People Friendly Cities in a Data Rich World

Research Pillar: Co-Creation and Engagement

Project Name/Title/Acronym: TU1204 - People Friendly Cities in a Data Rich World

Funding Body: Horizon 2020 Framework Program of the EU

Project Timeframe: 2013-2017
Key Output(s): To foster a trans-disciplinary network of key stakeholders. See here for more information.

COST Action: People Friendly Cities in a Data Rich World (TU1204)

Project Description:

People Friendly Cities in a Data Rich World challenged many of the perceived ideas and priorities around the concept of technology led Smart Cities. In doing so, it brought together a network of researchers and practitioners from very diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. Rather than simply debate the meaning of the topic from an academic perspective, it created partnership with a number of European Cities comprising Brussels, Dublin, Glasgow, Helsinki, Lucca, Oslo, Reykjavik and Vilnius by setting up City Sounding Boards to explore public engagement in collaborative urbanism. Some of the field studies revealed quite amazing disconnects between institutions and communities that led to the demise of urban regeneration schemes but also positively gave rise to new models and framework in particular the concept of Interrogative City Infrastructures. These ideas are being disseminated in numerous peer-reviewed articles, invited talks and books (Certoma et al 2017, Gleeson et al 2017).

It was interesting to observe that at the start of the Action, many senior urban design academics and practitioners felt that technologies were available to facilitate collaborative urbanism but the information and technologies had not yet filtered through to architects and planners. The reality was found to be quite different. For example, a bibliometric analysis of 35,000 peer-reviewed articles in the fields of urban governance and urban design found a significant gap in knowledge and practice between these two areas. The results confirmed suspicions that research into urban governance had not made any significant inroads into citizen engagement for urban design and planning. However, the barriers appear to be more cultural than technological (Dyer et al 2017). This was found to be the same for involvement of crowd sourcing in the field of urban governance, where the technologies were more interested in new hardware or software rather than influencing urban governance. The only area of significant influence appeared to be in the area of environmental governance (Certoma et al 2015).

On another cultural note, one of the major successes of the Action was the creation of a network of young researches and practitioners across European who have experienced inter- disciplinary and even transdisciplinary research. This should be one of the long-lasting effects of the Action. Another notable outcome was an international conference held in Brussels in April 2017. Continuing the theme of the Action, it created intense and positive debate and on-street activity about how to enable participatory urbanism at a time of serious disconnect between citizens and political governing classes and even professions for that matter. The conference resulted in the issuing of a Charter for Participatory Urbanism.

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