How do we engage citizens in smart cities? Views from Holyrood’s smart cities event

Posted on September 21, 2016 by stevenmcginty

The Technology Innovation Centre, Strathclyde University

By Steven McGinty

On 14^th September, Holyrood held a smart cities event at Strathclyde University’s Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC). It was chaired by Willy Roe CBE, an expert in public service reform, and brought delegates together from local and central government, academia, and the private sector.

The smart cities agenda is becoming increasingly important as cities face significant challenges, including climate change, traffic congestion, and ageing populations. However, as Dr Lorraine Hudson, Research Fellow at the Open University, highlighted, only 18% of people have heard of smart cities. This issue of ‘engagement’ became a key theme for the event, with delegates wondering how we engage citizens in smart cities.

Future City Glasgow

Gary Walker, former Programme Director for Future City Glasgow, spoke about the council’s success in exploring ‘innovative ways to use technology and data to make life in the city safer, smarter and more sustainable’.

With £24 million in Innovate UK funding, a number of demonstrator projects were introduced, including:

creating a new state-of-the-art Operations Centre, with integrated, traffic and public safety management system, bringing together public space CCTV, security for the city council’s museums and art galleries, traffic management and police intelligence
introducing intelligent street lighting in areas, such as the Riverside Walkway, which switch on when people walk by, and Gordon Street, where lighting provides real time data on noise levels, footfall, and air pollution

The council has also incorporated a number of community engagement initiatives. These include:

Engagement hubs – the hubs provide information to citizens about smart cities, and were spread out across Glasgow, including the main hub on Buchanan Street and in communities such as Easterhouse and Pollock.
The Glasgow Cycling App – the easy to use platform was designed to encourage cyclists to share their experiences of cycling, generating data that could help others plan journeys or highlight areas to target for improvement
‘Gamified’ engagement tool – this tool was developed in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and a local company, and aims to encourage people to modify their energy behaviours

Time to involve the people?

Dr Lorraine Hudson presented research from the Institution of Engineering and Technology. It highlighted that:

people’s views are the most important considerations when taking cities forward
introducing new city-wide technologies has been done without consulting citizens
the public has yet to buy into the idea of smart cities and are not convinced by the value and benefits on their lives

She also posed the question of whether citizens should be thought of as passive ‘consumers’ or ‘co-creators’ of smart cities.

In addition, Dr Hudson provided some statistics on the free Smart Cities course run by the Open University. They showed that over 23,000 people had joined since 2014, with 45% ‘knowing little or nothing’ about smart cities prior to the course. There was also interest from over 100 countries, including Brazil, India and Ukraine.

Interestingly, she suggested that participants’ comments could be mined to understand citizens’ views on topics such as open data, privacy and leadership.

Mazi Project

Dr Michael Smyth provided an insight into the MAZI project, a collaborative EU initiative which sets out to empower people to use technology to shape their local public spaces.

The innovative aspect of the project involves the use of ‘Do-It-Yourself networking’ – a combination of wireless technology, low-cost hardware, and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) applications. By making these technologies understood and easy to customise, configure and deploy, MAZI hopes to empower citizens to build their own local networks to facilitate physical, hybrid and virtual interactions within communities.

Panel Discussion

Ben Miller, Policy and Communications Officer from Smart Energy GB, commented on the UK’s rollout of smart meters. He explained that although many meters had been replaced, some members of the public were still reluctant to have the new smart meters installed. It was suggested that they represented the ‘spy in the house’, with some people concerned over the data being recorded and sent to electricity suppliers.

Ritchie Somerville, Innovation and Futures Manager at Edinburgh City Council, reflected on the impact of their budget challenge planner, an engagement tool which enabled citizens to have their say on how public money should be spent. The council used the feedback gathered to help make decisions when finalising the budget. The tool received over 3000 ‘engagements’ and was deemed to be a success by the council.

Mr Somerville also highlighted the importance of explaining the benefits of smart cities. He explained that most citizens are happy to sign up to social media and store club cards because of the services and rewards they receive. In his view, providing the opportunity to opt into services and showing the clear benefits should ease concerns over privacy.

Dr Hudson provided some further thoughts on the need for engagement. She noted that smart city project ‘Bristol is Open’ used an open blog to encourage debate. Additionally, she warned that failing to consult citizens could lead to a lack of trust. Another delegate highlighted Edinburgh Airport, who implemented a £1 drop-off charge without consultation, and are struggling to engage local residents over plans to change flight routes.

Scott Moore, Business Analyst at the Improvement Service, described his experience learning from Seoul’s (South Korea) main digital transformation body. In response to a question on cultural differences, he explained that the use of digital technology is more widespread in Seoul, amongst all age groups. He suggested that encouraging an increased take-up of digital technology would be a key challenge for Scotland. The Carnegie Trust and the Wheatley Group are two organisations who have been doing excellent work in tackling digital exclusion.

Final thoughts

The event provided a great opportunity to reflect on the future of cities. Although public budgets are reducing, it was felt that investing in a smarter approach to cities was a worthwhile endeavour. With the introduction of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act, many felt that this was an ideal time for local authorities to engage with citizens, and ensure smart cities are not just focused on technology, but are truly citizen-led.

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in public and social policy are interesting our research team. If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read our other smart cities articles.

7 digital platforms that are reshaping how planners engage the community

Posted on July 22, 2016 by Rebecca Jackson

By Rebeccca Jackson

We often think of planning as being about physical construction and the regulations and processes around this. But buildings are not constructed in isolation. The planning profession has to consider community views, and there is a need for different organisations and stakeholders to work together to enable development and regeneration. The co-design and co-creation of project briefs and delivery strategies between planners, architects and the community is critical to creating successful planning projects. However, engaging the public in the complicated planning process is difficult.

Integrating the variety of views and opinions within a community is vital to ensuring that places are designed in a way that best suits the needs of current and future residents and businesses. But the traditional methods of engagement can seem inadequate, especially in terms of reaching younger people, or those who have little understanding of how the planning system works.

Often people feel they are not able to engage, while others almost “over engage” and become the “usual suspects” during consultations, neither of which is especially helpful when the goal is to create outcomes which benefit whole communities.

Our guest blog earlier this year from Dr Paul Cowie at the University of Newcastle, looked at an award-winning theatre project which is engaging communities with planning processes. Following on from Paul’s blog post, we highlight here some examples of digital platforms which are expanding public engagement in planning.

The resources below offer some insights into this approach – some of these featured in a recent presentation given by Donagh Horgan at a conference held at the University of Strathclyde.

1. IDEO

IDEO is an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centred, design-based approach to helping organisations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow. Project work includes designing citizen-focused online resources for clients who wish to engage more with service users. In addition, the Open IDEO element of the business aims to encourage people to work collaboratively to solve social issues, emphasising each individual’s value through their own experiences and knowledge, and seeking to use that to design innovative plans to create solutions to problems.

2. CitizenLab

CitizenLab is a civic engagement platform on which citizens are invited to co-create their city. Software helps city administrators to tap into the collective intelligence of their citizens. The software allows people to participate in polls and enables administrators and planners to view collective data about the public’s views.

3. Organicity

An online platform to promote the co-creation of smart cities of the future. The project is a new EU initiative that puts people at the centre of the development of future cities. The project brings together three leading smart cities and a total of 15 consortium members with great diversity in skills and experience. The idea is to share experiences in order to use citizen experience and practitioner expertise to co-create future smart cities. It is run in partnership with a number of other organisations, including Catapult.

4. Loomio

There are also more free flowing, informal ways of engaging which can still be effective ways for communities to engage with one another, with planners and with service providers on a common platform. Tools such as Yammer and Slack, as well as government-designed online forums, can provide spaces for people to put ideas forward and allow for free flowing comment and discussion.

Similarly, Loomio is an open source software tool, built by a worker-owned cooperative social enterprise based in New Zealand, which seeks to increase collaborative design making within towns and cities. It is centred on co-operative and co-creative values, and looks to break down barriers to participation at all levels and across a range of organisations and works on a more open free flowing basis, encouraging groups to come together to openly discuss issues. It has the potential if used well to be a useful space to generate free flowing dialogue and discussion on community development plans and models.

5. Open Poplar

Open Poplar is a website based around the Poplar area of London, which seeks to make the most of the space in the area, for the benefit of the people and communities within Poplar. The website lists free spaces which people are then able to apply to take up using a form, the submissions are then taken forward and successful applicants are invited to occupy the space. There are no strict requirements for the sort of organisation that can occupy the space and applications range from start-up cafes, to community orchestras, but the site requires that applicants have a clear idea of what they want to do in the space and be able to fund it themselves.

6. Hands on Bristol

A collaboration between the Bristol School of Architecture, University of the West of England and the Bristol community, that seeks to encourage and strengthen knowledge exchange between education programmes and local communities through collaboration in live projects. The interaction between planners/ service providers and the community is documented online, and people can use various online channels to follow their progress but the community work itself takes place online too, with the online platform being a tool of engagement.

7. Community PlanIt

This online platform allows people to participate in planning at a community level through gamification. The idea is to allow participants to engage in a new and creative way, and to attempt to attract participants, and therefore views, which may not have been heard before.

Participants register on the platform and take part in “missions” which asks their views on scenarios relating to new plans which are being submitted; participants win coins for participating in “missions”, which they are then asked to “pledge” to causes. Those which receive the most support are then given real money to spend on bringing the projects to life. The idea has been used in community planning projects in a number of American cities including Philadelphia, Detroit, and Salem (MA) and figures suggest that in some areas up to 70% of players had never formally engaged in a community planning process before.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing regeneration … is this a new avenue for public engagement and participatory democracy?

Posted on July 20, 2016 by morwenj

Crowdfunding image via Rocio Lara (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Morwen Johnson

Finding money to fund community-led regeneration projects has always been difficult and as public budgets continue to be stretched, it can be hard to balance and prioritise the needs of different communities and groups. We’ve written on this blog before about how digital platforms are providing new ways to engage the public in government decision-making. So we were interested to hear that crowdfunding is also being explored for its potential to improve financing of regeneration.

Civic crowdfunding initiatives exist in Europe (for example, Voor je Buurt in the Netherlands, and Goteo in Spain) but they don’t explicitly involve public bodies as part of the crowd. But now the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority (GLA) is piloting an innovative way to plan and fund projects which puts local communities at the centre of the process. Working in partnership with the crowdfunding website Spacehive, the GLA is using a platform to enable local organisations to propose ideas for civic projects or new uses for unused space.

How it works

The Mayor pledges up to £20,000 to support the best proposals, with money coming from the High Street Fund. Public funds can make up no more than 75% of total project costs. Local organisations have to raise match funding from the wider community in order to unlock these public funds and make their projects a reality.

So far, the progress of the Crowdfunding Programme has been good. The first round received 81 proposals, 17 of which were supported, raising 118% match funding from the crowd. And in the second round, the GLA pledged £285,000 to 20 projects, leveraging over £450,000 of additional pledges – a 158% increase in funding. The third round of the programme is currently underway.

The programme was recognised as one of eleven leading examples of government innovation at the World Government Summit in 2016.

crowdfunding image from spacehive

Putting local communities in the driving seat

A recent event held as part of the London Festival of Architecture looked at the early experiences of the programme and asked what the implications are for digital citizenship and community participation. Speakers from the GLA, Centre for London, Spacehive, Arup and one of the funded projects (Peckham Coal Line) debated whether it offers a practical solution to the need for a bottom-up, place-based approach to regeneration.

The event raised a lot of questions for anyone interested in strategic planning, public engagement and citizenship, reflecting the fact that this is a new approach.

Should publicly-driven campaigns be allowed to dictate urban change?
Is it simply rewarding communities who already have motivated and engaged residents, rather than areas which need capacity building?
Do organisations such as local authorities have the skills or political will to behave in the agile and nimble way that such platforms require?
To what extent is long-term sustainability or maintenance issues addressed if funding is used to kick-start community projects? Are projects an end in themselves or is the aim to help the public sector see the value in an initiative in order to adopt it and fund it themselves?
What is the potential for scalability or replicability in funding very local projects?
And finally, there is the fundamental question of what role should crowdfunded community projects be playing in the grand scheme of regeneration? Do they have to be making a serious contribution to improving outcomes or can they be fun and frivolous?

Early lessons

A key message was the importance of offline activity. A project is unlikely to succeed in generating match-funding if it’s unable to mobilise the local community and businesses behind the idea. The speakers also highlighted the importance of managing expectations. In some cases the projects being funded are just testing the feasibility of a concept. People making pledges need to realise this in order to prevent the cynicism that could result from perceived non-delivery.

From the point of view of creating engaged citizens, initiatives such as this can help the public understand the hard choices that need to be made, in a similar way to participatory budgeting exercises. The platform also has the potential to evolve, for example if there are buildings available for pop-up or temporary use, then a similar process could advertise and select projects to occupy them.

Civic crowdfunding as a route to creating and enabling change

Generally, local government processes are oriented around handling and dealing with complaints, rather than positive interactions and generating ideas and change. So it was refreshing to hear about a public body trying to turn this on its head.

And it seemed that – done well – civic crowdfunding is not a substitute for the role of local government in enabling regeneration. In fact, it increases the need for someone to be interpreting these local ideas into a wider, long-term vision for place.

Enjoy this article? Read these other articles written by our team:

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The Hackable City – a new dialogue with citizens

Posted on June 9, 2016 by stevenmcginty

Buildings with bikes parked next to the canal, Amsterdam.

Image by Steven McGinty

By Steven McGinty

The Hackable City is an ongoing research project which investigates how digital media technologies can be used to provide opportunities for more democratic city development. Based in the Netherlands, this project was founded by One Architecture and the Mobile City Foundation, and aims to empower citizens and bring them closer to the key stakeholders of ‘city making’, including government institutions and design professionals.

The rise of the platform society

Sharing platforms, such as Airbnb (which allows individuals to rent out their homes), and more personalised platforms, such as Trip Advisor (which allows individuals to review different ‘experiences’), have changed the way people consume, interact, and share knowledge. They have become the norm, disrupting the traditional idea of the city and presenting new challenges for urban development.

Why use the term ‘hackable’?

The Hackable City project argues that some of the principles associated with hacker subcultures could help us think about how we can use technology to create more open cities. Hacker subcultures often have a focus on opening up data and sharing knowledge, co-operation between experts and amateurs and the idea of ‘learning by doing’.

The project remarks that this is in contrast to the more technologically-driven or consumerist view of cities, often associated with smart cities.

Case studies

The Hackable City project identifies several initiatives that they believe are hackable. These include:

BSH5
The BSH5 project involves an informal collective of self-builders, who have constructed properties in a brownfield redevelopment in the north of Amsterdam. The group coordinates their activities via a mailing list, a community website, and through traditional meetings. Apart from building their individual houses, they are also involved in improving the surrounding neighbourhood. The Municipality of Amsterdam provided these plots on a 50-year lease, and although the initial take up came mostly from architects and designers, recent years have seen more diverse self-builders. The Municipality has a very close relationship with the group – a key reason it was considered a hackable initiative. For example, when the contracts were initially set up, the municipality was open to suggestions on how the project might work (partly as it sought to understand more about how these projects might affect future urban development). However, the neighbourhood blog ‘I love Noord’, has criticised this close relationship and the group, suggesting that the project is an attempt to create a gated community under the guise of child-friendliness and better public spaces.

Peerby
Peerby is an online platform and mobile app that allows citizens to borrow items from people in their local area. The technology works by creating a common marketplace; however instead of providing a list of items, the user is given a set of questions, with the query emailed to the closest 100 users. So far, the project has been a success: with 80% of queries being responded to within 30 minutes. It provides people with an opportunity to borrow an item that isn’t often used, as well as to save money and reduce their levels of consumption, thus enhancing sustainability. This attempt to manage community resources differently is why Peerby is considered hackable.

Ring Ring
Ring Ring is a pilot project that aims to encourage cycling by rewarding people for the number of kilometres cycled. The project was launched by Janine Hogendoorn, who, upon realising that cycling 30 minutes to work was not as hard as she first thought, decided to try and convince others. The project is currently lobbying the government to introduce tax exemptions for those who cycle to work. It also provides valuable data (such as where people cycle the most and when), which can be used to improve cycling infrastructure.

Verbeter de buurt
Verbeter de buurt is an online platform and mobile phone app that allows local citizens to report problems and suggest ideas to their local municipality. The app provides a more convenient way for citizens to interact with government, and includes features such as the ability to track the progress of reports and to rate the handling of it. The majority of municipalities now accept these reports (320 out of 416), and 20 even use a customised package to streamline them. The main aim of the platform is not necessarily to manage complaints but to encourage citizens to share ideas with their municipalities. Verbeter de buurt is a hackable initiative because it transforms how citizens communicate with municipalities. It encourages citizens to care more about their local environment and to generate ideas to improve local areas. The team behind the project sees this platform as a way of reducing the bureaucracy associated with local government in the Netherlands (and in other countries).

Final thoughts

Hackable projects also exist outside of the Netherlands, such as the hackable cities toolkit, designed by the New School of Design Strategies at Parsons, in New York City. However, it will be interesting to see if these types of projects, which attempt to create a new dialogue between citizens and government, can become a more widespread and integral part of cities.

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in public and social policy are interesting our research team. If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read:

e-Participation: helping citizens engage with politics and policy making in the 21st century

Posted on December 16, 2015 by stevenmcginty

Image by Gage Skidmore via Creative Commons

By Steven McGinty

Last week, more than half a million people signed an e-petition to block controversial US presidential candidate, Donald Trump, from entering the UK.

These signatures were gathered using the UK Parliament’s official e-petitions website, which allows any British citizen or UK resident to create or sign a petition. The website, which was launched in August 2011, provides a direct route for the public’s voice to be heard. Most notably, if a petition collects 100,000 signatures, it’s required to be considered for debate in parliament.

In its first year, the website received a total of 36,000 petitions, attracting 6.4 million signatures. And although it has been criticised for rejecting almost half of petition requests, millions of people are continuing to use the service.

e-Participation

The UK Parliament e-petition website is an example of an initiative that encourages ‘e-participation’. According to the European Commission,

“e-Participation helps people engage in politics and policy-making and makes the decision-making processes easier to understand, thanks to information and communication technologies (ICTs).”

However, it’s important to note that e-participation is not all about the ‘e’. This is the view of Ella Taylor-Smith, Research Student at Edinburgh Napier University’s Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation, who explains that challenges to participation are usually associated with the social side of projects. This is why she recommends that e-participation should be integrated into the wider work of participation.

The ‘active citizen’

According to the Hansard Society, citizens are moving away from having a passive, broadcast only relationship with their MP, and are seeking a relationship were they can ‘contribute to the democratic debate’. That’s why, as digital technology is becoming more prevalent, MPs are becoming expected to use digital tools to communicate directly with their constituents. Recently, we have even seen guidance published by Parliament on how politicians should use Twitter.

Pirate Party UK

In 2009, Pirate Party UK was founded and introduced a new concept to British politics. The party, which has been inspired by the Swedish party of the same name, takes a collaborative approach to the development of policy, allowing anyone to make a contribution (with members ultimately deciding what the party stands for). They explain that:

“At the heart of Pirate Party politics is the right for everyone to share knowledge and take an equal part in society.”

In practice, this means that anyone can put forward their views on the Party’s online discussion forum. They highlight that this allows them to run on the UK’s first ‘crowdsourced manifesto’.

NHS Scotland

E-participation is not just about contributing to policy and holding elected representatives to account. For many people, e-participation is at its best when it empowers peoples and gives them a say in the issues that affect their daily lives.

In 2013, NHS Scotland published a report on their e-participation work. The report emphasises that the technical barriers to citizen involvement and co-production of services have now gone, thanks to the increased use of digital technology. It also highlighted that 71% of people are now accessing the internet for health-related information.

The report outlines some of the main e-participation activities that NHS Scotland’s boards are involved in. These include:

distributing health information
facilitating discussions on health issues
gathering positive and negative experiences from patients and public
engaging with staff

e-Participation in the Netherlands

In 2014, the United Nations E-Government Survey ranked the Netherlands as a top performer (jointly with South Korea) in e-participation. This is not too surprising, considering the Netherlands already has a long tradition of open and transparent government.

The Dutch approach to civic engagement has led to a number of e-participation initiatives, including:

eRepresentation – a tool used by the official Environmental Council for Schiphol Airport to collect the conflicting interests of economic development, spatial planning and environmental protection.
Citizenlink – an initiative which sets out to improve the performance of the public sector by introducing quality standards and measuring citizen satisfaction.
TrackYourCouncil – a voting assist tool which provides a comparison of political parties on the basis of 30 main issues during election time.
WeEvaluate – a national website which allows citizens to evaluate public services.

Finals thoughts

The increased use of technology provides a greater opportunity for citizens to participate in the decision-making that affects them. Yet, e-participation is still in its infancy and even Dutch politicians have responded to greater citizen involvement with some resistance. In addition, the Scottish Government has, on occasion, overlooked the democratic element in their definition of e-participation, preferring to focus on the access to technology aspect, such as in their Digital Participation Charter.

Therefore, although the technology is available to support citizen engagement, policies will have to be introduced to ensure that participation via technology is part of the normal process. Otherwise, citizens may find their own channels for engagement, which bypass politicians or policy makers.

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in policy and practice are interesting our research team.

Further reading: if you liked this blog post, you might also want to read our other articles on digital policy, including:

The Knowledge Exchange Blog

The official blog of The Knowledge Exchange from Idox

Tag Archives: public engagement

How do we engage citizens in smart cities? Views from Holyrood’s smart cities event

7 digital platforms that are reshaping how planners engage the community

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing regeneration … is this a new avenue for public engagement and participatory democracy?

The Hackable City – a new dialogue with citizens

e-Participation: helping citizens engage with politics and policy making in the 21st century

The Knowledge Exchange Blog

The official blog of The Knowledge Exchange from Idox

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