Collaboration

Centralizing engagement and social innovation in the smart city discourse

About the Author
Dr. Seth Asare Okyere is an development planner and Assistant Professor at the Division of Global Architecture, Osaka University. He holds a PhD in Urban Engineering from Osaka University (Japan) and MSc in Urban Planning and Policy Design from the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). Seth is interested in collective practices for improving communities and neighborhoods as well action research towards the sustainable management of urban areas (especially developing countries). 

In this urban century, cities have become complex systems that intersect and underpin the many dimensions of human society. Urbanization and the digital revolution alone, represent two of the most episodic events in human history. Together, this interlocking pattern of people and technology reinforces the complexity and complications that characterize contemporary urban society. The balance, harmony and complementarities between people and technology in the city— which currently hosts the largest concentration of the human population on earth— is high on the agenda of those interested in what the city might become, including the smart city proponents and enthusiasts (1).  


Here, are those who look at the interlocking process of urban society and technology from a positivist historical perspective. That, in the history of human transformation, the period of economic growth and productivity began when technology was integrated into the built environment (2). The invention of the steam engine, automobile, and electricity had not only a significant effect of improving the quality of urban life, but also transforming the relationship between people and their immediate environment. Inspired by recent advances in information and communication, technology has become both the tool and the platform to shape contemporary cities into ideals of the smart city. 

In this context, smart cities, according to the European Union, serves as technology aided approach (primarily ICT) to address pertinent problems in contemporary cities. Smart technologies are therefore being deployed as solutions to drive economic prosperity and social wellbeing of the human population in this urban age. Indeed, public transit systems, the automobile sector, energy, among others have proven the immeasurable benefit of smart technologies in improving quality of life in urban areas. As a matter of fact, recent quality of life and liveability ranking for cities suggests that cities that employ smart solutions rank better, are safer, and sustainable. 

There is however, a grave risk. In the current planning culture of informational urbanism and smart cities, the tendency exists to reduce cities—which are generally a composition of people first and things later—to material things that can be expressed in figures, codes and programming language on a computer. In this case, the city becomes sort of a machine that is purely conceived, designed, planned and operationalized on a computer system (3). People become secondary to this huge geographic space that can only attain meaning and relevance through people’s attachment, identity, sense of place, and feelings to space. In other words, technology becomes the subject and people as object. Which, suffice to say, relegates the common principle that it is lived experiences and repeated practices of those who move in and out of this huge and endless geographic space that form the place we call city and often associate with (4). 

So, as people, buildings, utilities, energy and mobility are being driven by smart technologies in the making of the smart city, it is important to emphasize the centrality of the social dimension (the people)—social innovation. Social innovation argues for integrating the smartness of people into the process of achieving the goals of smart cities. it is not an aspect, part or a dimension of the smart city agenda. It is the subject and object of smart city design and operationalization. Social innovation is grounded in the fundamental truth that cities are for people (5) and they are the ‘creators and users of it’. The innovation in the social, is what Millard, writing for the European Social Innovation Research, narrates as promoting, supporting, and inspiring people to find new ways to ‘craft, rethink and make use of their own and each other’s assets, data and other resources’ (6). In simple terms, inspire people to be smart and integrate their smartness into the city environment. 

In an era where technology is producing varied ways of singularity (the possibility to act alone or rely on virtual systems of distant plurality), community in the sense mutual interest, active engagement and collaboration between users, residents, service providers, state and local government in the built environment is critical.  Engagement for building community, in this context, is not perceived in the traditional sense of participation. Rather, a shift towards co-production where the public, private and citizen sectors work together to produce innovative services for liveable cities. It concerns the solutions that can result from collaborative network of people and institutions in the urban environment to identify problems, creatively design solutions and produce systems that can address systemic challenges in cities.

 To foster social innovation, it is incumbent to identify intelligent ways of engaging actors and the necessary networks, to provide platforms for acquiring information and skills, and to exploit citizen ingenuity in addressing common social goals. Social innovation must necessarily be built on getting people interested in their living environment and recognizing them as co-producers in the making of the city. Here, the city becomes some sort of social laboratory, where the networks of public, private, people partnerships becomes a continuous and iterative experiment of harmony and contradictions, towards the design of the ideal human environment. In view of this, collaborative engagement of all stakeholders, with citizens at the center, produces what Manzini and Rizzo define as ‘a constellation of design initiatives aiming at the construction of socio-material assemblies where social innovation can take place’ (7). 

The strategy of engagement, the kind that seeks to bring citizens together, in collaboration with authorities and service providers to co-produce for innovation is not new. In their working paper for the EU funded ‘MyNeighborhood project’, Concillio, Puerri and Rizzo 
identify diverse examples of civic engagement platforms—built on technology—where groups of citizens are collectively organizing to address critical problems in their neighborhoods or local environment (8). Take, for example, the group ‘Tempo risuso’— an association of citizens, activists, and researchers (9). In lieu of the many abandoned buildings and vacant areas in the former industrial areas, North of Milan, the group has been able to use social networking platforms to organize for citizen ideas and seek collective creativity for temporary reuse. Web 2.0 technologies, which require basic skills, allows for people to sign up and engage actively both on and offline. The group has been able to link up universities, artists and designers who worked together to recreate and regenerate abandoned places as citizen space for social experimentation, recreation and greening.

Another interesting example is ‘Depave’ (10). This is a group of volunteers who gather to transform over-paved spaces into urban landscape that connect to nature. Through social networking and internet sites, citizens can volunteer to be part of the group, suggest sites, seek local permission and work together to transform places (action-oriented) in an environmentally friend way. Already, several projects have been executed which led to the intense urban greening across several areas in the US. 

In both cases above, technology made it easier to inform people, get them interested, consult and discuss in a way that was inclusive and participatory. However, it was the real actions of people in real time that brought simple, innovative solutions to critical problems. 

The merit of civic engagement for social innovation is that it permits the city to thrive on what it is functionally meant to be: a social congregation of people who interact—not only virtually—but physically, build on shared values and interests, skills, and cognitive abilities to solve important urban challenges. This creates a situation where people are empowered, fulfilled and valued not only as end users but creators of innovation in the building of the smart city. Well, it goes without saying, that smart cities are for people and they must be at the center of it—interacting, exchanging, doing and ultimately innovating. 


Notes

1. The Urban Future Conference, was a showcase of smart city visions and initiatives by leading experts and professionals in the field of city planning and urban development. For a commentary on smart city enthusiasts, see Timoh (2018) Contrasting Smart City Approaches: Dubai vs Vienna 

2.  Doctoroff, Daniel (2016) Reimagining cities from the Internet up. Medium, Dec. 1, 2016. 

3.  Shannon Mattern (2017) The City is not a computer. Places Journal. 

4. Lewis Mumford (1961) The City in History: Its’ Origins, Its transformation and It’s Prospects. New York: Harcourt, 1961. 

5. Jan Gehl (2010) Cities for People. Island Press: New York. 

6. Jeremy Millard (2014) Smart Cities and Social Innovation.

7.  Manzini E., Rizzo F. (2011) Small projects/large changes: Participatory design as an open participated process, Participatory design as an open participated process. In: CoDesign, 7: 3-4, 199-215.

8.  Grazia Concillio, Emma Puerri and Francesca Rizzo (2013) Living Labs for Co-Designing in urban and public space. Deliverable 2.1: MyNeigborhood Project. PoliMI9.  See a collection of projects by this organisation at http://www.temporiuso.org/ (Page in Italian)