Katharine S. Willis

The Sustainable Development Goals for creating sustainable, resilient cities and addressing human impacts upon coastal waters and marine environments create a mandate for coastal cities to empower local communities to value city seascapes. One key way to achieve this is through more inclusive pathways to connect to the sea using participatory methods. This research used a participatory co-design approach in Plymouth—the UK’s first national marine park—to explore the potential for place-based digital engagement to connect people with the sea, especially for deprived neighbourhoods. We sought to answer the research question of whether place-based digital technologies can engage communities with marine spaces and make coastal areas more accessible. Using the collaborative community-led concept of a city marine park, we explored the requirements for digital technologies needed to create marine citizenship and address the challenge of building coastal resilience. We describe a participatory action research study that took place in an urban coastal community, run in collaboration with a local organisation, the Rockpool Project, over a period of six months. Through a baseline survey, we identified some of the barriers to accessing the sea and ways in which the sea was perceived as a space in the city. We also ran a series of co-design workshops using creative prototyping with local families to help define the requirements for a digital toolkit that could enable them to access the sea. The results found that by enabling access to temporal and biodiverse marine spaces such as rocky shores, place-based digital technologies can create new ways for communities to access and engage with the sea. Place-based digital technologies have the potential to create marine citizenship by building a connection between people and marine environments to care for the sea as a shared resource. We propose this can help establish a sense of place and contribute to marine stewardship in coastal communities.

Green infrastructure, particularly public greenspaces such as urban parks, plays an important role in urban environments, and improving public participation in greenspace practices and encouraging environmental stewardship can help to address some of the challenges of greenspace governance. We identify a gap in the research as to whether participation in citizen science projects can enhance connections between people and place and encourage better community participation in the stewardship of parks and urban greenspaces. The research adopts a Living Lab approach to utilise the inherent knowledge of the local community in developing digital experiments in the pilot site using a Nature Data Probe toolkit and seeks to explore its potential for enhancing nature connectedness by revealing hidden nature. We describe an action research method working with participants from a secondary school located close to a large urban park in Plymouth, UK. The results found that participants were more observant of hidden nature following the workshop and that an increase in the number of participants, and in the specific and descriptive responses identifying nature, was observed. These findings indicate that a deeper awareness of the natural environment was created and, in summary, we discuss the implications of this as a pathway to increased participation in greenspace governance.

This paper presents an exploratory study on the potential for sharing urban data; one where citizens create their own data and use it to understand and influence urban planning decisions. The aim of the study is to explore new models of participation through the sharing of emotional data and focuses on the relationship between the physical space and emotions through identifying the links between stress levels and specific features of the urban environment. It addresses the problem in urban planning that, while people’s emotional connection with the physical urban setting is often valued, it is rarely recognised or used as a source of data to understand future decision making. The method involved participants using a (GSR) device linked to location data to measure participant’s emotional responses along a walking route in a city centre environment. Results show correlations between characteristics of the urban environment and stress levels, as well as how specific features of the city spaces create stress ‘peaks’. In the discussion we review how the data obtained could contribute to citizens creating their own information layer—an emotional layer—that could inform a shared approach to participation in urban planning decision-making. The future implications of the application of this method as an approach to public participation in urban planning are also considered.

Although our emotional connection with the physical urban setting is often valued, it is rarely recognised or used as a resource to understand future actions in city planning. Yet, despite the importance of emotion, citizens’ emotions are typically seen as difficult to quantify and individualistic, even though knowledge about people’s response to space could help planners understand people’s behaviours and learn about how citizens use and live in the city. The study explores the relationship between the physical space and emotions through identifying the links between stress levels, and specific features of the urban environment. This study aims to show the potential of integrating the use of galvanic skin response (GSR) within urban spatial analysis and city planning, in order to address the relationship between emotions and urban spaces. This method involved participants using a (GSR) device linked to location data to measure participant’s emotional responses along a walking route in a city centre environment. Findings show correlations between characteristics of environment and stress levels, as well as how specific features of the city spaces such as road crossing create stress ‘hotspots’. We suggest that the data obtained could contribute to citizens creating their own information layer - an emotional layer- that could inform urban planning decision-making. The implications of this application of this method as an approach to public participation in urban planning are also discussed.

Historical context is that there are a range of different theoretical approaches to understanding what the digital city is and how associated urban changes are constituted. This chapter looks at relatively recent perspectives and paradigms as some of the main originators of the digital, and smart, city discourses and practices. It focuses on the convenience, around the beginning of the 1990s, the period when the interne started to be popularised. The complexity of the development of both cities and technologies means that looking at digital urbanism is a much more nuanced matter than simply charting the straightforward 'impacts' of a new piece of software or hardware on the city, and on urban life in general. The chapter presents a case study about wired cities, cyberspace and smart urbanism. The technology designers in these studies coped with developing new community information utilities by viewing the projects as analogous to existing exemplar technologies with which they were familiar.

Digital and Smart Cities presents an overview of how technologies shape our cities. There is a growing awareness in the fields of design and architecture of the need to address the way that technology affects the urban condition. This book aims to give an informative and definitive overview of the topic of digital and smart cities. It explores the topic from a range of different perspectives, both theoretical and historical, and through a range of case studies of digital cities around the world. The approach taken by the authors is to view the city as a socially constructed set of activities, practices and organisations. This enables the discussion to open up a more holistic and citizen- centred understanding of how technology shapes urban change through the way it is imagined, used, implemented and developed in a societal context. By drawing together a range of currently quite disparate discussions, the aim is to enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic. The book starts out with definitions and sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines digital cities. The text then investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of digital cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives into a coherent discussion. The consideration of the different dimensions of the digital city is backed up with a series of relevant case studies of global city contexts in order to frame the discussion with real world examples.

Much of our thinking around technology and the city is based around polarising paradigms. These tend to move between two different approaches; the technocratic and the social. On one hand the smart city agenda is underpinned by a vision of data-centred optimisation of urban systems, whilst on the other hand there is a focus on open-source, citizen driven approach based around ad-hoc practices and prototyping of counter-culture scenarios. To date, the technocratic paradigm has tended to dominate smart city projects and initiatives, which are often led by ICT companies. Many smart city concepts and projects tend to prioritise data capture that leads to top-down, technocratic governance (Kitchin, 2014), and a number of existing publications in the field focus on the technical and economic dimensions of smart systems (Paskaleva, 2011). This is despite the fact that the social issues and implications have been recognised as critical within the context of urban development (Hollands, 2008; Luque-Ayala & Marvin, 2015). Kitchin (2014) describes how the term ‘smart cities’ encompasses both cities which are ‘increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing’ and those ‘whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people’ (p. 01). This highlights the polarising nature of smart city rhetoric; the former presents a more technocratic and neo-liberal paradigm of ICT driven urban change, whilst the latter focuses on the positive societal impacts of ICTs in urban space. Consequently, Marvin, Luque-Ayala and McFarlane (2015) highlight the need for international comparative research, bringing a ‘critical insight across disciplines and places’ (p. 03).