People-centric Smart Cities

Topic Description

Smart Cities use IoT technologies, combined with Urban-Scale data, to improve city services. While the focus of the research community has been on developing novel technology, there is an emerging consensus that we need to better understand how to involve citizens in Smart City initiatives.

Citizens can be involved in a number of ways - as data sensors, crowdsourcing ideas for change, or users of Open Data, utilising approaches such as the public–private–people partnership created through Living Labs or short-term hackathon or co-production exercises. In our previous work we explored mechanisms to expand the scale of participation by engaging with large numbers of citizens both online and face-to-face.

There remain a huge number of open questions surrounding the best way of involving citizens in Smart Cities.

Skills Required:

The ideal candidate would have well-developed technical skills, with experience of programming. More importantly is experience in participatory design and a willingness to get involved in community-level activities.

Background Reading:

Daniel Gooch, Matthew Barker, Lorraine Hudson, Rebecca Brown, Hannah Forbes, Anna Klis-Davies, Robbie Macpherson, Clare Walton, Gerd Kortuem, Janet van der Linden and Marian Petre. 2017. Amplifying Quiet Voices: Empowering Citizens as Innovators in Smart City Projects. Accepted to the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI).

Daniel Gooch, Lorraine Hudson, Matthew Barker, Annika Wolff and Marian Petre. 2017. Mining a MOOC to examine international views of the “Smart City”. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE First International Conference on Smart City Innovations (SCI 2017), 4-8 August 2017, California, USA

Annika Wolff, Alan Valdez Juarez, Matthew Barker, Stephen Potter, Daniel Gooch, Emilie Giles, and John Miles. 2017. Engaging with the Smart City Through Urban Data Games. In: Nijholt, Anton ed. Playable Cities: The City as a Digital Playground. Gaming Media and Social Effects (1). Springer

Taewoo Nam and Theresa A. Pardo. 2011. Conceptualizing smart city with dimensions of technology, people, and institutions. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times (dg.o '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 282-291. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2037556.2037602

Mara Balestrini, Yvonne Rogers, Carolyn Hassan, Javi Creus, Martha King, and Paul Marshall. 2017. A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2282-2294. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025915