We’re excited to share that Martijn de Waal and Tessa Steenkamp will be presenting a paper next week at the American Association of Geographers Conference, in Detroit, USA. Together with Mike de Kreek, they co-authored the paper Beyond consultation: on the design of ‘engagement channels’ to foster ongoing civic discussions around the deployment of smart city technologies, which will be featured in the session Ordinary Democracy and Digital Cities, organized by Scott Rodgers and Yu-Shan Tseng.
Their talk will focus on our Human Values for Smarter Cities project, which in collaboration with the City of Amsterdam, has examined new ways to involve citizens beyond traditional consultation methods—moving towards continuous, two-way conversations between governments and the public.
In the era of urban AI and smart cities, citizen agency is often overlooked. While cities strive for transparency in civic co-creation, this is frequently approached in technical rather than socially embedded ways. This research investigates how to foster ongoing discussions between city governments and residents through ‘engagement channels’—mechanisms that allow citizens to actively shape and contest smart city technologies at all stages of deployment.
For more details, visit the ‘Human Values for Smarter Cities’ website below, or contact our researchers mentioned above.