Connected Places: a clarion call for community engagement
Author: Dr Jo Morrison
In 2024, what’s the golden thread connecting Digital Leaders Public Sector Innovation Week, the Connected Places Summit, the Association of Town and City Management‘s annual conference, PETRAS Connected Environments Summit and more? Having participated in all of them, I can reveal that (drum roll…) the golden thread for place professionals in the public sector, private sector, civil society and academia is… a clarion call for community engagement.?
Community
A community is a group with shared characteristics such as geography, time (past, current and future), attitude, culture, identity or interests. However, a community is not an homogenous group; people will likely belong to more than one identifying community. Communities may not be static and have different meanings to different people, and engaging with a community requires acknowledging and respecting this diversity.
Definition from Engagement Overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work
Place professionals understand that for a project to deliver sustainable, long-term benefits, it is key to integrate meaningful community engagement at all stages. It is hard to argue convincingly against inviting diverse voices, who have different lived experience, to design collectively with the goal of delivering place-based innovation for societal, environmental and economic impact.?
“Create future value by coupling wisdom and fresh thinking.”
Dan Labbad, Chief Executive, The Crown Estate
As well as community engagement, my interest at these events also focuses on the ways that digital technologies can play a critical part in systems-based urban innovation. For example, the Freetown the Treetown scheme in Sierra Leone is a response to the country’s situation as one of the most climate impacted cities in the world. Deforestation is a massive problem for the nation’s capital, Freetown, and the country is in the process of a huge reforestation programme. Digital technology is at the heart of the whole system that is delivering a massive tree-planting scheme: a digital platform enables the growth of the trees and their maintenance to be tracked and local community growers use a mobile phone app to evidence the status of each tree. Nearly one million trees have been planted successfully thus far.
“Technology is really at the heart of what we’re doing. We have a digital platform that ensures that sustainability is embedded.”
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor, Freetown
Which brings me to the crux of this piece: how can we use the strengths and power of both community engagement and rapidly advancing digital technology, for urban good?
Reframing places
First and foremost, we need to understand that places are becoming increasingly complex and all of their constituent parts are interconnected and in motion. It is incumbent upon anyone involved in shaping places to consider the systems within which they are operating, and recognise that urban components such as transportation, housing, energy, water, waste management and social services are interrelated. Be aware of the interdependencies and interactions happening within urban environments.
Over the past decade or so, the rapid deployment of digital technologies in towns and cities has caused people’s experiences of urban places to change significantly. For example, can you remember a time when the following didn’t exist?:
In addition, there are place-based digital technologies designed for social good, underpinned by a values-led and purpose-driven approach. NavSta and UCAN GO are two Calvium projects that demonstrate this perfectly; both are indoor navigation systems that were co-designed with disabled people. Other examples include the University of Plymouth’s Digital Seascapes, which use digital technologies to identify new ways for communities to engage with the sea as public space, and AWEN – a climate change-inspired walking experience that aims to deepen people’s perspective of their surroundings.
Fundamentally, place-based innovation requires us to recognise urban systems and the multiple strands of place, which are complex, and design for those in mind. We need to focus on how technologies are understood, designed and deployed. We might also consider how different types of digital technologies, ones that are so heavily enmeshed in places and with such significant consequences on people’s lives, might be regulated or funded in the near future.
Lessons learned
Fast paced urban innovation has led to a plethora of technology platform businesses being unleashed in towns and cities across the world. Some platforms have caused massive disruption socially, economically and environmentally. For example, Airbnb has been blamed for community displacement and a rise in property prices and rents. Uber is associated with several negative environmental impacts including higher carbon footprint, increased vehicle congestion, and air and noise pollution. Deliveroo is recognised as facing several environmental sustainability challenges, particularly related to packaging waste and resource consumption. What are the fast paced responses required to mitigate these harms and should purposefully ‘disruptive’ platform businesses be able to trade at will???
The rise of connected and smart tech, meanwhile, raises important considerations around data collection, storage, security and surveillance. The future impact of this was considered at length at a Petras ‘Future of the Internet’ workshop that I took part in recently. It discussed all sorts of key drivers including quantum computing, AI, 6G connectivity, holographic communication, cybersecurity as well as related legislation and regulation.
There are important lessons to be gained from tech innovations that have encountered issues. Remember Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs ‘Quayside’ smart city project in Toronto? Billed as a smart city “built from the internet up” (its first mistake), the project included a network of sensors to record data about people’s energy use and resident behaviours, and use the data to improve the project’s systems. Understandably, privacy concerns caused major backlash from citizens. Sidewalk Labs abandoned Quayside in 2020.
According to Liberty, the human rights non-profit, “South Wales Police has used facial recognition tech on more than 60 occasions since May 2017 and may have taken sensitive facial biometric data from 500,000 people without their consent. In August 2020, South Wales Police’s use of facial recognition technology was found to breach privacy rights, data protection laws and equality laws”. The court judgement meant that the police force leading the use of facial recognition on UK streets had to halt its long-running trial.
“Liberty, the human rights campaign group, has criticised the use of the technology as a “disturbing expansion of mass surveillance that threatens our privacy and freedom of expression as we go about our everyday lives”.
The Guardian, ICO opens investigation into use of facial recognition in King’s Cross, 2019
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More recently, driverless taxi trials in San Francisco have gone wrong and are eroding public trust in autonomous tech. In addition to myriad safety concerns raised, local safety officials complained the taxis were getting in the way of firefighting and other emergency situations. Like the previous two examples, the trials have since been suspended.
It is abundantly clear to me that many of these issues could have been avoided if communities were consulted first, or if plans and partnerships were better communicated upfront. Recently, the Department of Transport has declared plans to pilot flying taxis in the next two years. If it is to avoid the same fate, surely communication and engagement with communities is absolutely paramount?
Do people really want other people looking down on their gardens, or drones flitting about the sky? Who benefits from this technology and who loses? What about the impact on nature? These are the types of questions that should be addressed through meaningful engagement before design and deployment, otherwise citizen mistrust of urban technologies will continue to be eroded.
Effective community engagement and collaboration
Having highlighted the critical importance of community engagement, what does ‘good’ community engagement and co-design actually look like and how can it radically improve our places?
To draw on one of our own projects, Ideascape used community engagement to identify how digital placemaking could contribute to the social, cultural and economic value of Porth Teigr, Cardiff Bay, ultimately improving the quality of life for all. To do this, we ran ideation workshops with local stakeholder communities to develop a series of interactive project ideas that demonstrated how digital technologies might enhance people’s experiences of the area. The ideas were exhibited at a public showcase at Porth Teigr.
Ideas included: an online toolkit to enable residents to find, book and access public spaces in Cardiff Bay; Augmented Reality sightseeing binoculars to visualise the area’s history and future in situ; an ‘urban room’ where people can understand, debate and involve themselves in the past, present and future of where they work, live and play.
Find out more about the innovative digital placemaking ideas that emerged from the community engagement workshops here.
There are also numerous platforms that can facilitate place-based community engagement, such as Commonplace, Citizenlab and SitePodium. Then there are platforms which enable communities to upload content related to places, such as stories, photos and information. This is not only important for documenting the history of places and adding new layers of understanding and engagement, but also in aiding planning decisions – as Know Your Place’s lead, Pete Insole, explained in a recent online event curated by Calvium.
Ultimately, effective community engagement is about empowering citizens to have agency in decision-making. As part of this, digital technologies are an important tool for engagement, making it more inclusive and accessible to a wide range of voices. Finding ways to democratise digital engagement is therefore essential to improve places responsibly – from ‘community up’ rather than ‘technology up’.
Parks for health and wellbeing
At the Digital Leaders Public Sector Week, I called for a UK-wide community engagement programme, involving all local authorities, that looks at how digital placemaking can support the experience of parks for health and wellbeing.?Named ‘Connected Parks project’ and reinforcing the golden thread of this article, community engagement, stakeholder partnerships and co-design were all positioned?as fundamental components for making this work.
“Urban green space interventions need to be planned and designed with the local community and the intended green space users. This will ensure the derivation of benefits for the local residents and will aid the delivery of interventions that serve the needs of the community – especially in deprived areas.”?
World Health Organisation
Members of the public rarely have the opportunity to meaningfully explore how emerging technologies are applied in public spaces, nor make informed decisions about their application. Indeed, rarely do we see members of the built environment professions, or related policy makers, involved in the conversations and decision making around connected places.?
And yet, it’s really important that we focus on the positive opportunities that they can bring to improve the health and wellbeing of all. It’s vital, too, that we understand the potential unintended consequences, so that we can make good decisions.
In line with this, the Connected Parks project will help us to build capacity at the intersection of the physical and the virtual, the material and immaterial. It will build operations for facilitating responsible and thoughtful innovation across all the various aspects of place noted above and more. We need to create new partnerships that are aligned, work locally and communicate nationally, and inform one another iteratively.
A final call-to-action
“We need to be much better at discerning which technologies are going to help us and which aren’t. We need a whole new relationship with technology.”
Prof Mike Berners-Lee, Institute for Social Futures, Lancaster University
This article sought to demonstrate why and how community engagement and partnerships have a critical role to play in enabling responsible place-based innovation. Responsible innovation means supporting citizens to understand the world around them, keeping them informed and giving them the opportunity to have agency in decisions that will impact their lives.
We must learn lots of lessons from our experiences of urban technology deployment to date and not let history keep repeating itself. Inarguably, that requires enthusiastic and transparent collaboration with communities of all types.
We must be intentional?in using the combined power of community engagement and emerging? digital technologies for urban good – now and for future generations. If we do so, and?we?can?choose to do so, then we will be remembered as “good ancestors” – to borrow a term from Roman Krznaric.
Contact Calvium to find out how we can work together to develop digital technologies for urban good.