Agency at Play for Collective Impact in Human Services Systems

Responses to urban human services issues such as housing and unemployment often overlook lived experiences through these systems and are formulated from a top-down (systems, services, or policy-level) perspective. This study integrates systems thinking and design justice principles for centering the voices of those experiencing these issues towards exploring ‘agency'—the capacity to act—from the bottom-up and top-down in responding to these issues. An agency typology encompassing various bottom-up and top-down agencies is developed through an analysis of Digital Games for Change (DG4C) for the various agencies they can initiate. The agency typology's contributions are threefold—in research (as a method and analytical tool), in practice (as design principles) and in education (for teaching collective action, impact). The agency typology can drive ‘concerted agency' or collective action, where top-down and bottom-up agencies work together, enabling multipronged targeted approaches to complex social issues and maximizing social justice efforts through collective impact.

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The Built Environment and the Development of Intermediate Socio-Spatial Units at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco, Mexico

Latin American Antiquity ◽

10.1017/laq.2021.10 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza

Keyword(s):

Collective Action ◽

Built Environment ◽

Spatial Organization ◽

Action Theory ◽

Urban Landscapes ◽

Political Strategies ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Architectural Elements ◽

Thiessen Polygon

Intermediate socio-spatial units (ISUs), materialized as neighborhoods and districts, were important elements in the ordering of the built environment in large ancient settlements. They are indicative of an increasing vertical and horizontal complexity because they lie between households and the governing authority. Collective action theory holds that ISUs can take many forms and can be created through bottom-up, top-down, or top-down/bottom-up processes. The distribution of ISUs in the context of other architectural elements illuminates the degree to which collective policies shaped urban landscapes. This article identifies districts and neighborhoods, two types of ISUs, at the site of Los Guachimontones (Jalisco, Mexico) through a study of its internal spatial organization. Intensive survey and mapping have identified thousands of architectural elements, including the circular complexes known as guachimontones. Thiessen polygon analysis reveals that guachimontones are an important feature of the site's spatial organization, as well as to the materialization of ISUs and other socio-spatial units. Broadly speaking, the organization of these built spaces reveals that their growth can be attributed to collectively oriented political strategies.

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A Bottom-Up and Top-Down Participatory Approach to Planning and Designing Local Urban Development: Evidence from an Urban University Center

Land ◽

10.3390/land9040098 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 98 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Teodoro Semeraro ◽

Zaccarelli Nicola ◽

Alejandro Lara ◽

Francesco Sergi Cucinelli ◽

Roberta Aretano

Keyword(s):

Urban Area ◽

Urban Space ◽

Social Issues ◽

Well Being ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

University Center ◽

Planning And Design ◽

Urban University

The urban area is characterized by different urban ecosystems that interact with different institutional levels, including different stakeholders and decision-makers, such as public administrations and governments. This can create many institutional conflicts in planning and designing the urban space. It would arguably be ideal for an urban area to be planned like a socio-ecological system where the urban ecosystem and institutional levels interact with each other in a multi-scale analysis. This work embraces a planning process that aims at being applied to a multi-institutional level approach that is able to match different visions and stakeholders' needs, combining bottom-up and top-down participation approaches. At the urban scale, the use of this approach is sometimes criticized because it appears to increase conflicts between the different stakeholders. Starting from a case study in the Municipality of Lecce, South Italy, we apply a top-down and bottom-up participation approach to overcome conflicts at the institutional levels in the use of the urban space in the Plan of the Urban University Center. The bottom-up participation action analyzes the vision of people that frequent the urban context. After that, we share this vision in direct comparison with decision-makers to develop the planning and design solutions. The final result is a draft of the hypothetical Plan of the Urban University Center. In this way, the bottom-up and top-down approaches are useful to match the need of the community that uses the area with the vision of urban space development of decision-makers, reducing the conflicts that can arise between different institutional levels. In this study, it also emerges that the urban question is not green areas vs. new buildings, but it is important to focus on the social use of the space to develop human well-being. With the right transition of information and knowledge between different institutional levels, the bottom-up and top-down approaches help develop an operative effective transdisciplinary urban plan and design. Therefore, public participation with bottom-up and top-down approaches is not a tool to obtain maximum consensus, but mainly a moment of confrontation to better address social issues in urban planning and design.

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After the Pandemic: Experimental Governance and the Foundational Economy

Symphonya Emerging Issues in Management ◽

10.4468/2021.1.05morgan ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 50

Author(s):

Kevin Morgan

Keyword(s):

Collective Action ◽

Economic Activity ◽

Social Innovation ◽

Principal Agent ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Human Needs ◽

Goods And Services ◽

Theories Of Change

The purpose of this article is to outline the convergence – an intellectual as well as a political convergence – of two concepts that will play a critically important role in fashioning a more inclusive and more sustainable model of development in the post-Covid world. The first concerns the concept of the Foundational Economy, which offers a new lens through which to view and value social and economic activity by highlighting the significance of a range of goods and services that loom large in terms of meeting human needs. The second concerns the concept of Experimental Governance, which offers a multilevel framework in which to understand place-based social innovation, a framework which overcomes the shortcomings of principal-agent models of collective action as well as the binaries associated with top-down versus bottom-up theories of change.

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