eParticipation in Neighbourhood Development

Public involvement in urban planning is not new, but with recent innovations in the ICT sector and their rapid uptake by society, urban planners and public authorities have access to new digital means to facilitate it. The article focuses on the potential of digital solutions for stakeholder participation during the whole lifecycle of the urban neighborhood, such as participatory maps, 3D-visualisation, augmented reality, and virtual reality, and emphasizes their specifics. The article draws on diverse project experiences in Germany, but the authors argue its relevance for other cases in Europe and worldwide.

With a Little Help From AI

Exploring the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in urban planning and governance, this article reviews most current smart city developments and outlines the future potential of AI, especially in the context of participatory urban design. It concludes that especially the algorithmic analysis and synthesis of large data sets generated by massive user participation projects present a beneficial field of application that enables better design decision making, project validation, and evaluation.

Governance of City Resilience

Cities face a growing set of complex interdependent challenges. Increasing urban populations, ageing infrastructure, and uncertainties regarding the scale and manifestation of variety of contemporary challenges all highlight the increasing pressures facing decision makers to make substantial change. The influence of City Hall to convene, engage and involve, guide and steer, provide or liberate resources, demonstrate, and decide are all important means by which a city can accelerate and strengthen how it mitigates risks and rebounds from adverse situations better. This paper explores the experiences of cities involved in the RESCCUE project—Bristol, Barcelona, and Lisbon—in addressing climate change risks within pre-existing governance frameworks. The principal conclusion is that there is an absence of a common language and organising framework to strengthen the governance of city resilience, and to that end, the authors offer an emerging framework.

Business Models for Smart City Solutions

Smart city business models identify the mechanisms through which a smart city solution or a combination of integrated solutions are able to create, deliver, and capture private and public value for society. This paper aims to identify the main archetypes of smart city business models in three sectors (energy, mobility, ICT) through an in-depth analysis of three city case studies: Valencia, Dresden, and Antalya (involved in the Horizon 2020 project “MAtchUP”). Cities' business models are analysed through a questionnaire-based survey, targeted to city government representatives and their technical partners. The paper develops a set of smart city business model archetypes, based on the roles and involvement of public and private actors in 1) funding, 2) asset ownership, and 3) operations of smart city solutions. These archetypes range from a model where the city government plays a prevalent role in all three dimensions to a model where private actors are more prevalent with several intermediate models.

Transformation Rooms

In the face of societal and environmental challenges in Europe, cities—as socio-technical systems—seek for a deeper understanding of new governance processes and innovative urban policy approaches for profound changes towards sustainability. This paper proposes the ‘transformation room' as orchestration and negotiation format for the joint programming of research and innovation agendas with and for European cities, in order to allow for new urban governance via transnational cooperation and alignment. The ‘transformation room' aims to interlink innovative niches and current regimes in a multi-level governance set-up, in order to allow transformation by (1) defining the main structural elements of roles and rules for cooperation; (2) offering process elements for the co-creation, experimentation, and implementation of orientation; and (3) combining both elements in a specific form of transformative leadership. The paper identifies success criteria for transformative leadership and, consequently, the enhancement of urban transformative capacity.

Co-Shaping Smart Cities

This paper studies participation divides on civic crowdsourcing platforms in a smart city context, hybrid applications of distributed urban innovation management, and new modes of digital citizenship, often applied to co-shape future urban environments. However, the emergence of new participatory instruments also brings new digital inequalities, as their adoption is not distributed equally. Hence, from an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective, this article explores the role of civic engagement, digital inequalities, and opinion leadership in understanding differences in participatory behavior on such platforms. Using a regression model (N = 178), this study shows that participation differences on civic crowdsourcing platforms are explained by opinion leadership and political engagement, but not by community engagement, traditional digital inequalities. This reveals that such platforms are used most by those who were already participating and have high levels of expertise, which sheds a light on the potential empowerment of such platforms and its democratic implications.

Smart City Field Notes One

This is the first of a number of reports emerging from the author's 50 years of continuous action in the arena of sustainable energy field laboratories. This paper is a fresh guidance product of action-learning in an organically organised living lab which has been dedicated to the phased eradication of the use of fossil fuel as the dominant, and most destructive, source of Earth's energy. During the course of the past five decades, this old-style living lab, made-up of many smaller labs, has been migrating from rural to urban solutions, and it has been at the critical junctures of a number of European Union (EU) lighthouse smart cities. The author asserts that while definitions for smart cities abound, and a plethora of writing exploring the concepts that underpin them has emerged, the definitions tend to fall short as they do not take into account the requirement for keeping the cities operational while the teams of disparate planners, specialists, and citizens dynamically reshape it for purpose. This is akin to building the airship while flying it.

Impact of Automated Vehicles on Optimal Demand-Responsive Feeder Transit Network Design

This article aims to examine the economic benefits of automating flexible demand responsive feeder transit systems using a developed feeder bus routing optimization algorithm. The objective function of the algorithm is to minimize total passengers' and operating costs of the system. The results showed that when unit operating costs decline, total operating costs, and total costs obviously decline. Furthermore, when unit operating costs decline, the average passenger travel distance and total passenger travel costs decline while the ratio of total operating costs per unit operating costs increases. That means if unit operating costs decrease, the portion of passenger travel costs in the total costs increases, and the optimization process tends to reduce passenger costs more while reducing total costs. Assuming that automation of the vehicles reduces the operating costs, it will reduce not only total operating costs and total costs, but also total passenger travel costs.

Contributions of Urban Agro Ecological Agriculture to Ecosystem Services

This paper has the aim to analyze the implications of the transition of ecosystem services based on urban agro ecology. It advances on the debate over the negative effects of the traditional and industrial oriented agricultural production on the ecosystem services, food systems, climate change, etc. and analyses the principles, methods, and some practices that support the transition to urban agro ecology. The method employed is the analytical of the theoretical and empirical literature review. It concludes that a transition from traditional and industrial-oriented agriculture towards more urban agro ecology is inevitable to improve the ecological and environmental services, the economic efficiency, the social equity and justice, and the environmental sustainability of cities.

Unlocking Urban Tourism Through City Branding

This article discusses the concept of city branding and how it can unlock urban tourism in urban areas of the developing world. City branding has emerged as a sophisticated tool for cities to (re)assert themselves in a global economic market. Cities are concerned with establishing their own images in order to attract tourists, investors, business people, students, and skilled personnel. This study focuses on Harare in Zimbabwe which is currently in the middle of preparing a city master plan to guide development for the next 15-20 years. Harare is strategically positioned as far as the country's open for business mantra is perceived. However, Harare's brand, the ‘Sunshine City', has lost its sparkle due to a plethora of urban planning challenges. The study was based on a wide desk study and content analysis. The research highlighted gaps in city branding practices in which history, modernity, and planning are lacking. Hence, urban planning practices such as master planning may help cities (re)assert themselves in the global cities economic and tourist networks.