The Urban Future is Now: Uniting Powers for Inclusive and Sustainable Design of Smart Cities
The rapid urbanisation and smartization of the world brings challenges of designing urban futures that contribute to a sustainable and inclusive city environment. Additional complexity arises from space and infrastructure constraints, the diverse user range and involvement of multiple stakeholders in the design process. While these technologies -- once created -- would shape the future of cities and human- and non-human-citizens in the long run, we identify a lack of experience and knowledge exchange in the respective community regarding the addressing of smart city challenges from more than purely technical or topic-specific perspectives. With this workshop, we aim to gather researchers and practitioners from the fields of Urban Informatics, Smart Urbanism, and Human-Computer Interaction to openly share experiences and to outline the design challenges that should be addressed first, with the values of sustainability and inclusion as objectives for smart urban futures.
Call for Participation
This half-day hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners for outlining the current challenges and approaches towards inclusive and sustainable urban design and smart cities.
Participants can choose one of three contribution modes:
Motivation letters up to 2 pages
Creative contributions to be presented at the workshop within the timeframe of 5-10 minutes (posters, pictorials, videos, talks, presentations, interactive activities)
Workshop papers in the standard ACM article format up to 4 pages in 1 column layout.
We welcome everyone interested or actively involved in the topics of Urban Informatics, Smart Urbanism, Urban HCI, or Sustainable and Inclusive Design. We expect submissions that are novel, reflexive, critical and share perspectives or experiences on the topic with the community.
All accepted creative submissions (2) will be published on the community platform, while accepted papers (3) will be published on the GI library. Submissions are accepted via the Google Form until the 15th of June 2024 (acceptance notification: 8th of July 2024). At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference (attendance onsite or hybrid) with a workshop/day/full ticket. Additionally, we encourage everyone interested in the topic, regardless of attendance at the conference, to contribute to the discussion and community via the pre-conference online activities which will be announced later on this page.
In light of ongoing rapid urbanisation, the perception and definition of cities move from purely territorial and inhabiting parameters towards functional criteria [1].
Cities are no longer seen merely as “settlements”, but more as “systems” ensuring the comfort and quality of life and addressing contemporary societal challenges and wicked urban problems [2], such as sustainability [3], social inequality [4], design justice [5][6], resilience [7], security and privacy [8], human-wildlife-conflict mitigation [9][10][11], etc.
Nonetheless, urbanisation itself, reflected as the doubling of population living in cities worldwide over the last 70 years, brings new challenges alongside benefits, as reported by UN-Habitat [12], and raises new concerns and issues to be addressed that are specific to urban growth: overcrowding, increased crime, waste management, mass transportation, poverty, etc.
Technology and innovation are commonly seen as potential counter-measures leading to a positive urban development scenario. Recent UN reports [13][14][15], governmental plans [16][17][18] and urban development projects [19][20][21][22][23][24] emphasise the necessity of employing technology as a part of the urban infrastructure to ensure, what is usually portrayed as “bright urban futures”. At the same time, scholars have warned about the risks of “recasting everything as a problem waiting for a techno-fix” [25] and pointed to the need to strive for visions of smart urbanism capable of offering counter-narratives centred on people and civic values [26].
Most technological solutions contained in such visions - both positive and negative - are commonly referred to as “Smart Cities” in academia and beyond [27][15]. The popularity of the concept has grown over the recent years and has been discussed from different perspectives in academia [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. Additionally, to date, numerous tech companies across Europe [37][38][39] and globally [40][41][42][43][44] have embarked on projects focused on “Smart Cities”.
However, “Smart City” still remains an umbrella term focusing on different approaches and dimensions of the technology used for the city's functioning and development [45]. Historically, the definitions leaned more towards “intelligent solutions” aimed to “enhance the quality of the services provided to citizens” [46][27]. With the development of smart cities, this approach to defining the term got criticized by the community due to excluding human and non-human inhabitants of the urban environment as actors [26][5][47][48] and neglecting the question of what we want smart cities to look like and whom to serve [49][50].
As an alternative, more holistic definitions and approaches started to emerge, putting human and non-human citizens in the center of smart city design and purpose [51][5][52][48][53]. Known challenges of urban technology design, such as the specifics of the local context [29], technology-space relation [54][55], and diversity of stakeholders [30] are well discussed and documented in the literature, featuring participatory design as a potential remedy against pure technocratic solutionism. In contrast, work towards addressing themes such as ethics, inclusion, or sustainability is still emerging through workshops, critical papers, and case studies focusing on one specific aspect or quality [5][56][48], which in the light of the spawning numbers of smart city projects brings us to the necessity of a more systematic and community-based approach towards the agendas of holistic understanding and design challenges of smart cities.
Workshop objectives
While the literature covered general challenges of urban technology development, we identify a gap in providing space for discussions with a holistic approach to smart cities, and how that may affect the development of urban futures driven or facilitated by technology.
To address this issue, we propose a series of workshops focused on the topic of inclusive and sustainable design of urban futures, aimed at building a community of practice through recurring events, as well as a platform for inclusive knowledge and experience exchange.
This Mensch-und-Computer workshop, which will be the first in this series, pursues two key objectives:
To bring together a worldwide community of researchers and practitioners working towards technological urban projects; %via hybrid workshop and pre-workshop online activities;
To address the question of where we are now in the development of smart cities and urban technologies and what are the challenges, values, and objectives in designing it inclusively and sustainable.
The following workshops in the series will aim to further bond the community and invite for collective reflection and design of urban technological futures based on the challenges, values, and objectives collaboratively outlined, documented, and distributed via the created platform.
Inclusion and accessibility note. We are open for assisting participants with special needs and encourage all in the need of such to contact us prior to the workshop. All activities are designed with a potential to adapt them towards the requirements of participants. If you need special accommodations to participate, please, not it in the submissions form or write an email to [email protected].
Important Dates
Submissions deadline: 15 June 2024 (AoE)
Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2024
Workshop date: 3 September 2024
Organisers
Margarita Osipova is a PhD student and a Teaching Assistant at the Human-Computer Interaction Group, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She is a core researcher in the interdisciplinary project "Feminist Smart City" and focuses on Feminist HCI in research methods for designing urban futures.
Konstantina Marra is a Master’s student at the Human-Computer Interaction department of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She is working as a student assistant for the "Feminist Smart City" project. As her thesis work, she is designing an interactive stand for public spaces exhibiting wildlife, aiming to bring citizens closer to nature.
Tanja Aal is a PhD student in Information Systems, esp. IT for the Ageing Society, at the University of Siegen. Her research focuses on vulnerable human and non-human actors, (digital) participation and inclusion, and on the use of ICT, its potentials, benefits, and limitations within the context of designing ethical future environments.
Konstantin Aal is a PostDoc at the Chair for Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen. He is part of come IN, a project on computer clubs for children and adults including refugees. His research circles around social media usage by political activists in conflict areas such as Palestine, Iran, Tunisia, and Syria.
Eva Hornecker is a Professor of HCI at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her work connects technology, design and a social science angle, with a focus on non-screen interfaces/devices and interactions, such as tangible and embodied interaction, UbiComp, wearables, and collaborative and situated action. Some of her prior research relates to Media Architecture and Urban HCI.
Luke Hespanhol is a Senior Lecturer in Design at The University of Sydney and Director of the Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts. His practice investigates the intersection of people, culture, and technology, including Design interventions for vulnerable groups, such as First Nations peoples, refugees, and people in prison. It also includes the mediation of cities and culture through digital technologies, across the fields of media architecture, digital storytelling, social and cross-cultural interactions, placemaking, urban informatics, and smart cities.
