Connected Places: a clarion call for community engagement

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12 minute read
Jo Morrison

Jo Morrison

Director of Digital Innovation & Research

Digital Placemaking

People enjoying a park with lots of cherry blossom

Photo: Shunya Koide

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

Three images: 1 photo of person taking a photo of a sapling. 2 screenshot of monitoring dashboard. 3 hand planting a new tree with label.
Freetown the Treetown

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.

Threads of place. graphic of interwoven threads with text headings including public realm, environment, logistics, culture, health, society, housing and values, ethics, morals and trust.

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?:

  • Enhanced connectivity and communication: residents and visitors can communicate easily, access information in real-time, and navigate urban spaces using GPS and mapping apps such as the Place Experience Platform.
  • E-Government and civic engagement: people can interact with local governments, often making it easier to access public services, participate in civic activities, and provide feedback through e-government portals, mobile apps and social media channels.
  • Mobility and transportation: the rise of e-scooter rental apps, lift-sharing schemes and real-time public transit tracking apps have revolutionised urban mobility, offering flexible and diverse transportation options.
  • Retail and commerce: e-commerce platforms and digital payment systems have reshaped retail experiences, allowing people to shop online and make cashless payments.

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?  

Photo of Deliveroo driver and motorbike on a city street
Convenience couriers are a common sight across our towns and cities, and are a sign of the increasingly enmeshed nature of services, places and digital technologies.

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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