Abstract
The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data, privacy, ethics inclusion, and fairness. While the initial concept of smart cities was largely technology-and data-driven, focused on the automation of traffic, logistics and processes, this concept is currently being replaced by technology-enabled, human-centred solutions. However, this is not the end of the development, as there is now a big trend towards “design for values”. In this paper, we point out how a value-sensitive design approach could promote a more sustainable pathway of cities that better serves people and nature. Such “valuesensitive design” will have to take ethics, law and culture on board. We discuss how organising the digital world in a participatory way, as well as leveraging the concepts of self-organisation, selfregulation, and self-control, would foster synergy effects and thereby help to leverage a sustainable technological revolution on a global scale. Furthermore, a “democracy by design” approach could also promote resilience.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 11162 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-25 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Sustainability (Switzerland) |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Oct 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Special Issue: AI and Interaction Technologies for Social Sustainability.Funding Information:
D.H., R.H. and E.P. acknowledge support by the SNF project on ?Decision-making process supported by a participatory platform: Consequences on trust, on legitimacy of the political decision, and user skills? through the NRP77 ?Digital Transformation? (project no. 407740_187249). F.G. and D.P. acknowledge support through the project ?SOBIGDATA++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics?, which has received funding from the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 871042. J.v.d.H. acknowledges support through the project ?HumanE AI Network?, which has received funding from the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952026. C.I.H. and S.M. acknowledge support through the project ?CoCi: Co-Evolving City Life?, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 833168.We would like to thank the following people: Figure 2 was reproduced from a paper by Vasiliki Voukelatou, Lorenzo Gabrielli, Ioanna Miliou, Stefano Cresci, Rajesh Sharma, Maurizio Tesconi and Luca Pappalardo based on the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Thomas Asikis and Johannes Klinglmayr were involved in the ASSET project for more sustainable consumption. Marcin Korecki worked on combining the analytical self-control approach for traffic lights with machine learning approaches. Javier Argota S?nchez-Vaquerizo contributed to the data management flowchart in Section 3 and gave paper recommendations on the early use of computers for cities. The authors would also like to thank all researchers and developers who have contributed code to the Nervousnet repositories (https://github.com/nervousnet, accessed on 15 August 2021) and to the Finance 4.0 project (see [116] for details) as well as to the EPOS project [145,157,159].
Funding Information:
Funding: D.H., R.H. and E.P. acknowledge support by the SNF project on “Decision-making process supported by a participatory platform: Consequences on trust, on legitimacy of the political decision, and user skills” through the NRP77 “Digital Transformation“ (project no. 407740_187249). F.G. and D.P. acknowledge support through the project “SOBIGDATA++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 871042. J.v.d.H. acknowledges support through the project “HumanE AI Network”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952026. C.I.H. and S.M. acknowledge support through the project “CoCi: Co-Evolving City Life”, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 833168.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Funding
D.H., R.H. and E.P. acknowledge support by the SNF project on ?Decision-making process supported by a participatory platform: Consequences on trust, on legitimacy of the political decision, and user skills? through the NRP77 ?Digital Transformation? (project no. 407740_187249). F.G. and D.P. acknowledge support through the project ?SOBIGDATA++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics?, which has received funding from the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 871042. J.v.d.H. acknowledges support through the project ?HumanE AI Network?, which has received funding from the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952026. C.I.H. and S.M. acknowledge support through the project ?CoCi: Co-Evolving City Life?, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 833168.We would like to thank the following people: Figure 2 was reproduced from a paper by Vasiliki Voukelatou, Lorenzo Gabrielli, Ioanna Miliou, Stefano Cresci, Rajesh Sharma, Maurizio Tesconi and Luca Pappalardo based on the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Thomas Asikis and Johannes Klinglmayr were involved in the ASSET project for more sustainable consumption. Marcin Korecki worked on combining the analytical self-control approach for traffic lights with machine learning approaches. Javier Argota S?nchez-Vaquerizo contributed to the data management flowchart in Section 3 and gave paper recommendations on the early use of computers for cities. The authors would also like to thank all researchers and developers who have contributed code to the Nervousnet repositories (https://github.com/nervousnet, accessed on 15 August 2021) and to the Finance 4.0 project (see [116] for details) as well as to the EPOS project [145,157,159]. Funding: D.H., R.H. and E.P. acknowledge support by the SNF project on “Decision-making process supported by a participatory platform: Consequences on trust, on legitimacy of the political decision, and user skills” through the NRP77 “Digital Transformation“ (project no. 407740_187249). F.G. and D.P. acknowledge support through the project “SOBIGDATA++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 871042. J.v.d.H. acknowledges support through the project “HumanE AI Network”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952026. C.I.H. and S.M. acknowledge support through the project “CoCi: Co-Evolving City Life”, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 833168.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 871042, 952026 |
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | |
| European Research Council | 116, 833168, 145,157,159 |
| European Research Council | |
| Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung | 407740_187249 |
| Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung |
Keywords
- Co-creation
- Digital democracy
- Participation
- Resilience
- Smart cities
- Sustainability
