Tag Archives: digital civics

Working together on cooperative neighbourhoods

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On Wednesday 25 January, the School hosted a participatory workshop reflecting on the use of communities within recent policy agendas. It considered the emphasis placed on “localism” over the last nine years, the forces driving it at the national level and how it has been interpreted in northern, urban locations. It also asked how a localism agenda might be reworked to better reflect the needs of these areas.

The event was organised by Dr David Webb of the School, with partners Greening Wingrove and the CHAT Trust, and funded by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal and the Global Urban Research Unit.  This participatory workshop is the latest output of their collaborative partnership, building on their project Reclaim the Lanes which worked with residents of an area surrounding a back lane in the Arthur’s Hill area of Newcastle.

The workshop proved extremely popular, around 85 people attended from local authorities, charities, community interest companies, Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, consultancies and arts organisations.

The morning was structured around several presentations with time for panel and table discussions.  After an introduction to the themes from Dr Webb, he and Caroline Emmerson (CHAT Trust) presented their work on Reclaim the Lanes. Caroline Gore-Booth (Giroscope Ltd) talked about collaborating around self-help housing in Hull and after some initial reflections, Alan Barlow (WEA Greening Wingrove Project) presented Wingrove’s community innovation fund. Armelle Tardiveau (Newcastle University) and Cllr Marion Talbot (Newcastle City Council) talked about their experiences of co-designing Fenham’s Pocket Park.

Read the morning presentations at the links below:

The morning panel discussion was led by a presentation from Annabel Davidson Knight (Collaborate CIC) which reflected on early attempts in Oldham to use public services to support community action. She described their intention to create a virtuous circle, with learning and feedback generated from community hubs being used to adapt and update the way services were provided locally.

The afternoon presentations also focused on the use of community hubs, with Tony Durcan (Newcastle City Council) explaining the importance of digital for reducing the cost of service delivery in the city, and setting out Newcastle’s support offer for those who find it difficult to use digital technology unaided. Mark Cridge (MySociety) then explained the use of Fix My Street as a way of encouraging more efficient and transparent reporting of environmental problems. Rob Webb (Transmit Enterprise CIC) described the potential benefits of the Poverty Stoplight system and Pete Wright (Newcastle University) set out the work they have been doing to promote digital civic technologies in Newcastle. An interesting discussion was had on the use of digital to promote a culture change in public services, including the sometimes unseen benefits of face to face communication and the dangers that innovation might be driven primarily by austerity.

Read the afternoon presentations at the links below:

The event allowed for the sharing of experiences of community work from around the region, with numerous insights being offered during the morning panel session. Many of the themes raised were also relevant to Newcastle City Council’s policy cabinet meeting, which directly followed on from the event. Despite the huge challenges presented by austerity, it was interesting to reflect on the variety of responses being taken both by community organisations and local authorities. The experiences of Oldham and elsewhere show that creative ways of promoting joint working are emerging, and that future reflection on these may have much to offer for the way we seek to manage our cities and neighbourhoods.

Dr David Webb is Lecturer in Town Planning and Director of Engagement in the School

Digital Civics in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape

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In the School we’re developing new ideas about future forms of citizen participation in the built environment.

This theme is associated with the concept of ‘digital civics’ coined at Newcastle’s OpenLab. In conjunction with OpenLab and other departments around the University, the School is actively exploring the consequences of digital technologies for the built environment. One goal is to find forms of more relational citizen participation whereby the public sector moves from one of delivery of services to commissioning services.

But what is digital civics? How did it come to be? What are its drivers?   As a new area, nuanced answers are yet to be found. Projects so far involve a diverse number of motivations, such as overcoming the distance of ‘big data’ to everyday life, addressing collective ownership of data and urban infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, digital civics addresses the rise of ‘issue-based’ civics, for example, on social media platforms. Through designing, prototyping, and testing digital interventions directly with end users in their everyday lives, digital civics encourages novel interactions between participants and their city.

Projects involving researchers from Newcastle University manifest all of these approaches in different combinations. Successful projects so far include:

  • PosterVote by Vasilis Vlachokyriakos and colleagues: a low cost in-street voting device.
  • FeedFinder by Madeline Balaam: a location-based service to support breastfeeding mothers find safe spaces.
  • AppMovement by Andrew Garbett: a vehicle for non-experts to propose and vote on apps they like to see developed.
  • Tenison Road project led by Microsoft Research in Cambridge involving Vasilis Vlachokyriakos which focused on developing a street-level archive to support and understand the meaning of data to a community on a very granular level.

Digital civics research is delivered through action and change. Representatives of digital civics have emphasised the importance of long-term partnerships on collaborative projects strongly embedded in local contexts. Some projects focused on bespoke devices for tactile interaction in everyday life. This comes with the idea of ‘ecosystems of data’ that embed data deep within the everyday. In digital civics projects, problem solving is often approached through technical innovation with modes such as issue-focused civic hackathons. Social entrepreneurship works as a driver to scale projects and agendas beyond single locations.

As part of the ongoing investment in innovation, innovative teaching, and preparation of a new cohort of architecture and planning professionals for the future, the School has set up a digital civics module, an exciting Stage 2 elective with a ‘challenge-based’ approach to teaching.

We are looking for external partners who would like to work with our students to address a particular challenge (for inspirations see https://scenarios.organicity.eu/).

Within a safe and set framework, guided by Dr Sebastian Weise, students will learn about essential computing technologies and user-centred design approaches and respond to your challenge with propositions of service concepts and technical prototypes.

For full details please see the digital civics call for project proposals (PDF: 2.54 MB).

 

Dr Sebastian Weise is Lecturer in Digital Civics in the School and can be contacted at sebastian.weise@ncl.ac.uk.