Over the past decade the field of Citizen Science (CS) has progressed significantly through a combination of EU-funded projects, national, regional, and local initiatives, and the use of new digital technologies.
CS, defined by the European Commission as “the voluntary participation of non-professional scientists in research and innovation at different stages of the process and at different levels of engagement, from shaping research agendas and policies, to gathering, processing and analysing data, and assessing the outcomes of research” (EC, 2020), has existed since the early 20th century.
Initially its application was rooted in the natural sciences. In recent years, however, the digital turn (Ash et al., 2018), advancements in information technology (IT), new ways of collecting data such as crowdsourcing, digital sharing, online projects and social networks (Vohland et al., 2021) have enabled the proliferation of CS applications and projects in other fields of study (Hacklay 2015, Hecker et al., 2018) with prominent examples in urban planning (Karvonen & Van Heur 2014), and sustainable urban development (Cappa et al., 2022).
Our changing cities are experimenting with new policies, methodologies, and tools that engage citizens in problem solving, “hackathons” and co-design activities, demonstrating innovative approaches to urban challenges. Current research shows that the direct involvement of citizens in activities of data collection and analysis, and crowdsourced monitoring can generate a powerful tool to fill information gaps, raise social and environmental awareness, enhance public trust in science, and improve the influence of communities on planning activities and policies (Shade 2021). However, CS activities also face challenges related to accessibility, justice, equity, inclusion, etc. (Cooper et al., 2021) and, at the same time, have untapped potential to be explored.
To this end, this session aims to explore and critically examine the role and potential of CS uses in urban environments by addressing aspects such as community engagement; data collection and analysis; evidence-based policy development; crowdsourced monitoring; co-design, co-creation, collaboration and partnerships; local knowledge; public awareness and advocacy; and inclusivity and diversity.
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On Smart Engagement: Questions about Techno-Social Praxis on Inclusive Place-Based Smart City Planning Process for Climate Resilient City
Jin-Kyu Jung
University of Washington, United States of America
What would be forms of collaborative democracy and inclusive citizen participation in smart city planning? To what extent can smart city planning respond and address inequality, justice, and the social and digital divide? How can we create community- and place-based climate-resilient urban planning with the smart? The paper aims to answer these questions by exploring new visions, facets, methods, practices, and tools for enabling smart engagement. It explores alternative possibilities for just and participatory forms of citizen science grounded in community and place-based resources and priorities. It connects these possibilities to ongoing debates and experiments with smart engagement by closely working with local communities in Busan, Korea (e.g., Ami-Dong district, historically poor and built on a graveyard using the tombstones), particularly in the discussion of climate resilient smart cities.
The project raises thorny issues related to data production and gathering; knowledge, power, and narrative; relationships between people, places, resources, and collective processes; participatory work and university-community collaborations; and community self-determination versus enclosure and/or erasure. The question this paper advances: In a techno-social moment where more and more people, occurrences, and things are becoming data-producing and data-gathering, how could such datafication processes be made active, critical, and collectively public rather than passive, individualized, and/or driven by narrow private and corporate interest. This paper offers “smart engagement” as a placeholder term that approaches and situates this question in relation to existing possibilities already established in adjacent works on citizen science and digital participatory planning, including critiques of the limitations of those concepts.
Bi-directional connection between citizens and public authorities through citizen science
Tom Paul E Goosse
UGent, Belgium
Urban planning struggles since decades to endeavour plans closer to citizen’s everyday reality. The contemporary demands and needs for large-scale transformations question the established citizen-government relationships and the public-led participatory arrangements. Citizen science offers promising ways to sense and frame citizens’ environment through the collection of either quantitative or qualitative data. It enables various possible working arrangements between citizens, public authorities and academics to study societal issues. Citizen science can be applied in multiple contexts, feature a wide set of characteristics and can be both public- or civic-led. This research examines how citizen science enables new types of connections between citizens and public authorities based on a comparative analysis of 3 Belgian and 3 Dutch citizen science projects. These six projects are selected to cover a wide set of identified key-characteristics such as the addressed issue, the type of initiator, the drivers and intentions of the project. The research explores how existing connections evolved through these civic- and public-led citizen science practices. It regards how those projects set the path for new working arrangements and communicative practices between citizens and public authorities. It relies on an analysis of public documents, articles from local and national newspapers and scientific publications, in addition to field visits and semi-structured interviews of the key-stakeholders. The research focuses on both actors positioning, underlying argumentation, mutual trust and consideration of the issue addressed by the citizen science practice. The analysis of the cases identifies a number of challenges related to existing antagonistic positions between actors. It also contextualizes the enduring difficulty regarding the inclusion of diverse citizens in the citizen science practice to influence planning activities. The cases also demonstrate the potential of citizen science not only to sense multiple aspects of space from citizens’ viewpoint but also to influence planning interventions and significantly transform working arrangements between public authorities and civil society.
‘We Will Be Protagonists’: Perspectives from the Global South on Citizen-Generated Data (CGD)
Tainã Farias1, Lalita Kraus1, Tomás Donadio1, Gilberto Viera2
1Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; 2The Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná
In recent decades, the technological revolution has fostered new participatory models, such as citizen-generated data (CGD), which encourages citizens to produce data to monitor issues that impact their lives. Initially disseminated in Europe and supported by the UN, CGD has gained prominence in the Global South, where vulnerable populations use this approach to highlight local problems, challenge state statistical quantifications, and construct narratives that empower their communities.
In the Global South, citizen-generated data becomes a tool to combat socio-spatial inequalities. This perspective adds new dimensions to CGD, promoting the creation of a citizen-driven methodology aimed at overcoming the historical processes of violence and oppression in peripheral territories and populations. In this context, the present study discusses the innovation and potential of peripheral CGD in the Global South to foster participation and build a more just and inclusive urban planning focused on the common good. The case study will focus on analyzing the initiative of the Citizen-Generated Data Network in Rio de Janeiro.
Grounded in the approach of Data Justice, we demonstrate that the mapping and evaluation of everyday life promoted by CGD revitalize an ancestral resistance for life and the commons, strengthening belonging, care, and collective action — key elements for new practices of justice, democracy, and the right to the city.
From a methodological perspective, we conducted field research with participant observation and interviews with organizations identifying themselves as part of CGD, alongside an analysis of documentary materials. Preliminary results indicate that the citizen-generated data network in Rio de Janeiro proposes a replicable approach in any context, where each stage of data collection and monitoring is conducted in collaboration with individuals from the territory. These individuals not only have deep knowledge of their specificities but are also engaged in the struggle for social justice through data. Additionally, new sociopolitical dynamics have been promoted in the country, creating productive tensions that challenge state hegemony in territorial planning and expand citizen participation in deliberative processes.
University societal outreach and citizen science: open challenges
Carolina Pacchi
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
The Polisocial programme by Politecnico di Milano is a social engagement and responsibility initiative that aims to foster academic social responsibility and societal outreach, by attempting to bridge the gap between academic research and societal needs. Polisocial promotes and encourages a new multidisciplinary approach to projects, considering human and social development and expanding educational, exchange and research opportunities. Citizen science has emerged as a crucial component of these projects, enabling broader public participation in scientific research and social innovation.
In Polisocial projects, citizen science serves multiple interconnected functions. First, it explores possibilities to democratize research processes by involving local communities as active participants rather than passive subjects on relevant issues such as urban equality and inclusion, circular economy, sustainable water management, etc. Citizens contribute their knowledge, experiences, and observations to help identify and address social challenges in their communities. This bottom-up approach ensures in principle that research priorities align with actual community needs.
The integration of citizen science also enhances data collection and analysis capabilities. By engaging citizens as researchers, Polisocial projects can gather a more comprehensive grasp od issues and problems across different knowledge domains than would be possible with traditional research methods alone. This is particularly valuable in projects focusing on environmental monitoring, urban development, and social welfare. The collaborative nature of citizen science also helps establish sustainable partnerships between Politecnico di Milano and various stakeholders, including local governments, NGOs, and community organizations. These partnerships facilitate knowledge exchange and resource sharing, ultimately increasing the impact and longevity of social innovation projects. By incorporating citizen science, Polisocial projects exemplify a participatory approach to addressing social challenges, one that recognizes and values the expertise and contributions of community members. At the same time, the interaction of different actors and knowledge production dynamics entails risks in both epistemological and political terms.
Moving from this background, the paper will critically discuss two Polisocial research projects, working on sustainable water management and on urban inclusion, highlighting opportunities as well as pitfalls (in terms of accessibility, power imbalances, etc.) of these ongoing experiences.
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