Liesbet van Zoonen, academic director of the Centre for BOLD Cities, will be visiting Glasgow's Urban Big Data Centre on Monday 30th October to give a lecture entitled 'Governance and Empowerment in the Smart City'.
While ‘smart city’ is already a stale term in IT and urban discourse, the average citizen is unlikely to know what it means, and city civil servants are still catching up on the implications of ‘smart’ for their particular policy and planning arena. Hence, the current cry among smart city companies and professionals is that it is time to ‘involve the people’. However, it is never discussed which people are expected and desired to become involved what desirable outcomes of this involvement are, and what forms of involvement one should strive for.
In this talk, Van Zoonen discusses the need for the empowerment of citizens and civil servants against the big IT and platform companies, and presents the action research that her research centre for Big Open and Linked Data (BOLD) Cities conducts. Combining data science with participatory methods proves a promising way, she will argue, to help both citizens and civil servants to keep the city as a public space enabling public life.
Source: UBDC website