As academic director, professor Liesbet van Zoonen led the Centre for BOLD Cities since its founding in 2016. Her leadership was essential in shaping BOLD Cities into the unique and impactful organisation it is today. In this interview, we look back on her time with the Centre.
You were the academic director of the Centre for eight years. What did your academic background and expertise look like before you took on this role?
I started my career within feminist media studies and combined this with political communication. With the development of digital media, digitalisation automatically became part of my field and research. Before establishing BOLD Cities, I worked in England, where I was professor in cultural studies. My research focused on new means of predominantly digital identification and how people would engage with these new developments. We combined artistic and academic methods. For example, one artist experimented with adopting abandoned identities and investigated how far he could go with that new fake identity. He acquired a library card first, and from that he worked towards getting an identity card. It was, at the time, relatively easy to pick and reconstruct a new digital identity.
You were involved from the start of BOLD Cities. What did these beginning stages look like?
It started with Kenniswerkplaats Urban Big Data, a collaboration funded by Erasmus University and municipality Rotterdam. I worked with Fadi Hirzalla who is now with the Erasmus Graduate School for Social Sciences and the Humanities. The focus was on how citizens engaged with new data developments within cities. Our idea was that maybe it is not always a good idea to datafy systems or public spaces. At some point, Marjolein van Griethuysen told me that eventually everything in Brussels would be about cities and data, and that we should combine the forces of the three universities (Leiden University, TU Delft and Erasmus University). So, we decided to develop this idea and put in a proposal to start a Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre.
The Centre for BOLD Cities operates based on people willing to work together because they can learn from each other, want to share knowledge, or share an academic interest. Rooted in the network of these people, we developed our intellectual agenda. It was interesting to start BOLD Cities from the perspective of the researchers and people we had in our team, and not guided by top-down wishes of management or a board. There was a shared vision that we should create something both academic and useful in practice. So in that sense, we immediately had a strong constituency and well carried agenda.
The Centre for BOLD Cities offered a Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Minor Program, so the Centre was not only about multidisciplinary research. How did you, as an academic director, go about the development of this program?
Merlina Slotboom was the key player in this process. She started as an LDE-trainee, but developed so rapidly that she soon became someone we could no longer miss. We operated similarly on the idea of collaboration. We designed the minor Smart and SHARED Cities as one complete programme, as opposed to adding up separate modules. We were very well supported by the Centre for Education and Learning of Erasmus University, which organised our co-creation sessions in which we built the minor.
The second important thing we did was to organise monthly check-ins with the teaching staff. This allowed us to incorporate feedback from staff and students immediately. The minor had an challenging start because of COVID-19. Our curriculum was designed around various live activities, such as data walks and creative workshop sessions, which all had to be redesigned for online in a very short time. The evaluations showed that the minor provided an engaging program for students. The minor included students from TU Delft, Leiden University and Erasmus University. They were challenged to collaborate with students who each had very different skill sets and on topics outside of their own discipline.
When you look back at the past eight years, what do you consider the biggest success?
I am really proud of our younger staff members and how the BOLD experience helped them to further their career and find inspiring new positions. I think we have managed to anchor the mission of BOLD Cities beyond the academic structure. It was our goal to redefine datafication and digitalisation of the city as a political issue instead of a merely operational one. To investigate who is given the right to speak about these matters within the structure of a city, who is included and who is excluded.
We introduced a set of SHARED principles saying that urban technologies should be Sustainable, Harmonious, Affective, Relevant, Empowering and Diverse. This came to underpin all our research and teaching. Later we added the notion of contestability, which goes one step further than the SHARED principles, because technology as it is currently pushed by big capital needs to be contested, always. And it needs to be designed in a way that such contestation is always possible. That is more fundamental than to ensure transparency as a post-hoc way to be accountable. In each phase of technology, from idea-formation, to making, testing and implementing there should be moments where citizens, politicians, and all representatives of the public can say ‘this is not OK, we should change this’, or not do it at all.
Copyright: Janus van den Eijnden
Third, I am really happy with the different instruments for public engagement that we have developed. On our website, a whole section (Explore!) is dedicated to play, data walks and various other tools to engage with the themes of BOLD on citizen level. These playful means of engagement are crucial to guarantee that our research has an impact on a broad societal scale. Luuk Schokker, our first LDE trainee, had experience as an actor, Emiel Rijshouwer had a design background and Els Leclercq had a background in researching complex urban issues and urban designer. They played a crucial part in our usage of artistic methods and design methods and developed the game ‘Jouw Buurt, Jouw Data’.
Were there any challenges during your time as academic director?
We envisioned a new way of horizontal collaboration: Team Science. Researchers work equally together on themes they are passionate about under the umbrella of BOLD Cities. In reality, this ideal was hard to maintain. It was difficult to manage the differences between time and energy among researchers. We did receive funding for these projects, which made the whole adventure possible, but it wasn’t enough to buy everybody research time. Additionally, we underestimated the other pressures of teaching and funding that researchers were under. So, we saw people in the Teams having to choose different priorities. But I really believe in this collaborative approach. So we evaluated and adjusted the process in the next round; it is now slightly more top-down and focused. The Team Science approach to research is still a core element of the Centre.
You were involved right from the start of the Centre for BOLD Cities. With what feeling are you ending the chapter as academic director?
I will stay connected to the Centre and look forward to keeping in contact with the current team and to being a sparring partner when needed. I think the Centre will increasingly function as a place where municipal stakeholders and other interested parties can find reliable and useful knowledge and expertise. In that sense, I think we will become more like an impact centre and I believe that is really important in these times.
I look back on working with a fantastic group of people. It was both a joy and an intellectual satisfaction. Every day felt like we were building something new, through academic collaboration, through interaction with societal partners, while at the same time creating a pleasurable work environment. I am someone who likes to design and build, and to do it with these wonderful people was a very rewarding experience.