On this page, you can find an overview of the Centre for BOLD Cities' current projects. Please visit the project pages for more detailed information on the projects and team members.
Start Making Sense
The New Team Science: Start Making Sense
Fall 2025 we launched a new Team Science initiative called Start Making Sense. This open and inclusive project runs for 1.5 years and combines citizen science and academic research. Its aim: to explore, question, and make transparent the use of surveillance
The Team Science project Urban Digital Twins (3D data-based representations of the city) asks how inclusive these are for the diversity of people, experiences, and politics in the city. A digital representation cannot, by definition, capture the diversity of urban life and experience. The research
Using vehicle data to motivate and incentivize sustainable mobility behavior
This PhD-project focusses on the motivation for sustainable mobility behavior among premium customers of the BMW group and acceptance of sustainable mobility in the area of tension between public interests and individual needs.
Self-determined mobility plays an important role in the lives of
Beyond the Silicon Valley story: An ethnographic approach to the discursive production of smart innovative cities
The worldwide proliferation of smart city initiatives, incentives and programs to support innovation and tech entrepreneurship, incubation and co-working spaces, and platform-based services appear to attest to the global spread of a Silicon Valley-inspired version of our cities. Rather than
The use of big data by frontline bureaucrats in the social domain (Completed)
The welfare state is currently undergoing a transition toward data-driven policies, management, and execution. This has important consequences for frontline bureaucrats in such a 'digital welfare state'. Until now, the impact of data-driven tools on frontline officials has been mainly described in
Social acceptance of Urban Air Mobility (Completed)
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new way of urban transportation that involves moving people and goods by air in an urban environment. Vera Safronova, a junior researcher at LDE Centre for BOLD cities, carried out a research project to investigate the social aspects of urban air mobility under the
Citizen perspectives on smart urban safety (Completed)
How do people perceive, experience and react to smart urban safety imaginaries and everyday environments?
Smart city applications in the domain of public safety management (short "smart urban safety") are all around us, but are often unknown to the citizens of a smart city. In order to study citizen
From smart to political: Local councils in/and smart city decision-making (Completed)
BOLD Cities believes it is important that citizens and administrators are able to understand, assess and manage the digitalization and the use of (big) data in municipalities. The local council is perhaps the most important link between citizens and administrators, and therefore has a crucial role
Digital Technologies & the Symbolic Trajectories of Urban Neighborhoods (SYMTRA) (Completed)
How do local residents, civil servants and visitors understand and use digital technologies in relation to the symbolic trajectories of urban neighborhoods? The city is a site of uneven development, which leads not just to an uneven allocation of resources and power imbalances, but to status
SHARED Data for Improved Emergency Relief in High-Rise Buildings (Completed)
How can collected data from different stakeholders before and during a disaster help to improve emergency relieve? Is it possible to use big, open and linked data to improve emergency relief? Dutch cities are complex and dense urban environments, making them particularly vulnerable to urban
