The research will discuss the innovation related to the adoption of ICT technologies and social networks for promoting smart city strategy, founded on the participation of people in order to define territorial policies, planning goals and projects

E- PARTICIPATORY DECISION-MAKING: A STEP TOWARDS

E-PLANNING

Liliana Ardissono (Dip. Informatica, UNITO) e Angioletta Voghera – DIST (POLITO)

Smart city

• a new governance model that faces the challenge of simultaneously combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development

• a high urban quality and capacity to innovate by developing integrated actions regarding all aspects of economy, environment, quality of living, governance, transport and ICT services

• a strategic vision and a new approaches to urban planning, encompassing the efficient management of territorial resources through the use of ICT for monitoring, management and governance

ICT for smart cities

employed to retrieve, analyze and present continuous flows of real time data collected by sensors spread in the cities supporting the monitoring activities, but their effects on decisional processes, and thus in the promotion of life quality are unclear (De Leo, 2008) Some example: • SENSEable City Lab in Rome (Roma Real-Time) monitors the city use and

flows by geo-localizing citizens via mobile phones • Singapore Live! visualizes data flows about people mobility in the town, as

well as micro-climatic conditions, energy uses and consumptions, and harbor activities

• Dutch CurrentCity creates digital thematic maps by combining mobile phone data, GIS about the urban people flows (such as mobility, connectivity, etc.) that link data, flows and territorial land uses

• Amsterdam smart planning, especially related to energy consumption and living quality improvement, uses ICT technologies to collect and manage data sources

Focus

• lack of user participation in the city management and in the existing process of inclusive decision-making: awareness support is important, but it is not enough to achieve people empowerment, that is a strategic dimension for smart living quality and governance aimed at “creating” new individual and collective values and bonds.

• Dutch and United Kingdom experiences fail to effectively involve generic citizens in their participative processes

Our work

• starts from the idea of actively involving citizens in the smart strategic planning in order to take their ideas, requirements and needs into account

• ICT and the use of social networks technology could support people involvement in decision-making, starting from the identification of the interests of individual citizens for selecting the actors to be involved on a contextual basis.

CITIZENS INTERESTED IN

ZONE A

USER CLUSTERING

CITIZENS INTERESTED IN

ZONE B

CITIZENS INTERESTED IN

ZONE C

Participation

Developed from Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, supported by Urban and Leader and also the Italian legislative framework, the participation is a wide concept:

• “a process through which citizens take a part in the local community” (Porrello, 1983), spontaneously and actively involved in the policy-making

• a “relationship among society and institutions” (Allegretti, 2006), an occasions for “the reduction of the refuse between policy-makers and citizens” (Royer-Vallat, 2002)

• “a process of constructing a consensus” (Innes and Booher, 1999 ) in order to allow the society and national policies to adapt and respond to transformation of collective needs”

• a method for the “reconstruction of a local society in order to identify values and define their future development” (Magnaghi, 2006), but also “for the construction of innovative policies, interacting to the various expressions of the civil society and opening a dialogue with citizens” (Ciaffi and Mela, 2006)

produce effects on public policies, but also on the participants themselves (Bobbio, 2004), consolidating the relations among them and exceeding the dichotomy between “public use” and “private use” of the patrimony, introducing the “common use of common goods” (Magnaghi, 2006)

Traditional and ICT based participation process

4 steps communication, animation, consultation and empowerment (Ciaffi, Mela, 2006), each one characterized by specific objectives and methods, and applicable individually

1. communication, which is an information activity about public choices directed to the citizen (using manifests, multimedia communications, etc.), succeeding in involving someone (Pomatto and Bobbio, 2007)

2. animation activity aimed at informing a large social context about the state of the art of a decisional process or about the implementation of programs, keeping the attention and strengthening the relations between citizens and their own territory.

3. consultation, where the community is involved in territorial transformation processes, providing public institutions with their own requirements (“top-down” governance model because citizens can only react to defined scenarios at a later stage of the processes).

4. “empowerment” (or empowering) or a citizens’ participation by promoting the auto-organization abilities of people that become active parts of territorial processes instead of being mere external observers

ICT role for smart city governance?

• ICT could produce people empowerment helping the institutional actors

• to select citizens, finding and empowering people who have specific interests in a territorial choice

• to involve people opening the arena as much as possible and integrating a “bottom-up” decision-making approach with a “top-down” one and to include in the process interested subjects who have been difficult to identify so far, enhancing their abilities and enforcing their collective territorial belongings

ICT technologies could support public policies for people involvement, by developing/enacting participatory processes supporting the knowledge about

people’s expectations and needs and the objectives of territorial policies

River Contract is a new governance tool based on an inclusive decision-making process for the parties involved and integrated for the themes dealt with (Carter, 2007) for the definition and the implementation of a shared strategic framework (Affeltranger, Lasserre, 2003).

SOCIAL NETWORK AND E-PARTICIPATION TINELLA RIVER CONTRACT

Tinella participation process

Questionnaires

a) School involvment Istituto comprensivo Cesare Pavese (CN) Castiglione Tinella / Santo Stefano Belbo

Istituto comprensivo Vicari (AT) Boglietto / Calosso / Castagnole Lanze / Coazzolo

Istituto comprensivo Beppe Fenoglio (CN) Neive / Neviglie / Treiso / Trezzo Tinella

b) internet

c) Holder involvment

In the territory Circoli ricreativi, meeting point, …

through

Facebook by

setting up a

thematic group

and inviting

people to join

in.

Tinella Action Plan

Method

Masterplan

Tinella Masterplan

CITIZENS

INTERESTED IN

ZONE A

GOING BACK TO USER CLUSTERING: ICT SUPPORT

CITIZENS

INTERESTED IN

ZONE B

CITIZENS

INTERESTED IN

ZONE C

STEP1: How can we identify user

groups (virtual communities)? • Manually, by collecting addresses of people interacting with

the Public Administration via phone, etc. (e.g., see use case on Tinella river)

• Automatically (via ICT support), by analyzing the usage of Web-based territorial services and recognizing users’ interests on the basis of their actions on such services (e.g., document downloads, expression of interests via tagging and commenting, page visits, queries to information services) – Territorial services can be exploited for social network analysis

by inspecting the way citizens use them

– The recognition of the user groups interested in the same kind of information supports the definition of virtual communities that can be invited in participatory decision making concerning the related topics

ICT for group identification: social

network analysis • The study of users’ behavior can be done by analyzing the log files of the

servers hosting the territorial services – Identification of interest points/areas (e.g., user downloads documents about zone A)

– Identification of the type of interest on the zone (e.g., interest in family services in zone A)

However:

• Services must authenticate users for correctly tracking user actions (IP addresses are not enough for tracing user activities across different interaction sessions). Unfortunately most services fail to do that and have to be extended for that purpose

• For identification of specific types of interest, semantic information about the accessed information has to be explicitly modeled (by exploiting ontologies, e.g. NASA SWEET for territorial data)

• Anyway, people unfamiliar with internet will hardly access online services. Thus, a different interaction modality has to be devised (e.g., by offering information points spread in the territory)

STEP 1: virtual community analysis

• We recently started a collaboration with CSI Piemonte in order to track user interaction with the territorial services they offer – The Territorio Web Site of Regione Piemonte

provides data related to the assembling maps of local plans: from this service we want to extract the groups of users downloading maps about Piedmont cities, provinces and mountain communities

– In the next future, we plan to develop a user modeling service supporting the user authentication for several territorial services and merging usage information in order to identify user interests across services

STEP 2: active user involvement

• Having identified the virtual communities interested in the various urban areas, invite them to participate in decisions concerning such areas – Giving feedback about decisions and proposals

– Sharing information and documents (e.g., plans under development) in order to collect ideas, comments and involve citizens in the project development

• This could be done by injecting groups in an existing social network (e.g., the well known Facebook) and using them for direct communication with citizens and for sharing information in a selective way, depending on their interests

User privacy

• User privacy management is a serious issue to be addressed:

– Inform users of online territorial services that their actions will be tracked and analyzed for community management purposes

– Invite users to join in thematic groups (virtual communities) or to opt out, if they are not interested in participating in decision processes (or they do not want to be tracked at all)