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Summary briefing to accompany the report

Existing research from transport studies agrees that e-scooters are both functional and fun to use; however, detail is lacking on exactly where, when, and how e-scooters are used in a playful manner. Existing research also illustrates how, once allowed into city space, regulations tend to follow, limiting e-scooter speed and place of use. This is partly because of accrued statistics on accident and injury rates, both to e-scooterists and pedestrians. Hence, the question of how exactly e-scooters are used is an important one. It is studied here via qualitative analysis of video data collected by discreetly following e-scooterists and filming their actions amongst other co-movers in specific places. Very few studies of this kind exist, consequently the emphasis is upon detailed empirical analysis rather than theorisation or conceptual development. Through the presentation of graphic transcripts and a relatively simple comparative approach, new knowledge is gained on the complexities of e-scooter use within the city streetscape.

What could Auckland become within two generations? How do we become a truly global, liveable and sustainable city that is fit for the future? Reimagining T��maki Makaurau Auckland: harnessing the region���s potential ��� a report commissioned by Auckland Unlimited ��� explores the changes needed for Auckland to reach its potential.

This briefing note is from a systematic review completed about the effects of initiatives to increase people's influence in local decision-making to address inequalities and determinants of health and wellbeing in Europe. The review particularly focused on how initiatives can be affected by resource constraints. See also an illustration highlighting the main findings: https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.13626386.v1 The review found that initiatives aiming to involve people in decision-making to address inequalities and determinants of health and wellbeing are more effective if they focus on a mix of these elements: strengthening formal and informal spaces for participation, developing opportunities for collective learning, building collective capacities for influencing, developing relationships and trust, and changing institutional practices in ways that value public knowledge.

This thesis explores the contribution of farmers’ agency and social structures to the evolution of the social vulnerability in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, following a historic drought and saline intrusion in late 2015 – early 2016. Based on a qualitative case study research, I conducted 28 farm household interviews, 21 key informant interviews with stakeholders, documentary and archival records analysis, and direct observation in the Soc Trang province of Vietnam in 2018. I employ secondary quantitative data analysis, quantitative analysis of household data, and thematic analysis of qualitative data to provide a comprehensive assessment of the topic.

This thesis explores the contribution of farmers’ agency and social structures to the evolution of the social vulnerability in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, following a historic drought and saline intrusion in late 2015 – early 2016. Based on a qualitative case study research, I conducted 28 farm household interviews, 21 key informant interviews with stakeholders, documentary and archival records analysis, and direct observation in the Soc Trang province of Vietnam in 2018. I employ secondary quantitative data analysis, quantitative analysis of household data, and thematic analysis of qualitative data to provide a comprehensive assessment of the topic.

Evington Park in collaboration with Friends of Evington and Evington Echo ( 9th Sept 2019 ) project specific banners made and stall held distributing information on COS and forthcoming Peace Education course in October and November 2019.

Every fall semester, the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture conducts an Urban Lab for students in their fifth year of architectural education, a dynamic learning experience that focuses on interaction with community members as the foundation for urban design. Neighborhoods around Pittsburgh are chosen as areas of study, and the students set out to create an urban design intervention by analyzing and mapping their sites, interacting with real community members, and designing a catalytic intervention based off of their gained knowledge. For the Fall of the 2005, the chosen neighborhood of focus was Pittsburgh’s Northside, the once vibrant area of the city that suffered significantly from failed urban renewal efforts in the 1960’s, and the terribly invasive construction of Interstate 279 in the 1980’s. Students embarked on a semester long journey, documented in these pages, to discover and learn about the history and heritage of the Northside, document, map the strengths and weakness of each of its’ distinctive communities, develop frameworks for studying those communities, then generate strategies to form the basis of a final catalytic intervention to illustrate how a small scale urban design and architectural design can influence the 40 year future of a whole community. Along the way students learned how to interact with community members, develop visions for the future, and come to understand and respect the Northside and its’ citizens for all the wonderful assets they contributes to Pittsburgh.

This report examines how organisations working with diverse communities use digital communication and online platforms to bridge social cohesion and inclusion during crisis events. Amid the COVID-19 lockdown periods in Australia, researchers from the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre interviewed 23 key stakeholders who work directly with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Victoria. These included NGOs, educational institutions, community stakeholders and leaders, advocacy groups, multicultural organisations, local government representatives, and peak bodies. The interviews with these stakeholders provided deeper understandings of how programand service delivery modes shifted, how technology was harnessed, the strategies employed to connect with diverse groups, and the opportunities and challenges that emerged when transitioning services into the online sphere.This report presents these results followed by a discussion of immediately relevant and applicable next steps for stakeholders who work with diverse communities.

This paper explores the co-creation of location-based urban game to document emotionally-charged narratives of gender-based violence (GBV) experienced by marginalised women. The paper explores the impact of games not just as a tool of catharsis and healing for the ‘game designers’ i.e. marginalised women but also as that of advocacy for GBV for the game players. Two consecutive prototypes will be created: one developed by the paper’s authors and the other co-created with marginalised Indian women using a methodology of ethnographic action research. The games are built using open source digital tools such as Twine and social media platforms. This will result in developing a placemaking toolkit in collaboration with marginalised groups as a new form of community advocacy and urban activism.

Bushfire Risk in Late-modernity: An Examination of Risk Perspectives and Ontological Security Structures in Victorian Urban-rural Interface Residents

Community resilience October and November 2019The Vintage Café – offered to provide venue and place leaflets in the Café with first project based best practice pilot, 5 sessions of Peace Education as supplied by US Charity TPRF being held there.Friends of Evington offered COS the opening session at the Peace and Remembrance event 11th Nov 2019 at War Memorial, attended by around 100, including local schools.

The growth in Australia’s population from increased immigration is changing the ethnic, socio-structural and physical landscapes of urban neighbourhoods and significantly altering relationships within these areas (Australian Government, 2013; Hugo, 2008). These changes can be enormously positive, but can also pose a challenge for the development and maintenance of neighbourhood networks and social inclusion. With a sizeable number of Australians viewing immigration as a strain on economic resources and a threat to Australian identity and values (Dunn, Forrest, Burnley, & McDonald, 2004; Kamp, Alam, Blair, & Dunn, 2017), there is an urgent need to better understand the contextual dynamics that shape interethnic relationships.Despite a long history of largely successful multicultural policies and programs, recent surveys in Australia reveal that approximately 30 per cent of Australians do not believe that immigration from diverse countries makes us stronger and, further, they consider the current intake of immigrants as ‘too high’ (Markus, 2018). Negative attitudes against Muslims are also increasing (Markus, 2018) and native-born Australians are more likely to report high levels of social disorder and withdrawal from some aspects of community life in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods (Wickes, Hipp, Zahnow, & Mazerolle, 2013; Wickes, Zahnow, White, & Mazerolle, 2013). These findings suggest that although immigration brings national economic, social and cultural benefits, there is growing endorsement of exclusivist attitudes towards migrants.Countering exclusivist discourses can only succeed if initiatives address the underlying factors that allow these narratives to resonate with individuals. Evidence from other countries suggests that socially harmful exclusivism concentrates in neighbourhoods, especially segregated neighbourhoods and those with large proportions of non-White/European residents (Ramalingam, Glennie and Feve, 2012). In Australia, and specifically Victoria, we know little about the spatial concentration of socially harmful exclusivism as no large-scale Australian study examines whether these attitudes cluster in particular neighbourhoods. Furthermore, we do not know how and under what conditions these attitudes may lead to potentially harmful actions.This report examines the individual-level drivers of social exclusivism while also considering the role of the neighbourhood context and neighbourhood cohesion. A key goal of this research was to better understand the ways in which the local context encourages or prevents the development of exclusivist sentiments, attitudes and endorsement of actions that seek to exclude migrants, especially in areas experiencing significant changes in the ethnic composition. Linked to this goal was a focus on identifying the specific characteristics of the local context that distinguish areas with higher levels of socially harmful exclusivism from those with lower levels.

The growth in Australia’s population from increased immigration is changing the ethnic, socio-structural and physical landscapes of urban neighbourhoods and significantly altering relationships within these areas (Australian Government, 2013; Hugo, 2008). These changes can be enormously positive, but can also pose a challenge for the development and maintenance of neighbourhood networks and social inclusion. With a sizeable number of Australians viewing immigration as a strain on economic resources and a threat to Australian identity and values (Dunn, Forrest, Burnley, & McDonald, 2004; Kamp, Alam, Blair, & Dunn, 2017), there is an urgent need to better understand the contextual dynamics that shape interethnic relationships.Despite a long history of largely successful multicultural policies and programs, recent surveys in Australia reveal that approximately 30 per cent of Australians do not believe that immigration from diverse countries makes us stronger and, further, they consider the current intake of immigrants as ‘too high’ (Markus, 2018). Negative attitudes against Muslims are also increasing (Markus, 2018) and native-born Australians are more likely to report high levels of social disorder and withdrawal from some aspects of community life in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods (Wickes, Hipp, Zahnow, & Mazerolle, 2013; Wickes, Zahnow, White, & Mazerolle, 2013). These findings suggest that although immigration brings national economic, social and cultural benefits, there is growing endorsement of exclusivist attitudes towards migrants.Countering exclusivist discourses can only succeed if initiatives address the underlying factors that allow these narratives to resonate with individuals. Evidence from other countries suggests that socially harmful exclusivism concentrates in neighbourhoods, especially segregated neighbourhoods and those with large proportions of non-White/European residents (Ramalingam, Glennie and Feve, 2012). In Australia, and specifically Victoria, we know little about the spatial concentration of socially harmful exclusivism as no large-scale Australian study examines whether these attitudes cluster in particular neighbourhoods. Furthermore, we do not know how and under what conditions these attitudes may lead to potentially harmful actions.This report examines the individual-level drivers of social exclusivism while also considering the role of the neighbourhood context and neighbourhood cohesion. A key goal of this research was to better understand the ways in which the local context encourages or prevents the development of exclusivist sentiments, attitudes and endorsement of actions that seek to exclude migrants, especially in areas experiencing significant changes in the ethnic composition. Linked to this goal was a focus on identifying the specific characteristics of the local context that distinguish areas with higher levels of socially harmful exclusivism from those with lower levels.

Australia, and the rest of the world, is experiencing one of the most significant social, economic and health crises in history with the coronavirus. And there are signs that racial and ethnic discrimination is on the rise. Given the current challenges that Australia and other countries will face in the aftermath of COVID-19, creating and sustaining a welcoming culture is ever more pressing.The Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre, in collaboration with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Australian Catholic University, and Australia Multicultural Foundation, sought to better understand the contextual dynamics that shape inter-ethnic relationships across 140 neighbourhoods in Melbourne. The report Understanding the context of racial and cultural exclusivism: A study of Melbourne neighbourhoods led by Associate Professor Rebecca Wickes, provides a critical look into the processes that include or exclude migrants in Australia’s most multicultural city.On 21 April 2020, the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre hosted a webinar where we discussed the main findings of this report within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our panelists considered the impact of this crisis for inclusion and discussed how we might mitigate the social distance that may occur as a result of the physical distancing underway in our workplaces and communities. Professor Sharon Pickering, Dean of Arts, Monash University hosted this online event. Dean Pickering was joined by our discussant, Professor Alex Piquero, and panelists Associate Professor Rebecca Wickes (Monash University), Professor Karen Farquharson (University of Melbourne) and Aleem Ali (Welcoming Australia). These slides are from the presentation by Associate Professor Rebecca Wickes (Monash University) during the webinar.

Most research in Australia has measured housing affordability in terms of housing cost as a proportion of household income. We adopted a new measure that combined housing cost with transportation cost. This new measure showed that many suburbs which seemed affordable on housing costs alone became unaffordable when transport costs were taken into account. In this report we provide insights gained from employing a qualitative approach to explore the lived meanings and consequences of housing and transportation costs. We investigate the combined impacts of housing and transportation costs, as well as the residential and lifestyle choices, trade-offs and adaptations that people make. For this purpose, we selected three outer fringe suburbs for this study Pakenham, Dandenong and Craigieburn. Housing in these suburbs was cheaper, but living in these suburbs entailed significant transport costs, both financial and non-financial. We carried out in-depth face-to-face interviews with over 70 respondents across the three suburbs.

The Fall 2007 Urban Laboratory consisted of three studios studying a large urban brownfi eld adjacent to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Hazelwood. The studio explored reclaiming and reprogramming this post-industrial urban terrain by reconnecting it to surrounding human and natural ecologies, exploring programmatic scenarios, and designing a piece of sustainable contemporary urbanism. Working in pairs, students examined how the site could be transformed into a new sustainable urban neighborhood combining residential, retail, offi ce, institutional, and research uses. The studio explored the tenets of good urban design, and then attempted to advance them to fi t the requirements of a fi rst-rate twenty-fi rst century “new town” with local, regional and global connectivity.

Fault Lines Exposed intends to understand inequality across Australian cities and towns. Social and economic change in Australia has resulted in the emergence of disparities in advantage and disadvantage between metropolitan communities and regional localities, towns and cities. In 1999 the book Community Opportunity and Vulnerability (Baum et al.) considered the disparities that existed between communities using 1996 census data. This new book, available both online and in print, uses up-to-date data to reanalyse the patterns and consider the important policy issues that arise from the patterns identified. Fault Lines Exposed provides insight into advantage and disadvantage at an aggregate community or locality level. Such insight is necessary if we are to better understand what is happening in society. It helps us plan effective solutions to problems that impact not only on individuals and families but also on communities. Each of the chapters outlines the main findings from the typology of advantage and disadvantage. The book concludes with a strong policy orientation, addressing possible options and raising more policy questions. Fault Lines Exposed will be essential reading for academics, researchers, students, policy makers and other professionals working in the areas of geography, sociology, economics and social work. “We had escaped our societies. Nobody was watching us. We could be free, we could behave as we liked. We had found the meaning of our existence. The real meaning of existence was there all the time of course, in the simple pattern of the island which we had annexed as our own primitive milieu, but after a time we could not see it for the mired footprints of our own excesses.” George Johnston, Clean Straw for Nothing “They had a larger-than-life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts. They were real, tough, honest. They were the kind of people you meet less and less.” Leonard Cohen, on George Johnston and Charmian Clift

The proliferation of digital connectivity and mobility is having a profound impact on collaboration practices and coworking spaces in urban environments. This chapter focuses on nomadic patterns of designers, freelancers, hackers, and creative professionals, and seeks to map the urban spaces that they occupy and navigate in order to go about their work practices. After a brief introduction on the use of office space and recently emerged city bound working practices, we first review previous studies and current literature about the impact of digital connectivity and mobility on collaboration and coworking spaces. Two cases (the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, Canada, and The Edge, a digital culture centre at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia) will be introduced as examples of social practices in, and uses / employments of coworking and collaboration spaces. The subsequent discussion of best practices and future designs of collaboration and coworking spaces will focus on three distinct themes: First, the tension between universal vs specialised demands on space; second, the need for perpetual messiness, and; third, the unfolding urban ecology of work spaces. Finally, we will conclude with some considerations on the configuration and promotion of collaborative working practices especially with regards to urban planning.

Everyone knows what intoxication and drunkenness are, what they look like, how to define and measure them and what their consequences are. At least we might assume so given the ways these words are used by the media, by politicians and policy makers and by various medical, educational and legal experts in Australia and around the world. A whole variety of concerns about young people, individual and public health, road safety, sexual assault and violence are connected to these takenforgranted understandings of intoxication and drunkenness. Drawing on an extensive review of research from biomedicine, psychology, sociology and legal studies, and from news media reporting, the authors reveal a far more complex picture. This is a picture marked by little agreement on how to define intoxication and drunkenness, how to measure intoxication, what getting drunk means to those who drink (including young people, men and women and people from different cultural and national backgrounds), and where responsibility lies for many of the individual, social, medical and legal consequences of intoxication and drunkenness. Smashed! presents an overview of the history of these concerns and an extensive account of the many meanings of intoxication and drunkenness at the start of the 21st century. It provides a valuable resource for researchers, policy makers, the media and members of the community who are involved in these ongoing, often emotive, debates.

This brief provides an overview of academic and grey literature on the role of technology to facilitate intercultural engagement. We focus on the practices undertaken by three key sectors – NGOs and local government, education, and community organisations – that seek to strengthen communication among diverse groups. Much of this research has highlighted that intercultural digital engagement remains more informative than interactive. There is also a need to integrate such engagement collaboratively with diverse groups to ensure there is a transfer of technological knowledge and skills.

Thu, June 27, 2019 12:00 PM – 5:30 PMhttps://www.meccsa.org.uk/nl/three-d-issue-32-discourses-of-immigration-and-citizenship-from-windrush-to-brexit/The first REaPN event under its new Chair Mita Lad (and Deputy, Dr. Noor Halabi) took place at De Montfort University on 27 June 2019, organised by previous Deputy of the network, Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu. Across the afternoon the conference heard a selection of timely papers alongside fruitful discussion, culminating with the bringing together of ideas from keynote speaker Patrick Vernon OBE.https://www.windrushday.org.uk/windrush-day-events-2019/windrush-events-east-midlands/discourses-of-windrush/

This qualitative case study explores the potential of social living labs to foster digital participation and communication among regional and rural communities. The context is Townsville, North Queensland (Australia) - one of the first communities connected to Australia’s National Broadband. The study focuses on two cases: inaugural social living lab events related to social interests identified by local residents. Drawing on interview and observation data, the study’s findings present a snapshot of digital participation and associated learning needs among this community. It also models a novel social living labs approach whose emphasis on informal learning differentiates it from more established living labs models that have a technological or product focus. This social living labs approach could be of interest to community developers, educators and residents. Addressing digital divide, it supports digital capacity building in Townsville and other regional and remote communities around Australia and the world.

'The primacy of culture’s role as an educational site where identities are being continually transformed, power is enacted, and learning assumes a political dynamic as it becomes not only the condition for the acquisition of agency but also the sphere for imagining oppositional social change' (Giroux 2004 p. 60). 'Youth' or 'the young person' is an abstract concept; used often, unthinkingly, but without concrete, or universally agreed upon definition. Are young people the future or the ‘problem’ with society? Varying discourses define the young person in a number of ways, with the formative features of young derived from their social position and status, age and demographic, and role in wider social hierarchies. Adding to this complexity of definition, young people themselves also define themselves and the idea of ‘youth’ in a variety of ways. How a young person forms an identity1, and on whose terms, is hence a vexed problem. The research that guided this dissertation aimed to explore how the idea of the young person was constructed, represented and viewed within three informal learning settings located in regional Queensland. The first cohort included a group of ‘disengaged’ young people within an alternative educational setting. This group was identified by the case school as disengaged and in need of a remediation program to ‘get them back on track’. The second cohort included a group of young people who attended a fortnightly LBGTQI social support group. The group, founded by Headspace Toowoomba, met with the aim of providing a social opportunity for LBGTQI identifying young people, aged between 12 and 18 years old, to be able to connect with each other in a supportive environment. The third cohort was a group of mountain bikers who would get together, ‘hang out’ and ride their bikes together. This group formed based on the desire for a group of young mountain bikers to ‘hang out’, practise their riding, and teach each other new skills. Via these three ‘sites’, the experience of these groups of young people was examined in an effort to understand the dynamic nature of identity formation, how young people come to develop a sense of Self and, more generally understand their place within wider social contexts. This research highlights that young people have a profound understanding of their ‘place’ in the world and the challenges that confront them. Significantly, young people contend with a range of social views and stereotypes that pathologise and position young people in ‘fixed’ ways. This thesis outlines how a more comprehensive understanding of young people might develop and how opportunities for informal learning,2 engaged by young people, can mediate this process.

The mobile internet provides new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action, and interact with their city. However, lack of information or motivation often prevents citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this paper, we present DoGood, a mobile app that aims at motivating citizens to join civic activities in their local community. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to participate in civic activities. The term civic activity is not yet well defined, so we collect activities citizens consider to be civic in order to work towards a broadly accepted definition of the term. The DoGood app uses gamified elements that we studied in order to gauge their role in encouraging citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. DoGood was implemented and deployed to citizens in a five-week-long user study. The app succeeded in motivating most of its users to do more civic activities, and its gamified elements were well received.

Large-scale political or cultural events in urban environments disrupt and challenge city residents in making informed decisions to navigate through restricted zones. However, little research exists that examines how residents successfully overcome the mobility turmoils created by such events. Studies into collective intelligence found socio-technical efforts that can assist citizens in dealing with challenging situations in urban environments. Yet, studies into other forms of collective and network sociality and how those forms are interwoven with the social construction of urban space, are rare. In this paper, we present data from the 2014 G20 Summit held in Brisbane, Australia, to propose that collective-informed decisions made by urban residents in disrupted environments are influenced by particular communication patterns and information access, as well as the production and reproduction of urban imaginaries. An urban exploration as the G20 event unfolded, followed by audio-recorded focus groups, was conducted with 14 participants who mapped their walks through the city using a mobile app and captured images of different locations along their paths. The analysis of this data contributes towards a deeper understanding of collective intelligence strategies for citizens interacting with urban space, and gives rise to potential strategies for enhancing socio-spatial engagement of urban residents.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to trace how the relationship between city governments and citizens has developed over time with the introduction of urban informatics and smart city technology.Design/methodology/approachThe argument presented in the paper is backed up by a critical review approach based on a transdisciplinary assessment of social, spatial and technical research domains.FindingsSmart cities using urban informatics can be categorised into four classes of maturity or development phases depending on the qualities of their relationship with their citizenry. The paper discusses the evolution of this maturity scale from people as residents, consumers, participants, to co-creators.Originality/valueThe paper’s contribution has practical implications for cities wanting to take advantage of urban informatics and smart city technology. First, recognising that technology is a means to an end requires cities to avoid technocratic solutions and employ participatory methodologies of urban informatics. Second, the most challenging part of unpacking city complexities is not about urban data but about a cultural shift in policy and governance style towards collaborative citymaking. The paper suggests reframing the design notion of usability towards “citizen-ability”.

One of the main challenges facing South African citizens in terms of sustainable community development, remains the fight against poverty. One of the strategies implemented by the South African government to eradicate poverty, is the implementation of income-generating community projects. The advantages of the development of such interventions include the development of skills in conjunction with financial benefits stimulated by economic activities in communities. The expectation exists that income-generating community projects should develop into sustainable businesses after the initial skill development and donor funding. Unfortunately, this expectation is unrealistic, because income-generating community projects fail to develop into sustainable businesses and have a limited life span. However, they do facilitate sustainable community development in terms of skills development, development of entrepreneurs and economic development. The main objective of this study was to construct a conceptual framework to guide the planning and implementation of income-generating community projects to facilitate sustainable community development through the use of income-generating community projects. The case study of the Holding Hands income-generating community project provided an opportunity to study the development, implementation and functioning of an income-generating community project to develop a framework for the development and implementation of future income-generating community projects. The methodology consisted of a qualitative approach to explore a case study in order to develop constructivist grounded theory. A document analysis of the available documents on the planning, development and implementation of the Holding Hands income-generating community project was used as the first phase of data analysis with the assistance of ATLAS.ti. This resulted in the development of 10 themes and 33 codes. The gaps identified in the data were filled with indepth interviews conducted with the participants of the Holding Hands income-generating community project. The in-depth interviews confirmed that a SWOT analysis can be a useful tool to assist community mapping and that a social network analysis of the participants can provide required networks to enhance the impact of interventions on sustainable community development. The literature review provided additional information to support the identified codes and themes. The findings of the data analysis and the literature review were integrated to develop a conceptual framework based on four core principles consisting of five phases, ten steps and thirty-three actions to guide the planning, implementation and measurement and evaluation of income-generating community projects to facilitate sustainable community development. The limitation of the study was mainly rooted in the fact that it consisted of a single case study within a specific context. This provides an opportunity to test the conceptual framework in future research.

We propose a collective participatory speculative urban walk exploring "more-than-human" perspectives for smart cities. The walk will be a curated selection of outcomes from a PDC workshop interrogating how "more-than-human" approaches and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices toward cohabitation. Our aim with the Situated Action is to use the walk as an embodied approach to push forward a cultural change in the agenda of sustainable smart cities, urban informatics and IoT. The walk will draw from the specificity of urban infrastructures in Hasselt associated with "more-than-human" approaches and include a selection of provisional artefacts in the form of low-fi prototypes, manifestos or future scenarios from the workshop to scaffold participation within the urban environment for conference delegates and citizens.

The turn to participation in smart cities was intended to increase the involvement of diverse, often marginalised, citizens in the design and use of networked sensing technologies. However, ideals of activism, citizen engagement and democratisation through the co-design of networked technologies and services have been largely based on an understanding of urban space as separate from nature, and for human inhabitants alone. In current conditions of climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity, a human-centred perspective of cities is increasingly problematic. This workshop focuses on an expanded more-than-human perspective for cities, informed by studies in the Anthropocene in fields such as STS, geography, planning and design. We will interrogate how more-than-human perspectives and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices and policies towards cohabitation, and push forward a cultural change in the agenda of sustainable smart cities, urban informatics, IoT, and design.

Smart cities are usually optimised like a business for speed and efficiency. Placemaking can slow down cities to improve health and wellbeing and promote more democratic engagement of citizens.

Urban agriculture plays an increasingly vital role in supplying food to urban populations. Changes in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) are already driving widespread change in diverse food-related industries such as retail, hospitality and marketing. It is reasonable to suspect that the fields of ubiquitous technology, urban informatics and social media equally have a lot to offer the evolution of core urban food systems. We use communicative ecology theory to describe emerging innovations in urban food systems according to their technical, discursive and social components. We conclude that social media in particular accentuate fundamental social interconnections normally effaced by conventional industrialised approaches to food production and consumption.

A central notion in urban design, urban interaction design, and placemaking is the user of public space, the occupant, resident, citizen, bystander, passer-by, explorer, or flâneur. When the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) first emerged, the disciplines that represented the “human” aspects of HCI included behavioural psychology, cognitive science and human factors engineering. This situatedness begs the question whether the “user” requires different contextualisations beyond the immediate and traditional HCI concerns of the technical interface, that is, beyond usability.This article aims to illustrate the need for placemakers and urban interaction designers to be transdisciplinary and agile in order to navigate different levels of granularity. This article seeks to practice granular agile thinking by introducing five possible ways to think about the “urban user” and the implications that follow: the user as city resident; the user as consumer of city services; the user as participant in the city’s community consultations; the user as co-creator in a collaborative approach to citymaking, and finally; the user re-thought as part of a much larger and more complex ecosystem of more-than-human worlds and of cohabitation – a process that decentres the human in the design of collaborative cities.

In Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), we are introduced to heterotopias: spaces of ‘otherness’ that reveal the shadows of everyday life. One of these heterotopias that Foucault discusses is rest homes, which he describes as a place that exists on the border between being a heterotopia of crisis (a forbidden place) and a heterotopia of deviation (a place to house individuals that display behaviour that is irregular to the norm). In this paper, I explore Foucault’s notion of the rest home as heterotopia, through a close examination of the social worlds of ten older Australians, living in a residential aged care home in Queensland, Australia. Through a combination of repeated in-depth interviews and participatory visual methods, I unpack the social factors that regulate various heterotopian qualities of aged care. Centrally, I make the case that while heterotopias can be oppressive and sites ‘...in which humans experience their limits of existence’ (Hetherington, 1997:46), they can also be places of resistance, as demonstrated by the ways residents utilise habit in pushing back against institutional practices.

Australia's Smart Cities Plan largely conveys a limited role for people: they live, work and consume. This neglects the rich body of work calling for better human engagement in smart cities.

The future of civic engagement is characterised by both technological innovation as well as new technological user practices that are fuelled by trends towards mobile, personal devices; broadband connectivity; open data; urban interfaces; and, cloud computing. These technology trends are progressing at a rapid pace, and have led global technology vendors to package and sell the ‘Smart City’ as a centralized service delivery platform predicted to optimize and enhance cities’ key performance indicators – and generate a profitable market. The top-down deployment of these large and proprietary technology platforms have helped sectors such as energy, transport, and healthcare to increase efficiencies. However, an increasing number of scholars and commentators warn of another ‘IT bubble’ emerging. Along with some city leaders, they argue that the top-down approach does not fit the governance dynamics and values of a liberal democracy when applied across sectors. A thorough understanding is required, of the socio-cultural nuances of how people work, live, play across different environments, and how they employ social media and mobile devices to interact with, engage in, and constitute public realms. Although the term ‘slacktivism’ is sometimes used to denote a watered down version of civic engagement and activism that is reduced to clicking a ‘Like’ button and signing online petitions, we believe that we are far from witnessing another Biedermeier period that saw people focus on the domestic and the non-political. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Occupy movements in New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, Stuttgart 21, Fukushima, the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the Vinegar Movement in Brazil in 2013. These examples of civic action shape the dynamics of governments, and in turn, call for new processes to be incorporated into governance structures. Participatory research into these new processes across the triad of people, place and technology is a significant and timely investment to foster productive, sustainable, and livable human habitats. With this chapter, we want to reframe the current debates in academia and priorities in industry and government to allow citizens and civic actors to take their rightful centerpiece place in civic movements. This calls for new participatory approaches for co-inquiry and co-design. It is an evolving process with an explicit agenda to facilitate change, and we propose participatory action research (PAR) as an indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures and practices for civic engagement. This chapter proposes participatory action research as a useful and fitting research paradigm to guide methodological considerations surrounding the study, design, development, and evaluation of civic technologies. We do not limit our definition of civic technologies to tools specifically designed to simply enhance government and governance, such as renewing your car registration online or casting your vote electronically on election day. Rather, we are interested in civic media and technologies that foster citizen engagement in the widest sense, and particularly the participatory design of such civic technologies that strive to involve citizens in political debate and action as well as question conventional approaches to political issues (DiSalvo, 2012; Dourish, 2010; Foth et al., 2013). Following an outline of some underlying principles and assumptions behind participatory action research, especially as it applies to cities, we will critically review case studies to illustrate the application of this approach with a view to engender robust, inclusive, and dynamic societies built on the principles of engaged liberal democracy. The rationale for this approach is an alternative to smart cities in a ‘perpetual tomorrow,’ (cf. e.g. Dourish & Bell, 2011), based on many weak and strong signals of civic actions revolving around technology seen today. It seeks to emphasize and direct attention to active citizenry over passive consumerism, human actors over human factors, culture over infrastructure, and prosperity over efficiency. First, we will have a look at some fundamental issues arising from applying simplistic smart city visions to the kind of a problem a city is (cf. Jacobs, 1961). We focus on the touch points between “the city” and its civic body, the citizens. In order to provide for meaningful civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces.

If smart cities run on big data and algorithms that channel only 'relevant' information and opinions to us, how do we maintain the diversity of ideas and possibilities that drives truly smart cities?

This paper reports on our experience of setting up, operating, and evaluating the Mixhaus – a mobile community maker space inside a disused shipping container in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The project, which emerged from a pitch at the local StartUp Weekend in 2015, has seen community members coalesce around a shared interest in learning about and practising digital fabrication skills and techniques. We present and discuss the data we gathered from interviews, participant observations, and community workshops. Our thematic analysis was guided by the conceptual framework of boundary objects. We found that the Mixhaus maker space presents itself as an object crossing and dissolving boundaries along four different dimensions: an organisational mix, a social mix, a disciplinary mix, and a spatial mix. Our insights inform local community engagement initiatives and policies as well as design implications.