In all our research projects we put the perspective of citizens and civil servants in the smart city first. Our research projects can be divided along the following themes:
Citizen Empowerment in the Smart City
Data sources increasingly influence daily life in cities, in both personal and impersonal manners. One of the Centre for BOLD Cities’ main objectives is creating awareness of these processes. Data empowerment is a next step, in which urban residents not only gain knowledge on the use of data in the city, but are actively involved in figuring out what their role in the digital society is or can be.
Smart City Governance and Politics
Urban digitalisation and datafication processes is developed in multi-stakeholder processes in which municipalities, companies, knowledge institutions and citizens cooperate. These processes lead to the development of new forms of participations and governance, such as living labs, hackathons and open data. Furthermore, governments and municipalities increasingly use ‘big data’ and digital technology for (social) policy. Using our SHARED values, the Centre for BOLD Cities critically looks into the use of these technologies, especially when this concerns vulnerable groups.
Smart Urban Technology
Which new technologies are being introduced in the city and what are their challenges for citizens and government?
Urban Data Literacy
Many citizens have never heard of ‘big data’ or ‘smart cities’. Civil servants have diverging and contending expectations. From the perspective of a SHARED smart city it is imperative that citizens can make informed choices about datafication and digitization of their city.
Please visit the theme pages for more information on the individual projects and team members.
