Participative Foresight for Smarter Cities: From Vision-Seeds to the Development of Scenarios

Carabias-Hütter, Vicente and Kuehn, Tobias and Sokolov, Alexander and Spiess, Harry (2016) Participative Foresight for Smarter Cities: From Vision-Seeds to the Development of Scenarios. REAL CORP 2016 – SMART ME UP! How to become and how to stay a Smart City, and does this improve quality of life? Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Urban Planning, Regional Development and Information Society. pp. 501-508.

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Abstract

Recently, the smart city concepts have gained increasing importance in current energy and city planning. Various smart city projects which have been realized show that a systemic, integrative approach is crucial. However, in the projects the delineation of boundaries for integrative planning and the realization of systemic local solutions are challenging as the prevailing conventional planning tools and routines are limited. They usually propose top-down and short-term approaches with limited interactions with the stakeholders and limited interdisciplinary research (in particular involving areas of sociology). To tackle these challenges, a Swiss-Russian cooperation aims to enhance the existing planning routines by developing and testing systemic tools for multi-level stakeholder participation processes as well as for future-oriented thinking in city development. For this purpose, two Swiss and two Russian cities were selected, namely Winterthur, Zurich, Moscow and Kazan. These cities will be examined from the smart cities perspective with current and future applications at different implementation levels. Ideas and instruments will be developed to support their ongoing or planned smart city projects at district or city level by introducing participative and long term perspectives. In a series of workshops, participants’ visions, goals and interests will be elicited, compared with each other and contrasted with available data applying participative foresight methods and group model building techniques. Tools such as a GIS and a system dynamics simulation model will be developed to support the planning process, allow the integration of data and serve as a test-bed for proposed solutions. The systemic intervention and participation techniques will be continuously monitored and systematically evaluated. Moreover, a stakeholder-based scenario development process will be applied to envision future developments towards a smarter city and to distil roadmaps for the most desirable scenarios. Selected city processes in Switzerland and Russia among them Winterthur and Zurich, Moscow and Kazan which are all closely linked to the Smart City concept, will be supported by tailored vision-building, scenario development, system thinking techniques and simulation tools. In a first step, the prevalent situation concerning planning processes and instruments in the participating cities will be addressed with a specific focus on smart city objectives and current ongoing projects (e.g. stakeholder involvement, integrating smart energy concepts such as smart housing, smart grids, micro hubs in ongoing city and district planning and implementation processes). Moreover, we will analyse which planning processes and instruments are actually used to steer future energy provision and city development in participative and integrated manners, such as the interdepartemental management teams in the city of Winterthur spreading vision-seeds to come up with a variety of smart city scenarios.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Participative Foresight, Smarter Cities, Vision-Seeds, Scenario Development, Stakeholders
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography
H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Depositing User: REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited: 19 Jul 2016 15:52
Last Modified: 19 Jul 2016 15:52
URI: http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/119

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