Toward Web-Based Technologies to Support City Stakeholders in Local Development Actions

Despite massive investments and high expectations associated to the integration of smart city technologies into the city life, their support to the everyday activities, initiatives, and projects of public institutions, companies, third sector organisations, and citizens groups is still marginal, and the promise of a technology-driven local development is far from being firmed up. Current urban technologies do not reflect city dynamics because they are focused on individuals users or on the dichotomy between local governments and customer-citizens-voters, hiding the plurality of social structures and relationships among city stakeholders. Moreover, the silos logic to deal with urban problems on existing digital platforms contrasts with the ecosystemic nature of the city characterised by a tight interdependence between built-unbuilt environment, local activities, social norms and practices. By focusing on web technologies because of their accessibility, scalability, versatility, and low cost, the challenge is to understand how to design future technologies enabling city stakeholders in understanding better the complex context of their actions, making better decisions on the use of local resources, and activating inter-sectoral synergies among urban initiatives. To address this challenge, the work explored the integration between approaches, methods and theories in urban planning, design, and development with the informatics and system design disciplines, within a transdisciplinary research process adapting the TIPS framework to the specificity of a complex design problem. The analysis and progressive conceptualisation of the link between design choices in web platform development and the implications for the technological support of local actions implemented by city stakeholders have been elaborated throughout three years of field activities. Three case studies centred on the development of web platforms, respectively a civic social network, a collaborative urban governance platform, and a city data portal provided the opportunity to explore limits and potential applications of a new class of digital tools imagined as multi-stakeholders, multi-purpose, and multi-scale to reflect how cities work. Action research methods combined with participatory design techniques have been applied during the development of the three prototypes to face the contextual constraints of real working environments in different domains of urban activities. The lessons learned from these experiences provided a deep understanding about the system requirements defining a meaningful and acceptable representation of social structures and urban actions in a shared digital space oriented to mirror city dynamics, as well as insights on the contextual and technological factors to be considered under the perspective of the different types of stakeholders. At the end of the third case study, still on-going, the set of applicative scenarios synthesising the information gathered through the entire process will be analysed by using a grounded theory methodology. The goal is to systematise the findings across the three case studies in a theoretical framework of web technologies mirroring the city and operational guidelines for designers and decisions makers intended to build or adopt them in local initiatives.