[Air-L] Reminder: Abstract deadline Jan 31 - CfP Frontiers / Interrogating the Design of Smart, Sustainable, and Socially Just Urban Spaces: A Look at Institutions, Places, and Values

[shenja van der graaf]

People experience the city in different ways. These experiences shape how
people view the city and the values they seek to draw from this space.
Increasingly, people are experimenting with big data and digital tools
within the context of community-based public goods provision as a way to
realize values such as sustainability and social justice. In such a way,
they claim their right to the city.

These experiments can be transformative. There has been a groundswell of
scholarship on local efforts to become smarter in support of urban
experiments. However, our knowledge of these experiments’ design features
remains scant. Design shapes interactions within all collective endeavors.
When spatial, institutional, and value-based design principles are weak or
missing, urban experiments may fail. This is why this Research Topic’s
special focus is on the question of spatial, institutional, and value-based
design in urban experiments.

Smart urban development seems inevitable for the future of our cities, but
who should decide what that future should be like and whose interests smart
urbanism serves? Politics is inherent to urban development, and there is
increasing evidence that political struggle lies at the heart of urban
transformation. From LGBTQ+ activism that claims a right to public space to
youth climate protests, political struggle is a call to action. These
movements are the flints that spark urban experiments. However, we have
scant knowledge of these experiments’ governance, the co-evolution of
institutions that guide them, and ways in which they are designed to render
value. Research indicates that it is challenging to translate and implement
public values in smart city technologies. This Research Topic explores the
dynamics between socio-technological processes - particularly, value-based
design - that shape urban space and how citizens can participate
meaningfully, highlighting how institutional design principles can be
leveraged without incurring associated risks.

This Research Topic calls for original papers, empirical as well as
theoretical, that use the analytical lens of institutional and/or
value-based design principles to explore and connect current popular,
normative, academic, and political notions on urban commons, such as in the
“smart”, “inclusive”, “resilient”, "participatory", "citizen-centric",
“sustainable” and “just” cities.

The overall goal of this collection of papers is to bring together
contributions on the role of institutional and value-based design
principles within complex urban systems from different academic disciplines
and perspectives. By acknowledging these different perspectives and
discussing their cross-cutting themes, we aim to contribute to
understanding the complex issues in implementing these technologies posing
numerous challenges and trade-offs with which developers, designers, and
professionals working in urban management are increasingly faced with.

*Keywords*: Institutional design, Value-based design, Participatory
city-making, Urban commons, Transformative capacities, Quality of life

We welcome your
*abstract by Jan 31, 2022 (title, affiliation, about 500 words)*

*Relevant information*
Website cfp
<https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/29142/interrogating-the-design-of-smart-sustainable-and-socially-just-urban-spaces-a-look-at-institutions?utm_source=F-RTM&utm_medium=TED1&utm_campaign=PRD_TED1_T1_RT-TITLE>

You can opt for a short piece to a longer article
<https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities#article-types>!

Note: that Frontiers charges publication fees
<https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees> which are waived for
scientists at institutions with Institutional Memberships. You can find out
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<https://www.frontiersin.org/about/institutional-membership>. Frontiers
also has a fee support program.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!
- Shenja van der Graaf <shenja.vandergraaf at utwente.nl>, University of
Twente (shenja.vandergraaf at utwente.nl)
- Le Anh Long, University of Twente
- Ignazio Vinci, University of Palermo