How equitable is evidence-based decision-making? On smart cities and planning for older people

Urban planners, practioners and academics alike, are in strong support of evidence-based decision-making. Dynamic computer models that mirror every detail of a city’s physical, organisational, and social realities inform policymakers, planners, and decision-makers‘ in real-time’ –possibly forecasting the impact of anticipated decisions and changes.
Such smart city infrastructures share a critical limitation with other data science approaches: what cannot be measured, cannot be recorded. It is, for instance, challenging to represent older people, or other vulnerable or marginalised groups: the data that are collected and analysed, emphasise the interests of the majority group; technological, ethical and legal limitations lead to practical data scarcity on minority groups. This is further aggravated by a legacy of planning models assuming a representative ‘average resident’, often implicitly a white, middle-aged, middle-class man. More often than not, neither model nor data take marginalised groups and the most vulnerable residents into consideration. To overcome under-representation of older people in smart city initiatives and digital city twins, we developed strategies for engagement and co-creation, and experimented with different forms of inclusive rights-based urban decision-making. In this presentation, I will highlight that seemingly minor differences between the everyday realities of individual city residents can have a tremendous impact on the‘evidence’ we base planning decisions on, and outline practical and conceptual steps towards more equitable planning for more sustainable urban futures.

Gr. Seminarraum

online (click to open zoom link)

Inclusive places through or despite digitization

Speaker

Christoph Fink

University of Helsinki

Christoph Fink is interested in people and their activities, in particular in cities. He researches in which ways urban spaces and their meaning are constantly re-negotiated, and ask how digital, social and physical spaces interrelate. He is curious which forms of expression, which actions, and speech-acts people use to constitute their world-views and to reproduce their everyday realities. His research focuses on maps, digital platforms as modern-day agoraí, and the creative ways civil movements argue for their causes. Recurring themes in his work include active mobility, urban sustainability, the Right to the City, and socially just sustainability transformation.