Urenio Watch Watch: Cities

REFLOW: Co-Creating Circular Resource Flows in Cities

REFLOW Approach: Sally Bourdon, Manuela Reyes Guerrero. IAAC
REFLOW Approach: Sally Bourdon, Manuela Reyes Guerrero. IAAC

REFLOW is an EU H2020 project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test circular and regenerative solutions in urban and peri-urban areas across Europe. The vision of REFLOW is to develop circular and regenerative cities through the re-localisation of production and the reconfiguration of material flows at different scales, leveraging Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysts for wide-scale collaboration and co-creation conducive to systemic, sustainable change. The project operates at the international level, mobilising existing networks and movements that are working towards a new productive model for cities such as Circular Cities, C40 Cities and Fab City Global Initiative. Continue reading

New paper: Understanding Civic Crowdfunding as a Mechanism for Leveraging Civic Engagement and Urban Innovation

This paper analyses the dynamics of government initiated civic crowdfunding platforms, with regards to participation inequalities and their defining dimensions. Such platforms are considered by the authors as governmental responses for bottom-up peer-to-peer support mechanisms related to urban innovation, which also allows top-down governance and governmental support systems for civic entrepreneurship. Continue reading

Sharing cities and citizens sharing: Perceptions and practices in Milan

Sharing has become a global phenomenon; business models, social innovations and technological developments enable an escalated number of uses for a given asset, resulting in reshaped urban dynamics, practices and morphologies.

This paper is exploring diverse aspects of sharing economy as part of the urban fabric, through participatory activities with citizens and stakeholders. It investigates the co-construction of society and technology with respect to the implementation of sharing-based strategies in urban practices. Continue reading

On the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak and the Smart City Network: Universal Data Sharing Standards Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Benefit Urban Health Monitoring and Management

The authors of this is paper, inspired by the context of the current pandemic, attempt an exploration on urban resilience. Within the reality of smart cities, they outline the importance of seeking standardization of communication across and among them. One month after detection and during the outbreak, they surveys the virus outbreak from an urban standpoint. Continue reading

CyberParks: The Interface Between People, Places and Technology

cyberparks cover

This book focuses on the potential of ICT to increased possibilities for new uses and elements or even types of urban open spaces, as an important added value to the quality of life, inclusiveness and atrractiveness of the city. The editors are Carlos  Smaniotto Costa, Ina  Å uklje Erjavec, Therese  Kenna, Michiel  de Lange, Konstantinos  Ioannidis, Gabriela  Maksymiuk and Martijn  de Waal and its is open access.
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Book Chapter: Co-producing Smart City Services

This chapter provides theoretical empirical information regarding methods and tools that can make co-production of public services a   more efficient process. Through an exploration of six pilot case studies, authors find out that, apart from methods and tools, other skills as well as the capacity to manage the governance of co-production are crucial for this objective.

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Apps promising to make Urban Planning more Inclusive

The use of digital tools and visualisation techniques in the planning is rapidly increasing during the last decade. An article from The Guardian written by Oliver Wainwright and entitled Tinder for cities: how tech is making urban planning more inclusive presents briefly a new wave of digital tools trying to make the urban planning process more transparent, interactive and therefore, inclusive.

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