Engagement In The City

Engagement in the City: How Arts and Culture Impact Development in Urban Areas explores how the arts contribute to cultural and economic development, physical and mental health, education, and social capital. The book can be helpful for scholars and community leaders interested in facilitating arts-based initiatives to improve their communities.

This book explores ‘spatial practices’, a loose and expandable set of approaches that embrace the political and the activist, the performative and the curatorial, the architectural and the urban. Acting upon and engaging with the public realm, the field of spatial practices allows people to reconnect with their own sense of agency through engagement in space and place, exploring and prototyping alternative futures in the here and now. The 24 chapters contain essays, visual essays and interviews, featuring contributions from an international set of experimental practitioners including Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands), Teddy Cruz (Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, San Diego), Hector (USA), The Decorators (London) and OOZE (Netherlands). Beautifully designed with full colour illustrations, Spatial Practices advances dialogue and collaboration between academics and practitioners and is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals in architecture, urban planning and urban policy.

This book analyzes e-participation in smart cities. In recent decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) have played a key role in the democratic political and governance process by allowing easier interaction between governments and citizens, and the increased ability of citizens to participate in the production chain of public services. E-participation plays and important role in the development of smart cities and smart communities , but it has not yet been extensively studied. This book fills that gap by combining empirical and theoretical research to analyze actual practices of citizen involvement in smart cities and build a solid framework for successful e-participation in smart cities. The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses smart technologies and their role in improving e-participation in smart cities. Part II deals with models of e-participation in smart cities and the organization issues affecting the implementation of e-participation; these chapters analyze the efficiency of governance models in relation to the establishment of smart cities. Part III proposes incentives to motivate increased participation by governments and cititzenry within the smart cities context. Written by an international panel of experts and practitioners, this book will be a convenient source of information on e-participation in smart cities and will be valuable to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, citizens, international organizations and anyone who has a stake in enhancing citizen engagement in smart cities.

Although rarely explored in academic literature, most inhabitants and visitors interact with an urban landscape on a day-to-day basis is on the street level. Storefronts, first floor apartments, and sidewalks are the most immediate and common experience of a city. These “plinths” are the ground floors that negotiate between inside and outside, the public and private spheres. The City at Eye Level qualitatively evaluates plinths by exploring specific examples from all over the world. Over twenty-five experts investigate the design, land use, and road and foot traffic in rigorously researched essays, case studies, and interviews. These pieces are supplemented by over two hundred beautiful color images and engage not only with issues in design, but also the concerns of urban communities. The editors have put together a comprehensive guide for anyone concerned with improving or building plinths, including planners, building owners, property and shop managers, designers, and architects.

Once considered the antithesis of a verdant and vibrant ecosystem, cities are now being hailed as highly efficient and complex social ecological systems. Emerging from the streets of the post-industrial city are well-tended community gardens, rooftop farms and other viable habitats capable of supporting native flora and fauna. At the forefront of this transformation are the citizens living in the cities themselves. As people around the world increasingly relocate to urban areas, this book discusses how they engage in urban stewardship and what civic participation in the environment means for democracy. Drawing on data collected through a two-year study of volunteer stewards who planted trees as part of the MillionTreesNYC initiative in the United States, this book examines how projects like this can make a difference to the social fabric of a city. It analyses quantitative survey data along with qualitative interview data that enables the volunteers to share their personal stories and motivations for participating, revealing the strong link between environmental stewardship and civic engagement. As city governments in developed countries are investing more and more in green infrastructure campaigns to change the urban landscape, this book sheds light on the social importance of these initiatives and shows how individuals’ efforts to reshape their cities serve to strengthen democracy. It draws out lessons that are highly applicable to global cities and policies on sustainability and civic engagement.

The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing, and can’t see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. It’s time to imagine a different type of community engagement – one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners? What if they could be fun? For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. Dream Play Build offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California. While much of the process was developed through in-person meetings, the book also translates the experience to online engagement--how to make people remember their connections beyond the computer screen. Inspirational and fun, Dream Play Build celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making change within the landscape around them.

Discover insider secrets of how America’s transportation system is designed, funded, and built – and how to make it work for your community In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn Jr. delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America’s transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities. You’ll discover real-world examples of poor design choices and how those choices have dramatic and tragic effects on the lives of the people who use them. You’ll also find case studies and examples of design improvements that have revitalized communities and improved safety. This important book shows you: The values of the transportation professions, how they are applied in the design process, and how those priorities differ from those of the public. How the standard approach to transportation ensures the maximum amount of traffic congestion possible is created each day, and how to fight that congestion on a budget. Bottom-up techniques for spending less and getting higher returns on transportation projects, all while improving quality of life for residents. Perfect for anyone interested in why transportation systems work – and fail to work – the way they do, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer is a fascinating insider’s peek behind the scenes of America’s transportation systems.

"This book discusses various perspectives on facets of citizen engagement in open urban policy processes, all of them based on the widespread use of information and communication technologies in the field of urban/spatial planning. The book offers an updated outline of recent advances in this field as well as a critical perspective of the challenges with which citizen e-participation in urban e-planning is confronted"--