Paper by Gabriela Manrique Rueda et al: “Science is essential for cities to understand and intervene on the increasing global risks. However, challenges in effectively utilizing scientific knowledge in decision-making processes limit cities’ abilities to address these risks. This scoping review examines the development of science for urban policy, exploring the contextual factors, organizational structures, and mechanisms that facilitate or hinder the integration of science and policy. It investigates the challenges faced and the outcomes achieved. The findings reveal that science has gained influence in United Nations (UN) policy discourses, leading to the expansion of international, regional, and national networks connecting science and policy. Boundary-spanning organizations and collaborative research initiatives with stakeholders have emerged, creating platforms for dialogue, knowledge sharing, and experimentation. However, cultural differences between the science and policy realms impede the effective utilization of scientific knowledge in decision-making. While efforts are being made to develop methods and tools for knowledge co-production, translation, and mobilization, more attention is needed to establish science-for-policy organizational structures and address power imbalances in research processes that give rise to ethical challenges…(More)”.
Data can help decarbonize cities – let us explain
Article by Stephen Lorimer and Andrew Collinge: “The University of Birmingham, Alan Turing Institute and Centre for Net Zero are working together, using a tool developed by the Centre, called Faraday, to model a more detailed understanding of energy flows within the district and between it and the neighbouring 8,000 residents. Faraday is a generative AI model trained on one of the UK’s largest smart metre datasets. The model is helping to unlock a more granular view of energy sources and changing energy usage, providing the basis for modelling future energy consumption and local smart grid management.
The partners are investigating the role that trusted data aggregators can play if they can take raw data and desensitize it to a point where it can be shared without eroding consumer privacy or commercial advantage.
Data is central to both initiatives and all cities seeking a renewable energy transition. But there are issues to address, such as common data standards, governance and data competency frameworks (especially across the built environment supply chain)…
Building the governance, standards and culture that delivers confidence in energy data exchange is essential to maximizing the potential of carbon reduction technologies. This framework will ultimately support efficient supply chains and coordinate market activity. There are lessons from the Open Banking initiative, which provided the framework for traditional financial institutions, fintech and regulators to deliver innovation in financial products and services with carefully shared consumer data.
In the energy domain, there are numerous advantageous aspects to data sharing. It helps overcome barriers in the product supply chain, from materials to low-carbon technologies (heat pumps, smart thermostats, electric vehicle chargers etc). Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) providers can use data to support installers and property owners.
Data interoperability allows third-party products and services to communicate with any end-user device through open or proprietary Internet of Things gateway platforms such as Tuya or IFTTT. A growing bank of post-installation data on the operation of buildings (such as energy efficiency and air quality) will boost confidence in the future quality of retrofits and make for easier decisions on planning approval and grid connections. Finally, data is increasingly considered key in securing the financing and private sector investment crucial to the net zero effort.
None of the above is easy. Organizational and technical complexity can slow progress but cities must be at the forefront of efforts to coordinate the energy data ecosystem and make the case for “data for decarbonization.”…(More)”.
How data-savvy cities can tackle growing ethical considerations
Bloomberg Cities Network: “Technology for collecting, combining, and analyzing data is moving quickly, putting cities in a good position to use data to innovate in how they solve problems. However, it also places a responsibility on them to do so in a manner that does not undermine public trust.
To help local governments deal with these issues, the London Office of Technology and Innovation, or LOTI, has a set of recommendations for data ethics capabilities in local government. One of those recommendations—for cities that are mature in their work in this area—is to hire a dedicated data ethicist.
LOTI exists to support dozens of local boroughs across London in their collective efforts to tackle big challenges. As part of that mission, LOTI hired Sam Nutt to serve as a data ethicist that local leaders can call on. The move reflected the reality that most local councils don’t have the capacity to have their own data ethicist on staff and it put LOTI in a position to experiment, learn, and share out lessons learned from the approach.
Nutt’s role provides a potential framework other cities looking to hire data ethicists can build on. His position is based on job specifications for data ethicists published by the UK government. He says his work falls into three general areas. First, he helps local councils work through ethical questions surrounding individual data projects. Second, he helps them develop more high-level policies, such as the Borough of Camden’s Data Charter. And third, he provides guidance on how to engage staff, residents, and stakeholders around the implications of using technology, including research on what’s new in the field.
As an example of the kinds of ethical issues that he consults on, Nutt cites repairs in publicly subsidized housing. Local leaders are interested in using algorithms to help them prioritize use of scarce maintenance resources. But doing so raises questions about what criteria should be used to bump one resident’s needs above another’s.
“If you prioritize, for example, the likelihood of a resident making a complaint, you may be baking in an existing social inequality, because some communities do not feel as empowered to make complaints as others,” Nutt says. “So it’s thinking through what the ethical considerations might be in terms of choices of data and how you use it, and giving advice to prevent potential biases from creeping in.”
Nutt acknowledges that most cities are too resource constrained to hire a staff data ethicist. What matters most, he says, is that local governments create mechanisms for ensuring that ethical considerations of their choices with data and technology are considered. “The solution will never be that everyone has to hire a data ethicist,” Nutt says. “The solution is really to build ethics into your default ways of working with data.”
Stefaan Verhulst agrees. “The question for government is: Is ethics a position? A function? Or an institutional responsibility?” says Verhulst, Co-Founder of The GovLab and Director of its Data Program. The key is “to figure out how we institutionalize this in a meaningful way so that we can always check the pulse and get rapid input with regard to the social license for doing certain kinds of things.”
As the data capabilities of local governments grow, it’s also important to empower all individuals working in government to understand ethical considerations within the work they’re doing, and to have clear guidelines and codes of conduct they can follow. LOTI’s data ethics recommendations note that hiring a data ethicist should not be an organization’s first step, in part because “it risks delegating ethics to a single individual when it should be in the domain of anyone using or managing data.”
Training staff is a big part of the equation. “It’s about making the culture of government sensitive to these issues,” Verhulst says, so “that people are aware.”..(More)”.
Public Sector Use of Private Sector Personal Data: Towards Best Practices
Paper by Teresa Scassa: “Governments increasingly turn to the private sector as a source of data for various purposes. In some cases, the data that they seek to use is personal data. The public sector use of private sector personal data raises several important law and public policy concerns. These include the legal authority for such uses; privacy and data protection; ethics; transparency; and human rights. Governments that use private sector personal data without attending to the issues that such use raises may breach existing laws, which in some cases may not be well-adapted to evolving data practices. They also risk undermining public trust.
This paper uses two quite different recent examples from Canada where the use of private sector personal data by public sector actors caused considerable backlash and led to public hearings and complaints to the Privacy Commissioner. The examples are used to tease out the complex and interwoven law and policy issues. In some cases, the examples reveal issues that are particular to the evolving data society and that are not well addressed by current law or practice. The paper identifies key issues and important gaps and makes recommendations to address these. Although the examples discussed are Canadian and depend to some extent on Canadian law and institutions, the practices at issue are ones that are increasingly used around the world, and many of the issues raised are broadly relevant…(More)”.
Primer on Data Sharing
Primer by John Ure: “…encapsulates insights gleaned from the Inter-Modal Transport Data Sharing Programme, a collaborative effort known as Data Trust 1.0 (DT1), conducted in Hong Kong between 2020 and 2021. This initiative was a pioneering project that explored the feasibility of sharing operational data between public transport entities through a Trusted Third Party. The objective was to overcome traditional data silos and promote evidence-based public transport planning.
DT1, led by the ‘HK Team’ in conjunction with Dr. Jiangping Zhou and colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, successfully demonstrated that data sharing between public transport companies, both privately-owned and government-owned, was viable. Operational data, anonymised and encrypted, were shared with a Trusted Third Party and aggregated for analysis, supported by a Transport Data Analytics Service Provider. The data was used solely for analysis purposes, and confidentiality was maintained throughout.
The establishment of the Data Trust was underpinned by the creation of a comprehensive Data Sharing Framework (DSF). This framework, developed collaboratively, laid the groundwork for future data sharing endeavours. The DSF has been shared internationally, fostering the exchange of knowledge and best practices across diverse organisations and agencies. The Guide serves as a repository of lessons learned, accessible studies, and references, aimed at facilitating a comprehensive understanding of data sharing methodologies.
The central aim of the Guide is twofold: to promote self-learning and to offer clarity on intricate approaches related to data sharing. Its intention is to encourage researchers, governmental bodies, commercial enterprises, and civil society entities, including NGOs, to actively engage in data sharing endeavours. By combining data sets, these stakeholders can glean enhanced insights and contribute to the common good…(More)”.
Digital divides are lower in Smart Cities
Paper by Andrea Caragliu and Chiara F. Del Bo: “Ever since the emergence of digital technologies in the early 1990s, the literature has discussed the potential pitfalls of an uneven distribution of e-skills under the umbrella of the digital divide. To provide a definition of the concept, “Lloyd Morrisett coined the term digital divide to mean “a discrepancy in access to technology resources between socioeconomic groups” (Robyler and Doering, 2014, p. 27)”
Despite digital divide being high on the policy agenda, statistics suggest the persisting relevance of this issue. For instance, focusing on Europe, according to EUROSTAT statistics, in 2021 about 90 per cent of people living in Zeeland, a NUTS2 region in the Netherlands, had ordered at least once in their life goods or services over the internet for private use, against a minimum in the EU27 of 15 per cent (in the region of Yugoiztochen, in Bulgaria). In the same year, while basically all (99 per cent) interviewees in the NUTS2 region of Northern and Western Ireland declared using the internet at least once a week, the same statistic drops to two thirds of the sample in the Bulgarian region of Severozapaden. While over time these territorial divides are converging, they can still significantly affect the potential positive impact of the diffusion of digital technologies.
Over the past three years, the digital divide has been made dramatically apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. When, during the first waves of full lockdowns enacted in most Countries, tertiary and schooling activities were moved online, many economic outcomes showed significant worsening. Among these, learning outcomes in pupils and service sectors’ productivity were particularly affected.
A simultaneous development in the scientific literature has discussed the attractive features of planning and managing cities ‘smartly’. Smart Cities have been initially identified as urban areas with a tendency to invest and deploy ICTs. More recently, this notion also started to encompass the context characteristics that make a city capable of reaping the benefits of ICTs – social and human capital, soft and hard institutions.
While mounting empirical evidence suggests a superior economic performance of Cities ticking all these boxes, the Smart City movement did not come without critiques. The debate on urban smartness as an instrument for planning and managing more efficient cities has been recently positing that Smart Cities could be raising inequalities. This effect would be due to the role of driver of smart urban transformations played by multinational corporations, who, in a dystopic view, would influence local policymakers’ agendas.
Given these issues, and our own research on Smart Cities, we started asking ourselves whether the risks of increasing inequalities associated with the Smart City model were substantiated. To this end, we focused on empirically verifying whether cities moving forward along the smart city model were facing increases in income and digital inequalities. We answered the first question in Caragliu and Del Bo (2022), and found compelling evidence that smart city characteristics actually decrease income inequalities…(More)”.
What types of health evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system?
Article by Geoff Bates, Sarah Ayres, Andrew Barnfield, and Charles Larkin: “Good quality urban environments can help to prevent non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, mental health conditions and diabetes that account for three quarters of deaths globally (World Health Organisation, 2022). More commonly however, poor quality living conditions contribute to poor health and widening inequalities (Adlakha & John, 2022). Consequently, many public health advocates hope to convince and bring together the stakeholders who shape urban development to help create healthier places.
Evidence is one tool that can be used to convince these stakeholders from outside the health sector to think more about health outcomes. Most of the literature on the use of evidence in policy environments has focused on the public sector, such as politicians and civil servants (e.g., Crow & Jones, 2018). However, urban development decision-making processes involve many stakeholders across sectors with different needs and agendas (Black et al., 2021). While government sets policy and regulatory frameworks, private sector organisations such as property developers and investors drive urban development and strongly influence policy agendas.
In our article recently published in Policy & Politics, What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system?, we explore the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions…
The key findings of the research were that:
- Evidence-based narratives have wide appeal. Narratives based on real-world and lived experiences help stakeholders to form an emotional connection with evidence and are effective for drawing attention to health problems. Powerful outcomes such as child health and mortality data are particularly persuasive. This builds on literature promoting the use of storytelling approaches for public sector actors by demonstrating its applicability within the private and third sectors….(More)”
The Strategy Room: an innovative approach for involving communities in shaping local net zero pathways
Report by Nesta: “Between January and March 2023, we piloted a novel digital engagement tool, The Strategy Room, to help local authorities understand their residents’ priorities for net-zero policies on the topics of heat, travel and food.
Twelve local authorities ran 66 public engagement sessions between them, attracting almost 640 participants to make policy recommendations for their local areas. This report presents the preliminary results from the pilot study….
Our results show the value of experimenting with new tools for public engagement on net zero that can combine local specificity and comparisons at a national level. To support other similar initiatives in the future and build public support for the policies that will help the UK to transition to net zero by 2050, decision makers should consider the following.
Change how they commission public engagement
Establishing a Citizen Participation Service in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to coordinate and channel resources to local climate teams would help demonstrate the governments’ commitment to putting people at the centre of net-zero policy.
Change how they frame and communicate net-zero policies
Use creative public engagement that allows people to deliberate and learn about policies through interactive, engaging material. Communicate the wider co-benefits of net-zero policies. In particular, emphasise general benefits related to health as well as incorporating people’s current concerns like energy insecurity into messaging.
Change how they tailor net-zero policy at national and local levels
The UK Government needs to lead by example with strategic commitments to help councils decarbonise the housing stock and food supplies they’re responsible for, if it expects people to change how they heat their homes and the food they eat…(More)”.
Data for the City of Tomorrow: Developing the Capabilities and Capacity to Guide Better Urban Futures
WEF Report: “This report is a comprehensive manual for municipal governments and their partners, city authorities, and advocates and agents of change. It invites them to address vexing and seemingly intractable problems of urban governance and to imagine future scenarios. There is little agreement on how different types of cities should aggregate, analyse and apply data to their immediate issues and strategic challenges. Yet the potential of data to help navigate cities through the unprecedented urban, climate and digital transitions ahead is very high and likely underestimated. This report offers a look at what data exists, and how cities can take the best steps to make the most of it. It provides a route into the urban data ecosystem and an overview of some of the ways to develop data policies and capabilities fit for the needs of the many different kinds of city contexts worldwide…(More)”.
Data collaborations at a local scale: Lessons learnt in Rennes (2010–2021)
Paper by Simon Chignard and Marion Glatron: “Data sharing is a requisite for developing data-driven innovation and collaboration at the local scale. This paper aims to identify key lessons and recommendations for building trustworthy data governance at the local scale, including the public and private sectors. Our research is based on the experience gained in Rennes Metropole since 2010 and focuses on two thematic use cases: culture and energy. For each one, we analyzed how the power relations between actors and the local public authority shape the modalities of data sharing and exploitation. The paper will elaborate on challenges and opportunities at the local level, in perspective with the national and European frameworks…(More)”.