Liliana Ardissono and Angioletta Voghera on "Participatory decision making: a step towards e-planning for smart cities"

1. E- PARTICIPATORY DECISION-MAKING: A STEP TOWARDS
E-PLANNING
Liliana Ardissono (Dip. Informatica, UNITO) e Angioletta Voghera – DIST (POLITO)
The research will discuss the innovation related to the adoption of ICT
technologies and social networks for promoting smart city strategy, founded
on the participation of people in order to define territorial policies, planning
goals and projects

2. Smart city
• a new governance model that faces the challenge of
simultaneously combining competitiveness and
sustainable urban development
• a high urban quality and capacity to innovate by
developing integrated actions regarding all aspects of
economy, environment, quality of living, governance,
transport and ICT services
• a strategic vision and a new approaches to urban
planning, encompassing the efficient management of
territorial resources through the use of ICT for
monitoring, management and governance

3. ICT for smart cities
employed to retrieve, analyze and present continuous flows of real time data
collected by sensors spread in the cities supporting the monitoring activities,
but their effects on decisional processes, and thus in the promotion of life
quality are unclear (De Leo, 2008)
Some example:
• SENSEable City Lab in Rome (Roma Real-Time) monitors the city use and
flows by geo-localizing citizens via mobile phones
• Singapore Live! visualizes data flows about people mobility in the town, as
well as micro-climatic conditions, energy uses and consumptions, and
harbor activities
• Dutch CurrentCity creates digital thematic maps by combining mobile
phone data, GIS about the urban people flows (such as mobility,
connectivity, etc.) that link data, flows and territorial land uses
• Amsterdam smart planning, especially related to energy consumption and
living quality improvement, uses ICT technologies to collect and manage
data sources

4. Focus
• lack of user participation in the city management
and in the existing process of inclusive decision-
making: awareness support is important, but it is
not enough to achieve people empowerment,
that is a strategic dimension for smart living
quality and governance aimed at “creating” new
individual and collective values and bonds.
• Dutch and United Kingdom experiences fail to
effectively involve generic citizens in their
participative processes

5. Our work
• starts from the idea of actively involving citizens
in the smart strategic planning in order to take
their ideas, requirements and needs into account
• ICT and the use of social networks technology
could support people involvement in decision-
making, starting from the identification of the
interests of individual citizens for selecting the
actors to be involved on a contextual basis.

6. USER CLUSTERING
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE B
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE A
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE C

7. Participation
Developed from Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, supported by
Urban and Leader and also the Italian legislative framework, the participation is a
wide concept:
• “a process through which citizens take a part in the local community” (Porrello,
1983), spontaneously and actively involved in the policy-making
• a “relationship among society and institutions” (Allegretti, 2006), an occasions for
“the reduction of the refuse between policy-makers and citizens” (Royer-Vallat,
2002)
• “a process of constructing a consensus” (Innes and Booher, 1999 ) in order to
allow the society and national policies to adapt and respond to transformation of
collective needs”
• a method for the “reconstruction of a local society in order to identify values and
define their future development” (Magnaghi, 2006), but also “for the construction
of innovative policies, interacting to the various expressions of the civil society and
opening a dialogue with citizens” (Ciaffi and Mela, 2006)
produce effects on public policies, but also on the participants themselves (Bobbio,
2004), consolidating the relations among them and exceeding the dichotomy between
“public use” and “private use” of the patrimony, introducing the “common use of
common goods” (Magnaghi, 2006)

8. Traditional and ICT based participation
process
4 steps communication, animation, consultation and empowerment (Ciaffi, Mela, 2006), each one
characterized by specific objectives and methods, and applicable individually
1. communication, which is an information activity about public choices directed to the
citizen (using manifests, multimedia communications, etc.), succeeding in involving someone (Pomatto
and Bobbio, 2007)
2. animation activity aimed at informing a large social context about the state of the art of a
decisional process or about the implementation of programs, keeping the attention and strengthening
the relations between citizens and their own territory.
3. consultation, where the community is involved in territorial transformation processes,
providing public institutions with their own requirements (“top-down” governance model because
citizens can only react to defined scenarios at a later stage of the processes).
4. “empowerment” (or empowering) or a citizens’ participation by promoting the auto-
organization abilities of people that become active parts of territorial processes instead of being mere
external observers

9. ICT role for smart city governance?
• ICT could produce people empowerment helping the institutional actors
• to select citizens, finding and empowering people who have specific interests in a territorial
choice
• to involve people opening the arena as much as possible and integrating a “bottom-up”
decision-making approach with a “top-down” one and to include in the process interested
subjects who have been difficult to identify so far, enhancing their abilities and enforcing
their collective territorial belongings
ICT technologies could support public policies for people involvement, by
developing/enacting participatory processes supporting the knowledge about
people’s expectations and needs and the objectives of territorial policies

10. SOCIAL NETWORK AND E-PARTICIPATION
TINELLA RIVER CONTRACT
River Contract is a new governance tool
based on an inclusive decision-making
process for the parties involved and
integrated for the themes dealt with (Carter,
2007) for the definition and the
implementation of a shared strategic
framework (Affeltranger, Lasserre, 2003).

11. Tinella participation process
Questionnaires
a) School involvment
Istituto comprensivo Cesare Pavese (CN)
Castiglione Tinella / Santo Stefano
Belbo
Istituto comprensivo Vicari (AT)
Boglietto / Calosso / Castagnole
Lanze / Coazzolo
Istituto comprensivo Beppe Fenoglio (CN)
Neive / Neviglie / Treiso / Trezzo
Tinella
b) internet through
Facebook by
setting up a
thematic group
and inviting
people to join
in.
c) Holder involvment
In the territory
Circoli ricreativi, meeting point, …

12. Tinella Action Plan
Method

13. Tinella Masterplan
Masterplan

14. GOING BACK TO USER CLUSTERING: ICT SUPPORT
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE B
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE A
CITIZENS
INTERESTED IN
ZONE C

15. STEP1: How can we identify user
groups (virtual communities)?
• Manually, by collecting addresses of people interacting with
the Public Administration via phone, etc. (e.g., see use case
on Tinella river)
• Automatically (via ICT support), by analyzing the usage of
Web-based territorial services and recognizing users’
interests on the basis of their actions on such services (e.g.,
document downloads, expression of interests via tagging and
commenting, page visits, queries to information services)
– Territorial services can be exploited for social network analysis
by inspecting the way citizens use them
– The recognition of the user groups interested in the same kind of
information supports the definition of virtual communities that
can be invited in participatory decision making concerning the
related topics

16. ICT for group identification: social
network analysis
• The study of users’ behavior can be done by analyzing the log files of the
servers hosting the territorial services
– Identification of interest points/areas (e.g., user downloads documents about zone A)
– Identification of the type of interest on the zone (e.g., interest in family services in zone
A)
However:
• Services must authenticate users for correctly tracking user actions (IP
addresses are not enough for tracing user activities across different
interaction sessions). Unfortunately most services fail to do that and have to
be extended for that purpose
• For identification of specific types of interest, semantic information
about the accessed information has to be explicitly modeled (by exploiting
ontologies, e.g. NASA SWEET for territorial data)
• Anyway, people unfamiliar with internet will hardly access online
services. Thus, a different interaction modality has to be devised (e.g., by
offering information points spread in the territory)

17. STEP 1: virtual community analysis
• We recently started a collaboration with CSI
Piemonte in order to track user interaction with the
territorial services they offer
– The Territorio Web Site of Regione Piemonte
provides data related to the assembling maps of local
plans: from this service we want to extract the
groups of users downloading maps about
Piedmont cities, provinces and mountain
communities
– In the next future, we plan to develop a user modeling
service supporting the user authentication for
several territorial services and merging usage
information in order to identify user interests
across services

18. STEP 2: active user involvement
• Having identified the virtual communities interested in
the various urban areas, invite them to participate in
decisions concerning such areas
– Giving feedback about decisions and proposals
– Sharing information and documents (e.g., plans under
development) in order to collect ideas, comments and
involve citizens in the project development
• This could be done by injecting groups in an existing
social network (e.g., the well known Facebook) and
using them for direct communication with citizens
and for sharing information in a selective way,
depending on their interests

19. User privacy
• User privacy management is a serious
issue to be addressed:
– Inform users of online territorial services
that their actions will be tracked and analyzed
for community management purposes
– Invite users to join in thematic groups
(virtual communities) or to opt out, if they are
not interested in participating in decision
processes (or they do not want to be tracked
at all)