Two researchers, one mission…

My research interests primarily revolve around civic engagement and how technology can reach out to marginalised groups to give them a greater democratic stake in decisions about the built environment. Looking back at this year’s political events (deep breaths), it is extremely concerning that the very citizens who are most affected by the fallout of such seismic political decisions are the least involved in the making of them – see for example the direct correlation between age and turnout in the recent European Referendum. The need to overcome this motivates me massively and it is the main reason why I chose to study Digital Civics in the first place.

To this end, I have undertaken research in the past that explores how children evaluate the world around them and how planning practitioners can augment the participation of this particular group by generating discussions and obtaining feedback about their lived experiences of the built environment. It would be great to build on this by exploring how other marginalised groups – such as young adults, LGBTQ citizens, refugees or ethnic minorities – interact with existing structures of civic participation, why they do not participate in the same ways as other groups, and in what ways technology could augment their participation and influence over decisions that affect them.

There are some exciting overlaps between mine and Tom’s research interests. Tom is primarily interested in active travel – walking and cycling – and the role for technology to improve the environment and conditions for this. His previous work for Sustrans, the national active travel charity, has informed his view that the current ways of planning and thinking are unjust and favour the private car at the expense of travelling easily and safely on foot or by bike. Tom sees a potential MRes project in deploying “near miss buttons” on bikes, combined with GPS, in order to crowdsource data to identify unsafe parts of the network. He would also like to build on this in future by exploring technologies such as distance sensoring. I think that Tom’s honesty about his activist agenda from which he works from feeds into a clear research trajectory centred around user empowerment and improving conditions for a physically and structurally marginalised group of infrastructure users, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of his project.

A paper I have found for Tom is Chris Le Dantec et al’s paper on Planning with Crowdsourced Data. This describes a project in Atlanta where the local authority crowdsourced data on cycling patterns through the deployment of an app to inform decisions about new cycling infrastructure. Tom may wish to explore how the project utilised GPS technology to great effect as well as the role of citizen-produced data, both of which have clear links to his research agenda of addressing the perceived lack of legitimacy of active travel modes relative to the private car. It also presents some problems he will have to contend with, such as the systematic exclusion of citizens living in poor neighbourhoods from the crowdsourcing process.

A paper that I found that looks interesting and relevant to my research interests is Engaging New Digital Locals with Interactive Urban Screens to Collaboratively Improve the City by Ronald Schroeter. This details a project which targets the engagement of time poor and apathetic groups – with a particular focus on young people – to gather in-situ feedback on a live planning proposal through SMS and Twitter interactions.