Digital participation tools hold the promise to empower citizens and local communities to address urban development challenges. However, although many scholars have experimented with digital tools for citizen engagement, their efforts remain largely disconnected from planning practice. To address this disconnection, this paper analyses digital participation in planning from three perspectives: participatory planning, citizen engagement level, and human–computer interaction (HCI). We considered a wide range of digital participation tools, from tools designed for research projects to commercial and open-source tools. Our results show that there are two levels of “power mediation” and their “mediating actors” in digital participatory planning: (1) the digital tool and the HCI designer who creates the tool, and (2) the planning cycle and the planner who defines the participatory process. We furthermore highlight the importance of embedding participation tools in complementarity with each other to empower citizens at different levels. Taking these two insights into account, we developed an integrated framework – the EmpowerCycle – to embed digital participation tools in planning processes for citizen empowerment. The framework addresses the disconnection between digital tools and planning practice, supporting both researchers and practitioners in the design and implementation of digital participation tools in planning practice and decision-making processes.

This position paper consolidates the work of researchers from various departments and areas of expertise across the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. It discusses the relevance, applications, and different methods of community engagement in the built environment. The inclusion of main take-away, recommendations for community engagement, and a range of example projects demonstrating various methods, bridge the gap from scientific knowledge to application in practice.

The advent of complex socio-technical systems in modern society calls for teaching value-based participatory design in engineering curricula. Yet, no scientific literature supports teachers in this effort. This paper introduces a teaching approach called “value-based participatory design of complex socio-technical systems” and reports on its implementation. It emphasizes the importance of actively involving stakeholders and tapping into their values from the very start of the design process. Following this approach, students learn to (1) design with stakeholders, (2) identify key values and conflicts to create a value-based mission statement, (3) navigate uncertainties, (4) adopt an iterative design process, and (5) recognize that only stakeholders can define what works best. Results of an academic course based on this approach confirm its value and importance for engineering curricula.

Place-making is a promising approach to foster strong communities in cities. While participation has always been central to urban place-making, novel approaches such as using co-design and digital technologies change how stakeholders participate in the design of place-making interventions and the potential effect of these interventions. These new approaches open up questions on how participation works in place-making and how it is facilitated to achieve the intended outcomes. Through a literature review, 23 articles were selected and analysed using qualitative analysis informed by program theory. This allows us to understand the goals and workings of participation in place-making and its influence on the place-making itself. Findings include that designers of place-making interventions often do not explicitly consider their participation goal in selecting participatory mechanisms, and that place-making efforts driven by physical space are most effective in achieving impact.

In februari 2023 heeft de Kenniswerkplaats Leefbare Wijken een Call for Proposals uitgezet waarin zij aangeeft te willen verkennen hoe gerichte interventies kunnen bijdragen aan de veiligheidsbeleving van vrouwen in de leeftijd van 12-18 jaar. Dit naar aanleiding van verschillende recente onderzoeken in Rotterdam (en met name in Rotterdam-Zuid) waaruit blijkt dat adolescente meiden zich niet altijd welkom en veilig voelen in de buitenruimte (Doff & Snel, 2022, Fischer & Vanderveen, 2021, Schram et al. 2021). In deze publicatie zijn de eindproducten gebundeld van het onderzoek dat naar aanleiding van de Call en in opdracht van de Kenniswerkplaats Leefbare Wijken is uitgevoerd.

Co-design has been widely applied to develop interventions supporting behavior change. While numerous co-design propositions have been developed, applying these in practice often leads to difficulties and tensions. This study aims to review the co-design propositions and understand the dilemmas when applying them. A literature review was conducted, and twelve co-design propositions were identified after qualitative analysis. The study found that some co-design propositions conflict because they align with an idealistic versus a realistic perspective. By studying these conflicts indepth, seven dilemmas were identified at the intersection of realist and idealist propositions. Implications of the findings on design for behavior change were discussed, and this paper serves as a starting point to help researchers and practitioners identify, articulate, and navigate these dilemmas to achieve successful co-design outcomes.

The rapidly expanding rural community (often called rurban) is a new place for CSCW with unique sociogeographic characteristics that give rise to the need for adapted participatory practices. Socially Engaged Art (SEA) offers pluralistic and critical approaches to participative rurban CSCW to meet this need. This paper provides a case study of SEA-informed CSCW in an Irish rurban community. An online digital art summer school was delivered to young residents of Northrock using freely available digital collaboration and creation tools. Young people in rurban communities are navigating personal, social and political issues in a complex and evolving environment. In this summer school, SEA was applied to explore these issues through the creation and sharing of digital art on participant experiences and hopes for the future. The summer school hoped to promote critical thinking, confrontational dialogue and greater mutual understanding. We found that rapid creation and critique of a range of digital art expressions of social issues accessed nuanced and contradictory experiences, bringing them into dialogue with each other while supporting mutual understanding and new perspectives on rurban place and identity as they evolve. We propose integrating SEA into CSCW with young people in liminal and transitional communities such as the rurban to explore complex lived experiences in pursuit of more equitable futures and sustainable community expansion. We also draw attention to the usefulness of readily available digital and online tools in supporting CSCW in creative workshop situations.

Citizen engagement in urban planning is essential to designing urban spaces that are just and responsive to societal challenges. Consequently, local stakeholders are invited into urban co-creation processes. Digital tools are often used in this process to shape urban futures together. This paper explores what role digital technologies play in urban co-creation through five case studies from European cities that were presented at a workshop during the 11th Communities and Technologies conference. The Co-Design Framework is used to analyse the cases and understand how digital tools support collaboration on different levels throughout the design cycle. The findings help to design more effective digital tools for urban co-creation and provide an analysis methodology to compare and contrast urban co-creation practices across cases varying in scale, time, and utilised tools.

"With a large part of the built environment privately owned in many European cities, citizen engagement is crucial for the success of sustainability initiatives in urban areas. The use of digital platforms and tools can support this process, given their potential to enable remote participation, reach a large number of citizens, and enhance governance transparency. However, many digital platforms for citizen engagement in sustainability action remain underutilised.

This study adopts a user-centric perspective to analyse the interface design of over ten digital platforms and identify design elements that hinder or foster engagement. Our analysis highlights four main interface issues: disconnection between scientific data and personal experience, complex navigation, information overload, and limited opportunities for action.

To overcome these limitations, we developed a set of design guidelines addressing four themes: Awareness and framing, Individual and collective action, Effective use of data, and Navigation and visuals. We implemented these guidelines in two prototypes, focusing on heat waves and biodiversity loss in urban areas. The prototypes were tested in workshop settings with positive feedback from participants, corroborating the importance of citizen-centric interface design in ensuring effective citizen engagement."

Recent interest in biodiversity to combat climate crises led governments to use data platforms and sensing tools to monitor, conserve and increase city biodiversity. Given that most of these tools are designed for expert users and most city space is privately owned, there is a growing need for urban living labs (ULLs) approaches that combine community co-design with HCI for biodiversity. This paper develops and explores the BULL (Biodiversity Urban Living Lab) approach, building on the existing City Commons HCI framework, using research-through-design and action research methods. A BULL approach should not only engage citizens but also lead to opportunities for individual and collective action towards biodiversity as perceived common. Next to this, ecological and technological entities as non-human actors need to be involved in community-based co-creation in BULLs. The BULL approach provides a process and specific tools for multi-stakeholder groups, including more-than-human ones, to experiment with opportunities for more biodiversity in a local community, resulting in individual and collective action.

Identifying the diverse and often competing values of citizens, and resolving the consequent public value conflicts, are of significant importance for inclusive and integrated urban development. Scholars have highlighted that relational, value-laden urban space gives rise to many diverse conflicts that vary both spatially and temporally. Although notions of public value conflicts have been conceived in theory, there are few empirical studies that identify such values and their conflicts in urban space. Building on public value theory and using a case-study mixed-methods approach, this paper proposes a new approach to empirically investigate public value conflicts in urban space. Using unstructured participatory data of 4528 citizen contributions from a Public Participation Geographic Information Systems in Hamburg, Germany, natural language processing and spatial clustering techniques are used to identify areas of potential value conflicts. Four expert interviews assess and interpret these quantitative findings. By integrating quantitative assessments with the qualitative findings of the interviews, we identify 19 general public values and nine archetypical conflicts. On the basis of these results, this paper proposes a new conceptual model of ‘Public Value Spheres’ that extends the understanding of public value conflicts and helps to further account for the value-laden nature of urban space.

Fast growth of cities decreases the quality of life in these places. In response, Municipalities install policies aiming to improve local livability. While literature suggests social structures to have a defining impact on policy effectiveness, current evaluation metrics are not able to take this into account. This paper presents the Social Neighbourhood model, an agent-based model used to simulate and explore how livability changes in a neighbourhood given various social structures and policies. The model is applied to a neighbourhood in The Hague, Netherlands. The main result of the modelling experiments is that social structures have a very strong influence on whether or not a policy to improve livability is effective. Three hypotheses, concerning this relationship between social structures, livability, and policy interventions are drawn up as a starting point for future research.

Social sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic in design practice, calling for more contextual perspectives on the process of design for social sustainability. This paper presents a retrospective case study analyzing the design process of a serious game which aimed to empower teenagers to organize events to strengthen community bonds. The community context in which the collaborative project took place underwent significant contextual changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis using the Ecologies of Contestation framework shows the influence of multiple contextual levels (Socio-cultural, Power, Constructed, and Values-based) on the design process. Moreover, the paper discusses multiple contextual factors which influenced the design process and presents four suggestions for designers to anticipate and benefit from dynamics in these contextual elements. The suggestions regard (1) integrating the temporal dimension in the collaborative design processes, (2) carefully considering (value) alignment between actors, (3) leveraging values in the collaborative design process, and (4) acknowledging and responding to the multilayered nature of communities throughout the design process. As such, this paper explores the relationships between the community context and the collaborative design process to contribute to more resilient design practices.

Place-making initiatives have gained momentum in recent years to establish stronger urban communities. Through place-making, people attach meaning to spaces and they become places. While place-making initiatives have traditionally been designed and implemented from top-down, more and more scholars call for a participatory and bottom-up approach, for place-making to realise its full potential in creating strong neighbourhood communities. In this context, the thesis explored how the knowledge from Participatory Design and place-making may confluence to move from spaces to places in a more inclusive and community-driven way. The main research question was: How can Participatory Design facilitate place-making in urban settings across physical space, social connections, and institutional support? This thesis presents a framework for participatory place-making, build from place-making and Participatory Design literature and evaluated using six participatory place-making interventions that were designed, implemented, and evaluated in neighbourhoods in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Cork (Ireland). The framework contains five principles (emergent, empowering, inclusive, playful, reflective) that should guide the design of participatory place-making interventions and is complemented with five guidelines to design for participatory place-making.

Design probes, an essential research tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, are ancillary "personal" data gathering tools that enable researchers to enter the private world of research participants. This paper compares two case studies of design probes used during the pandemic for radical placemaking in hybrid digital-physical environments: Digital Art Summer School in Northrock, Ireland, with eleven participants, and Chatty Bench Project in Brisbane, Australia, with sixteen participants. The paper further expands on the design methodology of the probes and their deployment during the online radical placemaking projects. From the participant responses to the probes’ activities and interviews, both studies demonstrated that the probes fostered placemaking in digital environments during the pandemic. The paper concludes with three lessons on the potential of probes as a critical research instrument to enable creativity, build social capital and create bonds between people and places during uncertain and turbulent times.

This paper studies how residents in the neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) have dealt with the COVID-19 restrictions. Prior to the pandemic, significant investments in community-building were made to increase resilience of individuals and communities in BoTu. This paper identifies the key assets BoTu residents had developed and actually during this ultimate challenge. Interviews with formal and informal actors in BoTu revealed that community leadership, engaged governance, problem-solving ability, and information sharing environment were essential to adequately respond to the crisis, and were successfully deployed. The paper concludes with five policy implications to help strengthen capacities and relationships needed for community resilience.

COVID-19 has urged researchers to explore new options for distributed participatory design, as physical meetings and workshops became unfeasible. This situation posed new challenges but also opportunities, in particular with respect to engagement and inclusion. This paper focuses on distributed PD with Irish teenagers to support place-making during this period: to build relationships with each other and the community. In a two-week online summer school, teenagers explored a concern or highlighted a unique aspect of their local community and designed digital artworks in response. Activities and materials were designed to support reflection, empowerment, inclusiveness, emergence, and playfulness for participatory place-making. Analysis of the summer school provides insights and guidance on the design of online PD for engaging experiences, especially in the context of place-making.

Making it work together can be challenging when various stakeholders are involved. Given the context of neighborhoods and cities specifically, stakeholders values and interests are not always aligned. In these settings, to construct long-term and sustaining participatory city-making projects, to make it work together, is demanding. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a design framework for inclusive and participatory city-making. This framework is inspired by the playable city perspective in that it endorses an open, exploratory, and interactive mindset of city actors. An extensive literature review on approaches taken for playful and participatory interventions in local communities provides the foundations for the framework. The review brings forward four pillars on which the framework is grounded and four activities for exploration of the design space for participatory city-making. A case study from The Hague (NL) is used to demonstrate how the framework can be applied to design and analyze processes in which city stakeholders together make it work. The case study analysis complements the framework with various research methods to support researchers, urban planners, and designers to engage with all city stakeholders to create playful and participatory interventions, which are inclusive and meaningful for the local community. The research contributions of this paper are the proposed framework and informed suggestions on how this framework in practice assists city stakeholders to together make it work.