Abstract

The potential of open data as a resource for driving citizen-led urban innovation relies not only on a suitable technical infrastructure but also on the skills and knowledge of the citizens themselves. In this chapter, we describe how a smart city project in Milton Keynes, UK, is supporting multiple stages of citizen innovation, from ideation to citizen-led smart city projects. The Our MK initiative provides support and funding to help citizens develop their ideas about making their communities more sustainable into reality. This approach encounters challenges when engaging with citizens in identifying and implementing data-driven solutions to urban problems. The majority of citizens have little practical experience with the types of data sets that might be available or possess the appropriate skills for their analysis and utilisation for addressing urban issues or finding novel ways to hack their city. We go on to describe the Urban Data School, which aims to offer a long-term solution to this problem by providing teaching resources around urban data sets aimed at raising the standard of data literacy amongst future generations. Lesson resources that form part of the Urban Data School have been piloted in one primary and three secondary schools in Milton Keynes. This work has demonstrated that with the appropriate support, even young children can begin to develop the skills necessary to work with large complex data sets. Through our two approaches, we illustrate some of the barriers to citizen participation in urban innovation and detail our solutions to overcoming those barriers.

Highlights

  • The expectation that citizens are able to first identify and carry forward solutions to local problems is based on the premise that citizens have sufficient understanding of big data, smart city technologies and how open data can be used to drive urban innovation

  • The Milton Keynes (MK):Smart project plans on helping successful citizen-led projects become sustainable through using our contacts with the business community and Community Action MK (CAMK)’s experience of creating charities, co-operatives and community enterprises to ensure that any project which has had a positive impact can continue to benefit the local community

  • We have described three distinct projects, linked through a common theme of urban innovation from city data

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Summary

Introduction

Citizen-led smart city innovation is increasingly considered to provide an important counterbalance to the more traditional official-led planning. The third initiative is the Urban Data School (UDS) which is a school engagement programme, teaching data skills in schools using some real Milton Keynes data sets in the domain of energy. This is given focused attention within this chapter as the work with the young citizens becomes important when considering how to address some of the barriers revealed through the first two initiatives in terms of engaging citizens with data. In the remainder of this chapter, we will describe each of these projects in detail before identifying a number of barriers to creating hackable cities

MK:Smart
Citizens as Innovators
Community Action Platform for Energy
Our MK—Supporting Citizen Innovation
Challenges to Facilitating Citizens as Innovators
Addressing the Digital Divide Through Data Literacy
Conducting Inquiries with Real Urban Data sets
School Trials
Findings
Discussion and Conclusion
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