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Beyond the Darkness: Research on Participation in Online Media and Discourse
Get PDFThis commentary reflects on the notion of ‘dark participation’ which is central in this thematic issue. It asks whether there are patches of light and whether our research is becoming too obsessed with the darkness
Lobbying Brexit Negotiations: Who Lobbies Michel Barnier?
Get PDFInterest groups have a vital role in international negotiations and carry the potential to influence their outcome. This article contributes to discussions surrounding Brexit and institutional change in the EU, focusing on Article 50 negotiations and stakeholder engagement. Drawing from theories on deliberative democracy and institutional legitimacy, we argue that different groups are given access to the Chief Negotiator depending on the resources they can contribute. Assessing our expectations, we inspect the entire interest group population that held meetings with Michel Barnier and his team from 2016 onwards. On the aggregate, we observe a pluralist approach. A closer inspection reveals a tightly knit circle of insiders that hold unparalleled access. To the extent that these meetings offer a glance into the future of EU lobbying, European trade and professional associations are likely to observe growing cohesion and significance. Conversely, UK private interests will see their presence and influence diluted as their relevance grows smaller in Brussels. Following the trends we observe, think tanks and socioeconomic interests are likely to experience a continuous surge in their involvement in stakeholder activities
A Soft Systems Methodology for Business Creation: The Lost World at Tyseley, Birmingham
Get PDFMuch has been written about the benefits of green infrastructure, but securing the resources necessary for its development and long-term maintenance is often difficult. This article’s premise is that, in general, people and organisations will take action to provide those resources when they can see value accruing to them; therefore narratives of value generation and capture (our definition of business models) are required to motivate and support that action. This article explores the application of soft systems methodology to the wicked problem of business model development in the context of a social enterprise, using a case study based on a piece of green infrastructure in the city of Birmingham, UK, called The Lost World. The research involved a workshop with several of The Lost World’s key stakeholders and aimed at identifying: The Lost World’s scope as a business; its potential value streams; and how they might be realised in a social enterprise. Analysis of the findings shows that while stakeholders can identify opportunities for their organisations, bringing those opportunities to fruition is difficult. The research demonstrates a compelling need for social entrepreneurs to act as catalysts and long-term enablers of the formulation and maintenance of businesses and business models—vital missing actors in the ambition to transform cityscapes
The Eco-Techno Spectrum: Exploring Knowledge Systems’ Challenges in Green Infrastructure Management
Get PDFInfrastructure crises are not only technical problems for engineers to solve—they also present social, ecological, financial, and political challenges. Addressing infrastructure problems thus requires a robust planning process that includes examination of the social and ecological systems supporting infrastructure, alongside technical systems. An integrative Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETS) analysis of infrastructure solutions can complement the planning process by revealing potential trade-offs that are often overlooked in standard procedures. We explore the interconnected SETS of the infrastructure problem in the US through comparative case studies of green infrastructure (GI) development in Portland and Baltimore. Currently a popular infrastructure solution to a wide variety of urban ills, GI is the use and mimicry of ecological components (e.g., plants) to perform municipal services (e.g., stormwater management). We develop the ecological-technological spectrum—or ‘eco-techno spectrum’—as a framing tool to bridge all three SETS dimensions. The eco-techno spectrum becomes a platform to explore the institutional knowledge system dynamics of GI development where social dimensions are organized across ecological and technological aspects of GI, exposing how governance differs across specific forms of ecological and technological hybridity. In this study, we highlight the knowledge system challenges of urban planning institutions as a key consideration in the realization of innovative infrastructure crisis ‘fixes.’ Disconnected definition and measurement of GI emerge as two distinct challenges across the knowledge systems examined. By revealing and discussing these challenges, we can begin to recognize—and better plan for—gaps in municipal planning knowledge systems, promoting decisions that address the roots of infrastructure crises rather than treating only their symptoms
More Than Open Space! The Case for Green Infrastructure Teaching in Planning Curricula
Get PDFSince the mid-1990s, the concept of Green Infrastructure (GI) has been gaining traction in fields such as ecology and forestry, (landscape) architecture, environmental and hydrological engineering, public health as well as urban and regional planning. Definitions and aims ascribed to GI vary. Yet, agreement broadly exists on GI’s ability to contribute to sustainability by means of supporting, for example, biodiversity, human and animal health, and storm water management as well as mitigating urban heat island effects. Given an acknowledged role of planners in delivering sustainable cities and towns, professional bodies have highlighted the need for spatial planners to understand and implement GI. This raises questions of what sort of GI knowledge planners may require and moreover by whom and how GI knowledge and competencies may be conveyed? Examining knowledge and skills needs vis-à-vis GI education opportunities indicates a provision reliant primarily on continued professional education and limited ad hoc opportunities in Higher Education. The resulting knowledge base appears fragmented with limited theoretical foundations leading the authors to argue that a systematic inclusion of green infrastructure knowledges in initial planning education is needed to promote and aid effective GI implementation
Green Infrastructure and Biophilic Urbanism as Tools for Integrating Resource Efficient and Ecological Cities
Get PDFIn recent decades, the concept of resource efficient cities has emerged as an urban planning paradigm that seeks to achieve sustainable urban environments. This focus is upon compact urban environments that optimise energy, water and waste systems to create cities that help solve climate change and other resource-based sustainability issues. In parallel, there has been a long-standing tradition of ecological approaches to the design of cities that can be traced from Howard, Geddes, McHarg and Lyle. Rather than resource efficiency, the ecological approach has focused upon the retention and repair of natural landscape features and the creation of green infrastructure (GI) to manage urban water, soil and plants in a more ecologically sensitive way. There is some conflict with the resource efficient cities and ecological cities paradigms, as one is pro-density, while the other is anti-density. This article focusses upon how to integrate the two paradigms through new biophilic urbanism (BU) tools that allow the integration of nature into dense urban areas, to supplement more traditional GI tools in less dense areas. We suggest that the theory of urban fabrics can aid with regard to which tools to use where, for the integration of GI and BU into different parts of the city to achieve both resource efficient and ecological outcomes, that optimise energy water and waste systems, and increase urban nature
Integrating Green Infrastructure into Urban Planning: Developing Melbourne’s Green Factor Tool
Get PDFAs cities increase in size and density, the ecosystem services supplied by urban greenery and green infrastructure are increasingly vital for sustainable, liveable urban areas. However, retaining and maximising urban greenery in densifying cities is challenging. Governments have critical roles in addressing these challenges through policy development and implementation. While there has been significant attention on the quality and quantity of green space on public land, there is an increasing focus on policy mechanisms for integrating green infrastructure into the private realm, including green roofs, walls, facades, balconies and gardens. As part of City of Melbourne’s efforts to increase greening across the municipality, its 2017 Green Our City Strategic Action Plan includes specific focus on the private realm, and development of regulatory processes for green infrastructure. This article reports on a participatory research project to develop a Green Factor Tool for application to building development proposals in Melbourne. We focus on the transdisciplinary collaborations that brought together contributions from researchers, practitioners, policymakers and designers. We discuss how local research on green space contributions to provision of ecosystem services shaped the design of the tool and provided the tool’s rigorous evidence-base. Finally, we consider the roles of urban planning in retaining and maximising urban green spaces in densifying urban areas
Fighting Deepfakes: Media and Internet Giants’ Converging and Diverging Strategies Against Hi-Tech Misinformation
Get PDFDeepfakes, one of the most novel forms of misinformation, have become a real challenge in the communicative environment due to their spread through online news and social media spaces. Although fake news have existed for centuries, its circulation is now more harmful than ever before, thanks to the ease of its production and dissemination. At this juncture, technological development has led to the emergence of deepfakes, doctored videos, audios or photos that use artificial intelligence. Since its inception in 2017, the tools and algorithms that enable the modification of faces and sounds in audiovisual content have evolved to the point where there are mobile apps and web services that allow average users its manipulation. This research tries to show how three renowned media outlets—The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Reuters—and three of the biggest Internet-based companies—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—are dealing with the spread of this new form of fake news. Results show that identification of deepfakes is a common practice for both types of organizations. However, while the media is focused on training journalists for its detection, online platforms tended to fund research projects whose objective is to develop or improve media forensics tools
Training for the Algorithmic Machine
Get PDFIn thinking about the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance and the ways our presence in front of a camera has become engaged with the algorithmic logics of testing and replicating, this project summons Walter Benjamin’s seminal piece The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility with its three versions, which was published in the United States under the editorial direction of Theodore Adorno. More specifically, it highlights two of the many ways in which the first and second versions of Benjamin’s influential essay on technology and culture resonate with questions of photography and art in the context of facial recognition technologies and algorithmic culture more broadly. First, Benjamin provides a critical lens for understanding the role of uniqueness and replication in a technocratic system. Second, he proposes an analytical framework for thinking about our response to visual surveillance through notions of training and performing a constructed identity—hence, being intentional about the ways we visually present ourselves. These two conceptual frameworks help to articulate our unease with a technology that trains itself using our everyday digital images in order to create unique identities that further aggregate into elaborate typologies and to think through a number of artistic responses that have challenged the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance. Taking on Benjamin’s conceptual apparatus and his call for understanding the politics of art, I focus on two projects that powerfully critique algorithmic surveillance. Leo Selvaggio’s URME (you are me) Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic offers a critical lens through the adoption of algorithmically defined three-dimensional printed faces as performative prosthetics designed to be read and assessed by an algorithm. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen’s project Training Humans is the first major exhibition to display a collection of photographs used to train an algorithm as well as the classificatory labels applied to them both by artificial intelligence and by the freelance employees hired to sort through these images
To What Extent Can the CJEU Contribute to Increasing the EU Legislative Process’ Transparency?
Get PDFAlongside other actors such as the European Ombudsman, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) plays what looks like, at first sight, a key role in improving the transparency of EU legislative procedures. To take two relatively recent examples, the De Capitani v. European Parliament (2018) judgment was perceived as a victory by those in favor of increased transparency of EU legislative procedures at the stage of trilogues, as was the ClientEarth v. European Commission (2018) judgment regarding the pre-initiative stage. Both rulings emphasize the need for “allowing citizens to scrutinize all the information which has formed the basis of a legislative act…[as] a precondition for the effective exercise of their democratic rights” (ClientEarth v. European Commission, 2018, §84; De Capitani v. European Parliament, 2018, §80). Nevertheless, while the CJEU’s case law may indeed contribute to improving the legislative process’ transparency, its impact on the latter is inherently limited and even bears the potential of having a perverse effect. This article sheds light on the limits of the CJEU’s capacity to act in this field and the potential effects of its case law on the EU institutions’ attitudes or internal organization