About

Human Values
for Smarter Cities

Designing ethical smart city-applications: how to move beyond the manifesto?

Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficient urban management to our cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers from city governments and institutions now call for human and public values in tech development1, ethics guidelines for trustworthy A.I., and cities for digital rights. In a democratic society, these technologies should also be understandable for citizens (transparency) and open to scrutiny and critique (accountability and contestability).

This four-year project aims to help such professionals to develop an integrated, value-based design approach for smart city technologies’ ethical implementation by focusing on the concrete and urgent case of machine-vision in public space. It consists of three aspects. With civil servants at municipalities, we will create a language enabling them to translate public values such as transparency into concrete specifications. With designers, we will develop guidelines and principles to answer these value-based requirements. Finally, we will develop methods to engage civil society in this process with both groups of professionals.

The Human Values for Smarter Cities project will run from 2022-2026 and is financed by RAAK-PRO – Regieorgaan SIA.