Highlights and takeaways from AMS Conference – Reinventing the City
News & Updates
During the AMS Conference – Reinventing the City, which took place from April 23 – 25, 2024, the Human Values for Smarter Cities project was involved in two sessions. Check out below the main highlights and takeaways we got from them.
Human Values in Public Procurement
On April 25, Sylke van Duijnen and Imme Ruarus from Waag organized a workshop called ‘Human Values in Public Procurement’ related to their research on participatory procurement. The results were incorporated into this timeline, created by Waag, which presents a procurement process and touchpoints at which municipalities can incorporate public values by involving citizens.
Redesign of existing smart city technologies
On April 23, Mike de Kreek presented the results of two workshops that were focused on repairing existing urban technology in public spaces: Re-design for professional leeway and community agency in existing urban technologies. In these workshops, three unintended consequences of the unthoughtful growth of these technologies were mentioned:
- The leeway of civil servants decreases with the advance of urban technologies leaving their decisions increasingly black-and-white.
- The loss of self-solving capabilities in the community with the growing responsibility the municipality takes for arriving at solving problems.
- The necessity to negotiate or debate is under pressure, both among citizens and between citizens and civil servants.
He proceeded to illustrate how these consequences are not only unintended but can also be framed as unwanted, since they clash with policy aims that urge for human-scale approaches and support of self-solving capacities in the community. Finally, Mike illustrated how some citizens predicted these consequences in smart city surveys containing fields for open answers. These topics will be part of the one of articles we will work on in 2025.