Civic Interplay is being explored by Dr Sarah Barns and collaborators, through a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research.
There is more information about our places than ever before.
More of each place, its infrastructure and its services, is built through digital intelligence.
But who gets to make sense of this? And who gets to act on it?
Civic Interplay explores how digital and AI methods can support place-based civic enquiry, towards more care-full and resilient futures.
It looks at how places are assembled, in both digital and experiential ways, and what is recorded about them, including how they are made legible (to both humans and their digital collaborators). It asks: does this place invite open enquiry and participation in how it is shaped, or are its systems, digital ones included, hard to see into?
If the 2010s asked for data to be made open, now is the time to move data-driven enquiry beyond specialist knowledge, towards everyday knowledge practices, citizen sensing and open deliberation forums.
Civic Interplay is being explored by Dr Sarah Barns and collaborators, through a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research.
A core reference for the Civic AI methodology. Sieber and colleagues ask what civic participation in AI actually means, and note that AI's opacity, mutability and resource requirements impede meaningful engagement, particularly in cities. They distinguish institutional transparency, functional empowerment and democratic empowerment.
journals.sagepub.com DOI 10.1177/23998083241296200
Liverpool built the world's first civic data cooperative on the back of its public health history. In this piece, Buchan argues for a civic path to AI that serves lives, livelihoods and life chances. Buchan's connected city architecture models civic AI governance and stewardship at the level of the city precinct and is an inspiration for civic interplay.
news.liverpool.ac.uk
A first-of-its-kind charter for responsible data sharing across a city region, which is what it looks like when civic AI stops being a framing and becomes a document people sign.
news.liverpool.ac.uk