Civic engagement and participatory City­Making: A fly­Through towards systemic Change

Today’s notion of a Smart City is significantly different from what we imagined it would be approximately twenty years ago, when the term has first been coined. It has evolved from a strictly technical vision of efficiency towards one where technology allows us to both optimise the city and serve greater, social causes. Researchers have begun to postulate for Human Smart Cities, where citizens are agents of change, or, at least, active contributors to the Smart City, instead of being spectators upon which change is being inflicted. They can initiate or participate in projects that shape their city. This chapter provides a contextual review of such city-making projects from several perspectives, aiming at a more systematic and thorough picture of what has organically emerged in different parts of the world. The contribution is threefold. First, it offers an investigation into these initiatives and what they have done right in terms of fostering systemic change, knowledge that can be used as a learning for future projects. Second, it raises fundamental questions on participatory city-making to push it further on its path to maturity. Lastly, the contextual review will contribute a taxonomy framework that can help classify and categorise projects and initiatives in the fields of urban interaction design, urban prototyping, place hacking, and civic and citizen engagement, and that can serve as a reference for future research