The City as Platform lab (cityasplatform.com), an associate lab of the Games Institute, published a Whitepaper to present their findings from their "Right to the Smart City" symposium that took place March, 2018 at Harvard University. Their work aims to help municipalities, experts, and community members plan smart cities together.
An announcement about the Whitepaper and toolkit was featured on Waterloo News this morning. The toolkit is an crucial step forward for developing a paradigm for "smart" cities.
According to the Whitepaper, the toolkit is "a template for municipalities to reproduce our process on a local level in order to ground-truth our general findings and provide local texture to the definition of smart".
The toolkit provides five major actions, what the City as Platform Lab calls "plays", that should be taken by any organization or municipality looking to engage the public with plans for integrating technology in city decisions.
These five "plays" were identified by stakeholders from academia, government, and private sectors from across North America who attended the "Right to the Smart City" symposium:
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Embracing smart cities
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Cultivating local innovation ecosystems
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Inviting public influence
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Questioning data
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Designing for play and civic imagination
Read the Whitepaper that accompanies the toolkit to learn more about how these "plays" were developed and why they are essential for building "smart" cities.
To learn more about the "Right to the Smart City" symposium, check out their website.
The City as Platform lab is directed by Beth Coleman, an Associate Professor of Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo. She is quoted in the press release, saying:
Civic engagement must be part of a smart city if it is to be a city of innovation, generosity, play, and opportunity.