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Real-time data from urban and rural regions is increasingly being used by policymakers to achieve environmental sustainability goals within smart cities. At the same time, smart urban governance has been criticized for its technocratic and human-centric approach that sacrifices long-term planning for the here-and-now and overlooks the more-than-human in sustainability-related city-region foresight strategies. By reviewing two city-region foresight strategies employed in Australia – namely, the Atlas of Living Australia and Greenprints – this paper argues for the merits of including foresight strategies that account for multispecies entanglements. The paper mobilizes more-than-human perspectives to propose multispecies foresight for better urban and regional sustainability outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global agricultural production methods and supply chains have become more digitised, farmers around the world are adopting digital agricultural technologies (AgTech) such as drones, IoT, remote sensors, blockchain and satellite imagery to inform on-farm decision-making. Yet, on the backdrop of a persistent digital divide between rural and urban communities, many Australian farmers are not taking up digital AgTech. It has been argued that these farmers are being 'left behind' in an increasingly digital world, and this may impact their future success. Scholars of digital AgTech adoption typically take a siloed approach, positioning the individual or farm as the key unit of analysis, with fewer studies addressing structural conditions. This has provided a useful but incomplete understanding of the disparity between users and non-users. This paper builds upon emerging sociocultural approaches, which aim to address this gap, by using a novel 'communitive ecology' analytical approach to consider how adoption occurs through networks of actors. Based on an exploratory, qualitative study of a digital farming project on a cotton farm and its digital communicative ecology in South-East Queensland, Australia this study identifies technological, discursive, and social factors of digital AgTech adoption. Overall, an evolution from a digital divide to data divide, expressed in the interactions between farmers and stakeholders, and characterised by gaps between the generation and application of farm data, is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data analytics in smart cities has given rise to the new interdisciplinary field of urban science, which uses data mining, visual analytics, modeling, and simulation to create novel planning support systems. One such system is RAISE (the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer) which assists urban planners and local government authorities with rapid analysis and visualization of land value uplift from proposed transport infrastructure. This paper's contribution is twofold. We first introduce co-design as a method for developing a planning support tool such as RAISE and present findings from a series of co-design workshops that informed its development. Findings included the need for further transparency of the land valuation process and recommendation of a community feature that explains valuation outcomes to landowners. The resulting insights from the co-design process led to a series of emerging questions that the design of this type of planning support system raises: (a) the collaboration with local government partners and the need for what Huybrechts calls "institutioning;" (b) some of the ethical implications of use, and (c) the impact of moving from conventional to AI/machine learning-assisted modeling. We discuss these questions as part of our second contribution. The paper concludes by reflecting on the process of using the development of RAISE not just as a solution but as an opportunity to problematize new questions and identify future research opportunities that tackle these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's cities and regions are the envy of the world for their natural beauty and lifestyle amenities and attractions. Not only has this sustained the tree-change and sea-change movement, with broadband connectivity and the COVID-19 pandemic so-called 'e-changers' and 'flee-changers' are part of the populus seeking to combine career aspirations with lifestyle destinations. This paper discusses the growing popularity of remote, particularly home-based work, and planning and design responses that accommodate this type of work in residential neighbourhoods. The issues are exemplified through a case study of the City of Gold Coast drawing on mixed methods including survey instruments and a design charrette facilitated by the authors. The design charrette is reported via three integrative narratives of a remote worker, the neighbourhood and the city. Findings outline preferences of remote workers towards built environment and urban design features enabling collaboration and knowledge exchange and assist in a better understanding of the socio-economic factors behind the spatial distribution of home-based work. The study's findings offer a range of implications for appropriate urban planning and design responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New digital and remote work practices challenge city planning and urban design as they move economic activities from city centres to residential suburbs. Little is known about the spatial impact of these new work patterns on suburbia. This paper addresses this knowledge gap through a design charrette conducted in the City of Gold Coast, Australia. Despite often working individually, remote workers favour design interventions that facilitate a transformation of suburbia towards multi-use. Urban design strategies supporting new work practices in residential neighbourhoods can enable better collaboration and innovation, create new opportunities for third spaces, and unlock a city's competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional realities often limit participatory planning practice from reaching its full potential. Rather than continuing to improve participatory approaches and methods in isolation, we studied whether there is merit in extending the repertoire of planning knowledge and skills to encompass a focus on the broader institutional decision-making processes. By interviewing a diverse range of experts working in the Queensland planning context, the research sought to understand different types of clashes between participatory planning practices and institutional cultures. Interviewees shared their personal experiences and strategies that helped them traverse institutional processes and constraints. This confirmed that there is already a wealth of tacitly held skills, which have not yet been formalised. Our data analysis found that planning practice may be improved by attenuating the disparity between external messaging and internal practices, and by enabling planning practitioners to better utilise informal institutional structures. Intermediation is proposed as a skillset to formalise planners' tacitly held interpersonal and political literacy and acumen, and equip them to better navigate and negotiate institutional structures and constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ready availability and widespread deployment of IoT devices and sensors enable a high granularity of quantitative data to be collected to give a real-time appraisal of a building's environmental performance. Rating and assessment frameworks are increasingly taking advantage of insights that can be derived from both new building technology and big data analytics. Yet, climate change action requires new perspectives that move towards a post-anthropocentric and more-than-human viewpoint. This paper makes a threefold contribution. In order to highlight a gap, we (1) critique select Green Building Rating Tools, (2) contrast current achievements and targets with what climate change action demands of the built environment's performance; and (3) we discuss several causes for the disconnect between actual and aspirational ends of the performance measurement spectrum and offer some possible responses and actions with a view to stimulate scholarly debate and engagement to leapfrog the performance of the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece acts as a coda to this journal's special issue on "Smart Cities and Innovative Technologies." First, it provides a retrospective view of the origins of the smart city concept. The paper, secondly, presents the most recent perspectives on the new interpretations of the smart city notion. It then provides a commentary on the potential directions for a better reconceptualization of smart cities to evade a most likely urban ecocide. Lastly, the short communication concludes by asking two critical questions: (a) Will urban scholars, planners, designers, and activists be able to convince urban policymakers and the general public of the need for a post-anthropocentric urban turnaround? (b) How do the public, private, and academic sectors along with communities pave the way for post-anthropocentric cities and more-than-human futures? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative case study explores the potential of social living labs to foster digital participation and communication among regional and rural communities. The context is Townsville, North Queensland (Australia) - one of the first communities connected to Australia’s National Broadband. The study focuses on two cases: inaugural social living lab events related to social interests identified by local residents. Drawing on interview and observation data, the study’s findings present a snapshot of digital participation and associated learning needs among this community. It also models a novel social living labs approach whose emphasis on informal learning differentiates it from more established living labs models that have a technological or product focus. This social living labs approach could be of interest to community developers, educators and residents. Addressing digital divide, it supports digital capacity building in Townsville and other regional and remote communities around Australia and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers an emerging planning practice that uses networked connections to interact with urban places and re-create enlivened cities. The paper presents “urban acupuncture” as a new planning approach that broadens communication and strategically targets interventions across the city. Defined as an approach, which, through the use of digital social networks and interactions, involves citizens and planners in place activations in order to stimulate and reinvigorate place, thus creating meaningful relationships between citizens and their urban settings. This paper uses the UR[BNE] Brisbane Festival 2012 as a qualitative case study of urban acupuncture, best defined as a hyper-localized healing treatment through place activation to enliven and recreate cities. It examines the challenges faced and opportunities embraced by a network of urban professionals. Their aim was to activate the underused urban spaces of central Brisbane through the festival's activities and events. The findings identify the key elements required to design public spaces using socially and technologically networked interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most significant lifestyle and technological trends of the twenty-first century is the emergence and increased ubiquity of mobile information and communication technologies (mICT). The potential of mICT raises critical questions for planners, potentially enabling citizen engagement and enhancing the urban planning process through facilitating communication, interaction and collaboration between planning professionals and the public. To date, although technology has become integral to all functions within our urban environment, little is known about how urban planners perceive mICT and its current and potential future role in the planning process. This research explores this knowledge gap, via empirical data gathered from town planners of various sectors based in Queensland. The findings illustrate that these planners believed ICT offered strong potential to share information, creatively build community, connect with users of public spaces and adapt places in swift and temporary ways. This paper explores the issues of integrating mICT into planning practice and the affordances that these technologies offer for community consultation and placemaking. The paper aims to spark a discussion to find the best ways to overcome key barriers to making ICT part of the daily practice of planning professionals, including knowledge, skill, agency and time constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media and web 2.0 tools offer opportunities to devise novel participation strategies that can engage previously difficult to reach, as well as new, segments of society in urban planning. This paper examines participatory planning in the four local government areas of Brisbane City Council, Gold Coast City Council, Redland City Council and Toowoomba Regional Council, all situated in South East Queensland, Australia. The paper discusses how social media and web 2.0 tools can deliver a more engaging planning experience to citizens and investigates local government's current use and receptiveness to social media tools for plan-making and community engagement. The study's research informed the development of criteria to assess the level of participation reached through the current use of social media and web 2.0 in the four local government areas. This resulted in an adaptation of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Toolbox to integrate these new tools, which is being presented to encourage further discussion and evaluation by planning professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to consider how libraries support the development of community networks both physically and digitally. To do this, a case-study methodology was employed, including a combination of data about the library and qualitative interviews with library users considering their experience of the library. This paper proposes that libraries act as 'third places' spatially connecting people; libraries also build links with online media and play a critical role in inclusively connecting non-technology users with the information on the Internet and digital technology more generally. The paper establishes the value of libraries in the digital age and recommends that libraries actively seek ways to develop links between non-technology users and activity on the Internet. It addresses the need to reach these types of non-technology users in different ways. Further, it suggests that libraries utilise their positioning as third places to create broader community networks, to support local communities beyond existing users and beyond the library precinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology brings together five articles that are based on presentations given at the Street Computing Workshop held on 24 November 2009 in Melbourne in conjunction with the Australian Computer-Human Interaction conference (OZCHI 2009). Our own article introduces the Street Computing vision and explores the potential, challenges, and foundations of this research trajectory. In order to do so, we first look at the currently available sources of information and discuss their link to existing research efforts. Section 2 then introduces the notion of Street Computing and our research approach in more detail. Section 3 looks beyond the core concept itself and summarizes related work in this field of interest. We conclude by introducing the papers that have been contributed to this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual world platforms such as Second Life have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using Second Life for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision-making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real-world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a 'serious playground', we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the world's citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, socio-cultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. NeoGeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is there a potential for the emergence of a neo-planning paradigm in which urban planning is carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0 and new media technologies thus redefining the role of practicing planners? This paper traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, NeoGeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends - participation and visualisation - with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining advanced participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed to explore a planning workshop and an integrated software event framework to assist narrative generation. We discuss an approach to harness and analyse narratives using virtual reality logging to make transparent how users understand and interpret proposed urban designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research has shown that household and neighbourhood characteristics are significantly linked to particular health-behaviour profiles. Specifically, people living in lower socioeconomic living contexts tend to be associated with less active and healthy lifestyles. However, what is not yet fully understood is how living contexts work to produce and sustain common or shared behavioural patterns. To address this question, we employed Berger and Luckman's social constructionist conceptualisation of context to study a group of residents who had recently moved from poorer living contexts to a mixed-tenure, inner city, new urban village equipped with various resources promoting a physically active lifestyle. This framework was coupled with Charmaz' social constructionist approach to grounded theory. An analysis of the qualitative data gave rise to the conceptual categories of “being flogged up something fierce”, “running away”, “sleeping with one eye open”, “you're just fat”, and “exercise as a dream” as the key contextual influences mediating poor living contexts and low physical activity levels. A core category of “identity management” was located. The selection of this case and the findings exhibited here draw attention to the need for a situated understanding of how particular lifestyles develop in socioeconomic living contexts. The insights need to be drawn from 'insider perspectives' in order to ensure more sensitive and effective interventions in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain patterns of interaction between people point to networks as an adequate conceptual model to characterize some aspects of social relationships mediated or facilitated by information and communication technology. Wellman proposes a shift from groups to networks and describes the ambivalent nature inherent in an egocentric yet still well-connected portfolio of sociability with the term 'networked individualism'. In this paper, qualitative data from an action research study of social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings in Australia are used to provide empirical grounding for the theoretical concept of networked individualism. However, this model focuses on network interaction rather than collective interaction. The authors propose 'communicative ecology' as a concept which integrates the three dimensions of 'online and offline', 'global and local' as well as 'collective and networked'. They present their research on three layers of interpretation (technical, social and discursive) to deliver a rich description of the communicative ecology they found, that is, the way residents negotiate membership, trust, privacy, reciprocity, permeability and social roles in person-to-person mediated and direct relationships. They find that residents seamlessly traverse between online and offline communication; local communication and interaction maintains a more prominent position than global or geographically dispersed communication; and residents follow a dual approach which allows them to switch between collective and networked interaction depending on purpose and context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design research has a long history of active engagement with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet, the mainstream adoption and sometimes tokenistic cooptation of design methods, have prompted renewed concerns about a new wave of perhaps unintended neo-colonial practices. Codesign practice tends to be sensitive to these risks, however, when design is driven only by concrete deliverables it often comes at the expense of participants’ distinct identities and exacerbates problematic concepts of homogenising others. Facilitating diversity in how the other is seen, depicted, and engaged remains a challenge. Fostering pluriversality—Escobar’s vision of relational ontology and a world ‘where many worlds fit’—is even harder: it depends on enabling participants as active, autonomous agents as individuals, groups and communities. Empowering the interactions between and across participants requires a conceptual shift in the way we design. In this paper, we present our experiences with tabletop games design workshops to show how creative worldbuilding can trigger emergence and autopoiesis between participants and foster safe spaces where pluriversality is a condition for codesign to happen, rather than a desirable consequence of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]