Table Of ContentLocal and Urban Governance
Francesca De Filippi
Grazia Giulia Cocina
Urban
Regeneration
and Community
Empowerment
Through ICTs
A Focus on Digital Participatory
Platforms (DPPs)
Local and Urban Governance
Series Editor
Carlos Nunes Silva, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of
Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
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Francesca De Filippi • Grazia Giulia Cocina
Urban Regeneration and
Community Empowerment
Through ICTs
A Focus on Digital Participatory Platforms
(DPPs)
Francesca De Filippi Grazia Giulia Cocina
Dipartimento Architettura e Design Dipartimento Architettura e Design
Politecnico di Torino Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy Torino, Italy
ISSN 2524-5449 ISSN 2524-5457 (electronic)
Local and Urban Governance
ISBN 978-3-030-97754-2 ISBN 978-3-030-97755-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97755-9
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Foreword
In the last decades, there has been a renewal of interest about the way citizens
engage in the public policy decision making process. If during the long period in
which the rational model of public policy prevailed, citizen participation was merely
symbolic or even non-existent, as the milestone study of Sherry Arnstein showed in
the late 1960s; on the contrary, recent decades witnessed the rise worldwide of citi-
zen participation as a key feature in public policy. Notwithstanding this shift in the
importance and centrality given to citizen participation in the public policy field,
research findings do suggest the existence of continuity, more than rupture, by com-
parison with the period of the rational paradigm; in the real capacity, citizens have
to influence the decision-making process through the conventional participatory
procedures. In other words, citizen participation in public policy making continues
to a large extent on the lower tiers of the Arnstein ladder of citizen participation, that
is, it remains in most cases merely symbolic and far from being a way for citizens
to exert a real power in the final policy decision.
This picture is not substantially different in the field of urban policy, and in urban
planning more specifically, when comparison is made between the rational planning
paradigm, which prevailed in developed countries in the post-World War II period,
and the collaborative planning paradigm, for instance, in more recent decades. If
this is so, undoubtedly, it is nonetheless also important to mention that recent
research findings do suggest possibilities of greater citizen influence in the decision-
making process in urban planning when specific approaches and tools are employed.
That is the case of findings revealed by research on the use of digital tools in pro-
cesses of citizen participation. In other words, the urban planning practice can be
somehow different if the right concept of participatory planning is considered and if
the appropriate tools are employed, chiefly among them the increasingly wide set of
online digital tools. Citizen participation in urban planning can thus be less a sym-
bolic procedure, as it has been most of the time in the already long history of plan-
ning, and be a real tool for citizen empowerment, in the way expressed by Arnstein
for the upper levels of her ladder of citizen participation.
The book Urban Regeneration and Community Empowerment Through ICTs: A
Focus on Digital Participatory Platforms, the outcome of the research work carried
v
vi Foreword
out on this theme, in the last years, by Francesca De Filippi and Grazia Giulia
Cocina, within the Department of Architecture and Design at the Politecnico di
Torino, in Italy, provides a useful introduction to the use of digital participatory
platforms in urban regeneration processes. The book addresses the issue of citizen
engagement in urban policy and offers an innovative perspective of citizen partici-
pation in the field of urban regeneration through the use of digital tools. It is focused
on the potentialities of applying a specific category of digital tools, the digital par-
ticipatory platforms. The authors do this based on experiences of innovative citizen
participation at the neighborhood level in Italy, which they have been studying for
several years now.
The book is structured into three main sections and five chapters. The first sec-
tion comprises the two initial chapters. The first provides an introduction to the role
of ICT in urban governance (1. “ICTs in Support of Urban Governance”), while the
second chapter discusses the role of digital technologies in urban regeneration (2.
“Digital Technologies to Encourage e-Participation in Urban Regeneration). The
second section of the book, with two chapters, is its core part. Chapter 3 offers a
broad view of digital platforms in Europe (3. “Case Studies of Digital Participatory
Platforms in Europe: An Overview) and in the following chapter presents and dis-
cusses the case study of MiraMap in Italy (4. “MiraMap: A Digital Tool for Civic
Engagement in Urban Regeneration”). The third section of the book, with one chap-
ter (5. “Digital Participatory Platforms: Conclusions and the Way Forward”), sum-
marizes the findings, both theoretical and empirical, and presents possible future
developments in this specific type of civic technology, which is seen by the authors
as having been explicitly built for participatory, engagement, and collaboration pur-
poses, allowing users the possibility to generated content through a range of
functionalities.
As the authors argue, based on the evidence they collected, these new digital
online tools have the potential to change the traditional and still prevailing form of
urban governance, and the role of local government in the governing of cities and of
other human settlements. And not less important, these tools also have the potential
to allow a more democratic and inclusive interaction between citizens and local
government, making possible forms of citizens participation that could be included
in the higher levels of the ladder of citizen participation proposed half a century ago
by Sherry Arnstein.
In other words, the answers provided in the book to the three research questions
that have guided the research developed by the authors – “May the use of ICTs
promote new ways of participating in society and facilitate innovative processes of
local governance?”; “What are the advantages and the added value for citizens and
Public Authorities in using DPPs?”; “What are the main success factors to be identi-
fied in the design of a DPP?” – will certainly serve as a reference for other studies
on issues of urban regeneration, in particular for those focused on citizen participa-
tion, through new forms of social innovation, as examined in this book, in Europe
but also in other regions of the world. The close link Francesca De Filippi and
Grazia Giulia Cocina make between the changes in the forms of civic engagement
in urban governance, through the use of digital platforms, and those going on more
Foreword vii
broadly in public administration, in the form of e-government, places this book well
at the center of the core themes that make up the Springer book series Local and
Urban Governance.
All considered, the book Urban Regeneration and Community Empowerment
Through ICTs: A Focus on Digital Participatory Platforms is a relevant and timely
contribution to the field of local and urban governance and an important addition to
the growing library on the use of digital technologies for civic engagement, namely
in processes of urban regeneration, showing how to go beyond obstacles and barri-
ers, namely those related to digital divide and digital literacy, and how to enhance
civic behaviors for the care and regeneration of the public space in urban areas
through the use of these digital participatory tools.
However, despite all the progress made in this field, as reported in the following
chapters, there is still room to further deepen the research about these digital partici-
patory platforms, in order to fully understand their potential and limitations, from
the point of view of the prevailing contextual, technological, and organizational
factors, as the findings discussed by Francesca De Filippi and Grazia Giulia Cocina
in the book show.
Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning Carlos Nunes Silva
University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal
Acknowledgments
The research on digital technologies for civic engagement, carried out by the authors
in these last 10 years within the Department of Architecture and Design (DAD) at the
Politecnico di Torino (Polito), has been made possible thanks to a dynamic, passion-
ate, and visionary multidisciplinary team of professors, researchers, and students.
Special and heartfelt thanks go to the Fondazione della Comunità di Mirafiori
Onlus, for its constant support; to the administrators, policy makers, managers, and
public employees of the City of Torino, of the Mirafiori Sud District, and the others
belonging the municipal area, who have contributed to developing the work; to the
Case del Quartiere Network; and to all the citizens who have trusted us and accom-
panied the Polito research team during the design, implementation, and testing of
the MiraMap platform.
We are grateful, for what concerns the design, the adaptation, the fine-tuning,
and the testing of the MiraMap digital platform in its various releases over time, in
particular to:
• Silva Ferretti for her precious insights;
• Daniele Trinchero and the Ixem Lab in the Department of Electronics and
Telecommunications (DET) at the Politecnico di Torino, who conceived the
adaptation and customization of the Ushahidi platform for the pilot project
Crowdmapping Mirafiori Sud;
• Guido Boella, Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, and his
team, thanks to whom it was possible to test a verticalization of the FirstLife
platform, in the first phase of the MiraMap project;
• Gian Marco Toso, who designed the platform for the last and current release of
the MiraMap project.
We would like also to thank them for their contribution over time to the definition
of the contents related to the technological features of the digital platforms, which
are covered respectively by the paragraphs 4.2 (D. Trinchero), 4.3 (G. Boella) and
4.4.2 (G.M. Toso).
Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnico di Torino MiraMap –
research group:
ix
x Acknowledgments
• Scientific coordinators: Francesca De Filippi and Cristina Coscia
• Project manager: Grazia Giulia Cocina
• Collaborators Miramap - Phase 2: Giulia Lazzari, Stefania Manzo, and Gian
Marco Toso
• Collaborators Miramap - Phase 1: Roberta Guido and Anna Cantini
