Design & Publics = Critical City-Making

On July 4th 2023 Martijn de Waal (HvA) and Michiel de Lange (UU) invited a group of scholars engaged in smart cities research to an expert meeting called Critical city-making to explore design approaches for imagining smart urban futures.

Design & Publics provided a lecture on our method of Data Empowerment Design Studios and on the role of (and distrust in) researchers (see) inclined to support citizens’ Right to the City, instigating the debate on:

• How to be sustainably engaged in complex (critical) city-making processes, when our work is funded and approached as time and budget-bound projects?
• How to provide stakeholders with actual agency in to follow-up of our design and futures-driven co-creative sessions?
• How to integrate politics and activism in our research and design?