Digital technology for local and inclusive development - potentials and challenges

How can we utilize the digital technology sector to enable local and inclusive development? Digital technology is developing rapidly and is increasingly entering people’s daily life all over the world. It has a huge potential to support local actions and initiatives for inclusive urban development and well-informed decision making to create sustainable cities and communities. In our event, we will present examples that represent activities from distinct countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, from informal settlements micro data collection to digital twins for cities for decision support for climate responsive cities. We cover a variety of perspectives, from women, health, culture, green infrastructure, food safety and security to energy and climate change impact. Our examples come from real world projects initiated in diverse contexts - practice, practice based research, and students' work.
We will discuss localized approaches that embrace empowerment of cities, local stakeholders and communities, reflect on trade-offs in the use of technology and how to ensure that it works for marginalized communities. We address both community engagement and inclusion through digital tools as well as using digital twins for governance and decision-making support. Crucial aspects we will discuss are data gathering - digital and analogue, implications of who is collecting data (professionals, local community), data availability versus accessibility, data use and ownership, data integration, ethical dimensions, gender perspective related to use of technology, age and digital literacy. Additional perspectives we discuss are issues of data classification to capture the various socio-economic aspects and the ability to integrate them into digital models which becomes a complex task and require ample action. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in urban development is a potential yet to be explored, where it might provide accurate proxies where real data is missing. However, ethical considerations of AI still require sufficient attention to ensure that the generated data and consequently models are void of bias and adequately include various users.
Through our examples, we reflect on how digital tools can support the generation of new knowledge in urban and community context, through participative collection of local, qualitative micro data, for example about use and perception of place, locations for local food production and pertinent socio-economic conditions. Such evidence-based approaches ensure technological solutions that are responsive to citizen interests and re-establish trust between governments and local actors. Our event also contributes to a growing understanding of the usefulness of citizen data collected by community researchers with little technical research skills and the use of geospatial data in ethnography, data visualisation as a way to enhance communication and data analysis to explain complex relationships.