Solving Social Problems? Imaginaries of infrastructures and participation in the Good Democracy

Abstracts

Shared mobility and geofencing: Creating virtual frontiers within cities?

Ellen Aurell, Linköping University/Technology and Social Change; with Kristina Trygg and Karin Edberg

Shared micromobility in the form of e-scooters are marketed as a complement to public transport that is easy, fun, environmentally friendly and accessible. Contrastingly, not everyone can access this mode of transport in their local communities. 

E-scooters have during recent years been a highly discussed mode of transport, especially when it comes to safety and cluttering. A subject that has not been discussed to the same extent in media or academic research is the one about equal access, which this article will discuss through the perspective of geofencing. With the use of a ‘geofence’, e-scooter companies and municipalities can define areas where the vehicle automatically drives slower, where it is not possible to park or to even drive the vehicles. This usually applies to busy city centers, but it is also used to exclude other areas with other unwanted characteristics. Streets become barriers that cannot be crossed with the same mode of transport. An example of this is the neighborhood of Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden, an area that is defined as a “vulnerable area” by the Swedish police and where e-scooter companies have chosen not to operate. Thus, city boundaries are not only jurisdictional or socioeconomic, but also technological.

By studying virtual maps, policy- and planning documents as well as material provided by micromobility companies, this article asks questions about who can be a part of the shared micromobility systems, but also who it is that defines a city's boundaries – the municipality, the companies or the citizens? 

When Visions of the Future Become the Whole Solution: Challenges created from future path optimism

Marie Bemler, House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics

Visions of the future are an important component to enable change in organizations, as they are used to open paths, fulfill organizational goals, speed up the change process, and unlock prior lock-ins. Prior theoretical focus on enabling innovation has left a gap in understanding how agency in path creation also affects the present circumstances. Imaginaries allow us to look at visions of the future that are larger than a single organization and encompass a field or even all of society, influencing the technology visions that individual organizations adopt. In this paper, archival data from the Swedish public sector is used to understand how sociotechnical imaginaries complement predominant organization-level perspectives on how to use visions internally to fulfill transport goals by using technology and enable path creation. The archival data is supplemented with observations and interviews to understand how future technological visions of self-driving vehicles affect public bodies when planning future infrastructure to fulfill national transportation goals. Analysis of public bodies’ visions of self-driving vehicles at public offices where the future technological visions are preferred to other solutions that are closer in time, creating a future path of optimism that, paradoxically, may lead to a situation where radical imaginaries create inertia rather than enable change. 

Use of digital tools in environmental participation

by Parissa Mokhtabad Amrei, parissa@chalmers.se (presenter), Co-author: Catharina Landström, catharina.landstrom@chalmers.se

Digital tools with the aim of engaging public are employed in various forms (such as citizen science, smart cities initiatives and VGI) as part of environmental governance. These tools can potentially establish networks, reconfigure processes and render actors (in)visible in environmental governance.   In my ongoing research, I investigate how democracy is accommodated in the tools by exploring citizen science initiatives. In the case studies which all involve place-based collectives, the possibility of making regulations through networks will be analysed.

Keywords:  public participation, citizen observatory, citizen science, environmental governance.

Solving (social) problems? Imaginaries of infrastructures and participation in the Good Democracy

Katharina Wuropulos, HSU Hamburg

Democracy is a spatial-material setting where problems are imagined to be taken care of and solved in participatory-sensitive ways. In this setting, building (good) public infrastructures, inclusivity, diversity, and public participation are more and more imagined to provide democratic solutions for contemporary problems. What happens when future making is practiced in democratic ways of life? The imaginaries of how good democratic problem solving should be practiced vary in communities that are differently affected by a variety of conflicts and problems that undergo divergent (e)valuations. Some problems, crises, catastrophes (Latour and Weibel 2005), or the care taking of ruins (Tsing 2021), are imagined to be more pressing than others, depending on which futures are imagined (Doganova 2018). Additionally, the constitution of democracy facilitates through infrastructures of problem-solving that some ways of how problems and crises are attempted to be solved, are preferred over others. Modes of preference are usually connected with who the imagined public is that is concerned and affected by a problem. Public participation can become problematic, because what participation means has to be negotiated, defended, and maintained. How are democratic dilemmas approached? Who is subjected to the imaginaries of having to live a good democratic life, and how? Which infrastructures and whose participation are imagined to be valueable and good? Which and whose futures are given precedence when doing politics in times of catastrophe? Where does the idealisation of the future (Dányi 2018, 2021) make life in the present more difficult or even unbearable?

Organizers

Katharina Wuropulos (katharina.wuropulos@hsu-hh.de)