Helka-Liisa Hentilä

Urban development practices as anticipatory action learning: case Arctic smart city living laboratory

Abstract An operational model for Arctic smart city living laboratory is presented and discussed. The model is a change-promoting process meant for the public city organization, operating in the context of smart cities, open innovation ecosystem and spatial planning. The entire city functions as a living laboratory scene with the principles of anticipatory action learning. The four urban development practices pace the exploration and exploitation of the opportunities and advantages for the city. As the public landowner, the city builds capacity for enhancing and applying innovations.

Boosting web-based public participation in urban planning with a group of key stakeholders

Today, communication between planners and different stakeholders should be an integral part of participatory urban planning. In many cases, technologies supporting participation have been developed for the wider public separately from the existing ways of involvement, and even outside the planning context. In this paper, we report on three planning experiments that revealed a close connection between Web-based public participation and a group of key stakeholders involved in the planning. The results discussed in the paper give rise to hypothesize that the challenges of developing Web-based participation for the wider public can be overcome by tighter links between the technology development and actions of the key stakeholders.