Liam Magee

Reframing social sustainability reporting : towards an engaged approach

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability between other sustainability assessment efforts, to the potential exclusion of issues that really matter on the ground. Conversely, bottom–up approaches enable sustainability initiatives to speak directly to the concerns and issues of communities, but lack a basis for comparability. While there are clearly contexts in which one approach can be favored over another, it is equally desirable to develop mechanisms that mediate between both. In this paper, we outline a methodology for framing sustainability assessment and developing indicator sets that aim to bridge these two approaches. The methodology incorporates common components of bottom–up assessment: constituency-based engagement processes and opportunity to identify critical issues and indicators. At the same time, it uses the idea of a “knowledge base,” to help with the selection of standardized, top–down indicators. We briefly describe two projects where the aspects of the methodology have been trialed with urban governments and communities, and then present the methodology in full, with an accompanying description of a supporting software system.

An ontology derived from heterogeneous sustainability indicator set documents

We present an ontology to represent the key concepts of sustainability indicators that are increasingly being used to measure the economic, environmental and social properties of complex systems. There have been few efforts to represent multiple indicators formally, in spite of the fact that comparison of indicators and measurements across reporting contexts is a critical task. In this paper, we apply the METHONTOLOGY approach to guide the construction of two design candidates we term Generic and Specific. Of the two, the generic design is more abstract, with fewer classes and properties. Documents describing two indicator systems - the Global Reporting Initiative and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -- are used in the design of both candidate ontologies. We then evaluate both ontology designs using the ROMEO approach, to calculate their level of coverage against the seen indicators, as well as against an unseen third indicator set (the United Nations Statistics Division). We also show that use of existing structured approaches like METHONTOLOGY and ROMEO can reduce ambiguity in ontology design and evaluation for domain-level ontologies. It is concluded that where an ontology needs to be designed for both seen and unseen indicator systems, a generic and reusable design is preferable.

Towards urban food sovereignty : the trials and tribulations of community-based aquaponics enterprises in Milwaukee and Melbourne

Community-based urban aquaponics enterprises represent a new model for how to blend local agency with scientific innovation to deliver food sovereignty (FS) in cities, re-engaging and giving urban communities more control over their food production and distribution. Little is known, however, about the factors and outcomes that determine the success or failure of these enterprises. This paper explores stakeholder experiences of building community-based urban aquaponics enterprises to understand the internal and external factors that impact on their success or failure. We draw upon existing FS, social enterprise and aquaponics literature, to identify factors in the related area of community-based urban agriculture. For exploring these factors, we use a comparative case study methodology for two cases in Milwaukee and Melbourne, conducting in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, exploring their relative contexts, objectives and structure. Based on these findings, we highlight the challenges and suggest relevant indicators for establishing an urban aquaponics enterprise.

From issues to indicators: developing robust community sustainability measures

Recent debate on sustainability indicator development has centred upon top-down and bottom-up methods. In practice, a key difficulty is the establishment of defensible issues and indicators to use. Here, we present a structured approach for transitioning from initial community consultation designed to elicit issues to the downstream definition, composition and measurement of those issues via indicators. The approach incorporates two quantitative techniques from the literature, analytic hierarchy process and Qualitative Sustainability System Index. The application of these techniques is designed to foster a better understanding of the priority of and relationships between issues, prior to the construction of measurement instruments and indicators of sustainability. We develop a prototype implementation of the approach, and elicit feedback from an expert panel on its suitability in a community sustainability context.

A model for ranking entity attributes using DBpedia

Purpose – Previous work highlights two key challenges in searching for information about individual entities (such as persons, places and organisations) over semantic data: query ambiguity and redundant attributes. The purpose of this paper is to consider these challenges and proposes the Attribute Importance Model (AIM) for clustering and ranking aggregated entity search to improve the overall users’ experience of finding and navigating entities over the Web of Data. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed model describes three distinct techniques for augmenting semantic search: first, presenting entity type-based query suggestions; second, clustering aggregated attributes; and third, ranking attributes based on their importance to a given query. To evaluate the model, 36 subjects were recruited to experience entity search with and without AIM. Findings – The experimental results show that the model achieves significant improvements over the default method of semantic aggregated search provided by Sig...

The labour of communicating publics: Participatory platforms, socio-technical intermediaries and pluralistic expertise:

Kolorob is a participatory platform connecting informal settlement communities with services and informal jobs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Alongside technological systems, expertise from community, non-government, private-sector, volunteer and academic fields has been integral to the platform’s development. These socio-technical connections and networks, manifest through participatory design, agile software development and collaborative knowledge practices, have become productively entangled in the labour of platform production. We introduce a framework, participatory platform analysis, through which distinct layers – in the form of audiences, intermediaries, interfaces and databases – of this labour can be distinguished and examined. Our analysis draws upon focus group discussions, conducted in Mirpur in 2016 with emergent experts: youth facilitators, field officers and developers. We argue that the interests and tensions of co-designing participatory platforms relating to matters of public concern in South Asian mega-cities are reflective of the rising hybridity of expertise, generated through both institutional training and grass-roots practice, in contemporary urban life. The ‘narrative of expertise in the future’ compels us to recode knowledge production in the here and now: how we are making participatory platforms, the role of socio-technical expertise and the labour of communicating publics.

What’s in a WordTM? : when one electronic document format standard is not enough

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the standardisation of two largely overlapping electronic document formats between 2005 and 2008, and its implications for future IT standards development. , – The document format controversy is researched as an exemplary case study of the institutional rivalries, perspectives and strategic interests at play in standardisation processes. The study adopts a methodological lens of discursive institutionalism in order to explain how actors assume and perform a variety of roles during the controversy. It consults a range of documentary sources, including media commentary, corporate press releases and blog posts, financial reports and technical specifications. , – The study shows that: first, intentions to increase competition in the office software market through the standardisation of document formats led to a standards “arms race”; second, this further entrenched the position of a single market actor; and third, the resulting public debate nevertheless has reinvigorated the push for genuinely open standards. , – Information technology standards are often touted as mechanisms for increasing the competitiveness of a market, thereby benefitting consumers and the greater public. In the presence of dominant institutional actors, efforts to standardise can, perversely, undermine this benefit. Increased public scrutiny through online media offers a potential remedy. , – This research presents a novel account of the controversy over the document format standardisation process, understood through the lens of discursive institutionalism. It also shows the increasing and potentially putative role of online media in the development of IT standards generally.

Art and space: Creative infrastructure and cultural capital in Sydney, Australia

Creative activity and cultural facilities are routinely touted as markers and facilitators of successful cities and societies. This view is underpinned by the assumption that they contribute to local economic growth, foster a positive city image, and enhance urban quality of life. Creativity and the consumption of art are also well established as markers of social and cultural status, while access to, and the physical distribution of, cultural resources are also embedded in, and reinforce, forms of social difference. Understanding the intersection of the social and the spatial in the consumption and distribution of culture is important to both cultural and urban sociology. Using Sydney, Australia, as a case study and drawing on the findings of a major national study of cultural consumption, the article engages with the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu on the reception of art and the differential propensity of various social classes to go to art galleries and to appreciate art, to highlight social and spatial concentrations and fault-lines in arts participation. It also points to important theoretical and empirical nuances, including a weakening of the nexus between socio-economic class and cultural consumption that is occurring at the same time as the links between forms of cultural capital – education and art consumption – appear to be strengthening.

Spreading Out the Fabric: Urban, Rural, Global

Chapter 2 shifts focus to the urban fabric as it stretches out to regional and global spatial levels. The city’s relations to its surrounds — its hinterlands, farms, forests, coasts, rivers, waterways, towns and the encompassing nation state — constitute fragments of its fabric thought large, interconnected with the natural and social habitat from which and with which it is woven. The chapter proceeds with an account of this system along lines suggested most emphatically by Peter Taylor in World City Network. Drawing upon Taylor’s work, I nevertheless argue here for a global urban fabric in place of alternative vernaculars, in order to retain connotations of spontaneous and sporadic relations that bind cities together in suggestive as well as systematic ways.

Assemblages of altruism in urban service delivery: Seamful designs and cities

ABSTRACT Lack of access to services is one of the chief difficulties faced by marginalized urban communities. The proximity of digital technologies and data promises to remove a key constraint to greater access: the unequal distribution of information. However, issues of digital literacy and affordability and the local specificity of services make opportunities for achieving well-being both a technical and ethical concern. We discuss 2 community-based projects—one in Western Sydney, Australia, and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh—that sought to unpack this interface through prototyping a combination of offline and online service directories. Through these, we explore what we have termed altruistic assemblages—circulations of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, local communities, service providers, hackathons, co-design events, and technology devices. The contributed time, resources, hopes and care of these assemblages do not presuppose a finite solution to urban service delivery but rather offer a prefigurative politics for the more equitable cities to come.