MoSaIC: More-than-human sustainable and inclusive smart cities

Half of humanity - 3.5 billion people - lives in cities today and 68% of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. This increase in urbanisation is contributing to biodiversity decline worldwide due to changing land use. At the same time, digital technologies are changing our cities. Innovations such as real-time bus information, smart rubbish bins, smart parking, and smart street lighting are often referred to as the smart city, and optimistically promised as a social and environmental good. But these interventions generally fail to take into account the ways in which human and non-human inhabitants of cities (such as plants, animals, micro-organisms, as well as sensors) are inter-related and interdependent in urban space.

The MoSaIC: More-than-Human Sustainable and Inclusive Smart Cities fellowship will investigate the design of more inclusive, sustainable and flourishing smart cities. It will do this by exploring how digital technologies such as networked sensors, AI, and data visualisation approaches can help us plan and design smart cities for all their inhabitants - human as well as other species. The research will be undertaken in three living labs, which are real world testbeds for co-creating research and innovation in public-private-people partnerships. These will take place in three types of site: urban community gardens, buildings, and waterways. In these living labs we will co-design new prototypes that demonstrate how digital technologies can enable sustainable, more-than-human smart cities in practice and policy. We will use inclusive and creative co-design methods, working in close collaboration with key community, business, and policy partners to include the perspectives of human and non-human inhabitants.

We will produce the following outputs from the research: new methods for decentering the human in smart cities, new digital and data visualisation prototypes, new artworks and a book, open source toolkit and data sets, practical guidelines for designing more-than-human smart cities in for industry, policy and with communities, an interdisciplinary workshop and cross-sector symposium for the general public.

We will also conduct public engagement and dissemination activities that include art commissions and an exhibition that will help to deliver a transformational agenda to the wider public and create impact at scale.