Digital self-determination: Kiezkarthograph

With our concept study of the Kiezkarthograph, we are developing a solution approach with which we want to make citizens active co-creators of data-driven urban development. A digital dashboard gives the residents of a neighbourhood the opportunity to understand the information basis of urban planning decisions and to bring their own perspective into the planning processes. A central element is the possibility to enrich the information basis for urban planning decisions with their own data via a data donation.

Like many decision-making mechanisms, urban planning is increasingly based on digital data. However, depending on the project, the data situation for the decisive actors (e.g. urban planners) often varies. On the one hand, there are legal, technical and organisational hurdles to consolidate already existing information across different storage locations and formats, to process it in a meaningful way and to apply it. On the other hand, the information basis for planners is not yet available to a sufficient extent and in sufficient detail. This applies, for example, to information about where citizens like to spend time in urban spaces and where they don’t (and for what reasons), or about routes in neighbourhoods that are perceived as convenient or inconvenient. Such information about everyday lifestyles and preferences of citizens can hardly be collected by an urban administration with conventional means for a variety of reasons. For example, it may be too time-consuming to collect information on CO2 pollution in neighbourhoods. There may also be data protection reasons for not doing so. For example, data that allow deep insights into the private lives of citizens (e.g. movement data) can often only be collected with their consent – or the data can be anonymised, which, however, entails a considerable loss of information.

Due to these difficulties, urban planning decisions are often made on the basis of information that only inadequately reflects the interests and needs of citizens and thus does not optimally achieve the objective urban planning goals and is even perceived as disadvantageous from the perspective of many citizens. With our concept study of a digital citizens’ dashboard, we are developing a solution approach with which we would like to make citizens active co-creators of data-driven urban development. The dashboard gives the residents of a neighbourhood the opportunity to understand the information basis of urban planning decisions and to feed their own perspective into the planning processes. A central element is the possibility to enrich the information basis for urban planning decisions with their own data and to influence it in this way. Be it the jogging route or the way to work by bicycle. Be it the measurement of air quality at their own kitchen window or data from connected vehicles that they use (or would like to use) in their daily life and work. The dashboard can also support informational self-determination vis-à-vis private-sector actors who help shape urban space. For example, citizens could use the dashboard to centrally control which shops in their neighbourhood they would like to receive geolocalised advertising or offers for. A data trustee ensures that the data is not misused for other purposes.

Citizens can donate via two basic mechanisms: generating new data or transferring existing data to the data donation. The design of the data donation is based on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in particular using the Data Protection by Design approach (Art. 25 GDPR).

The data donation will be embedded in a digital citizen dashboard and a digital participation platform with urban and citizen-driven ideas and concepts for the further development of the neighbourhood. This will enable citizens to understand the concrete benefits of donating data and to actively shape the urban planning processes.

Special attention is paid to the trustworthy handling of data in the data donation process. The central starting point is the digital self-determination of citizens. For this purpose, the existing data basis for urban planning decisions is first made visible in the digital citizen dashboard via a suitable visualisation. On this basis, the digital participation platform aims to keep the inhibition threshold for active participation of citizens as low as possible. A direct contribution is the possibility to influence the decisions with one’s own evaluation of the proposed projects (by evaluating existing initiatives or proposing one’s own initiatives). Inevitably, depending on the technical design, more or less personal data is already collected. The importance of the contribution of one’s own information to the active shaping of one’s own living space is finally realised through the possibility of specifically contributing one’s own data to the decision-making basis of urban planning projects. The central design principle of the dashboard is thus to make the benefits of their data visible to citizens through an appropriate visual design – and to enable this contribution in accordance with data protection by design (see Art. 25 of the GDPR).

In particular, efficient control options for data release are provided with regard to the data collected, the purposes of use and the recipients of the data. Methodologically, this is done through an interdisciplinary combination of legal concepts and methods (with a focus on the requirements of the GDPR) with methods and concepts of human interaction design research. The digital citizen dashboard addressed in this concept study only represents the elements of the solution approach that are visible to citizens. In order to meet the data protection requirements at the system-technical and organisational level, the infrastructure behind the dashboard would probably have to be designed via a trustee. This trustee is responsible for monitoring that the data is only used by the various actors for the permitted purposes.