Project objectives Radicalisation research leads to ethical and legal questions and issues. These issues need to be addressed in way that helps the project progress in ethically and legally acceptable manner. Description of Work The legal analysis in SAFIRE addressed questions such as which behavior associated with radicalisation is criminal behaviour. The ethical issues were addressed throughout the project in close cooperation between the ethicists and the researchers using a method called ethical parallel research. Results A legal analysis was made about criminal law and radicalisation. During the project lively discussions were held in the research team about ethical issues. An ethical justification for interventions in radicalisation processes has been written. With regard to research ethics: An indirect informed consent procedure for interviews with (former) radicals has been designed. Practical guidelines to prevent obtaining information that could lead to indirect identification of respondents were developed.
Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.
As multifunctional places that combine shopping and hospitality with public space and residential functions, urban consumption spaces are sites where different normative orders surface and sometimes clash. In Amsterdam, such a clash emerged over touristification of consumption spaces, eroding place attachment for local residents and urging the city government to take action. Based on policy analysis and interviews with entrepreneurs and key informants, we demonstrate how Amsterdam’s city government is responding to this issue, using legal pluralism that exists within formal state law. Specifically, the city government combines four instruments to manage touristification of consumption spaces, targeting so-called tourist shops with the aim to drive them out of the inner city. This strategic combination of policy instruments designed on various scales and for different publics to pursue a local political goal jeopardizes entrepreneurs’ rights to legal certainty. Moreover, implicitly based on class-based tastes and distrust towards particular minority groups of entrepreneurs, this policy strategy results in institutional discrimination that has far-reaching consequences for entrepreneurs in itself, but also affects trust relations among local stakeholders.
Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficiently managed cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers now call for human and public values in tech development, ethics guidelines for trustworthy A.I., and cities for digital rights. In a democratic society, these technologies should be understandable for citizens (transparency) and open for scrutiny and critique (accountability). When implementing such public values in smart city technologies, professionals face numerous knowledge gaps. Public administrators find it difficult to translate abstract values like transparency into concrete specifications to design new services. In the private sector, developers and designers still lack a ‘design vocabulary’ and exemplary projects that can inspire them to respond to transparency and accountability demands. Finally, both the public and private sectors see a need to include the public in the development of smart city technologies but haven’t found the right methods. This proposal aims to help these professionals to develop an integrated, value-based and multi-stakeholder design approach for the ethical implementation of smart city technologies. It does so by setting up a research-through-design trajectory to develop a prototype for an ethical ‘scan car’, as a concrete and urgent example for the deployment of computer vision and algorithmic governance in public space. Three (practical) knowledge gaps will be addressed. With civil servants at municipalities, we will create methods enabling them to translate public values such as transparency into concrete specifications and evaluation criteria. With designers, we will explore methods and patterns to answer these value-based requirements. Finally, we will further develop methods to engage civil society in this processes.
Urban open space has a huge impact on human health, well-being and urban ecosystems. One of the open spaces where the environmental and ecological challenges of cities manifest the most is the urban riverfront, often characterised by fragmented land use, lack of accessibility, heavy riverside vehicular traffic, and extreme degradation of river hydrology and ecology. More often than not, the current spatial design of the riverfront hinders rather than supports the delivery of ecosystem services and, in consequence, its potential to improve the health and well-being of urban inhabitants is diminished. Hence, the design of riverside open spaces is crucial. Urban and landscape design in those spaces requires instruments that can aid designers, planners, decision-makers and stakeholders in devising spatial interventions that integrate complex environmental and ecological goals in high quality public space design. By recognising the multiple environmental and ecological benefits of green space and water in the city, the project “I surf” applies a set of four design instruments, namely the Connector, the Sponge, the Integrator, and the Scaler. I surf is a three-phased project that tests, validates and updates these instruments through a design-driven research methodology involving two design workshops and expert meetings addressing three different riverside urban spaces in Amsterdam: in the Ij waterfront, along River Amstel, and on a site located on the canal network. The project concludes with an updated and transferrable instrument set available for urban and landscape design applications in Amsterdam and in other Dutch cities crossed by rivers.
In the Netherlands, the theme of transitioning to circular food systems is high on the national agenda. The PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has stressed that commuting to circular food chains requires a radical transformation of the food chain where (a) natural resources must be effectively used and managed (soil, water, biodiversity, minerals), (b) there must be an optimum use of food by reducing (food) waste . . ., (c) less environmental pressure, and (d) an optimum use of residue streams. The PBL also recognizes that there should be room for tailored solutions and that it is important to establish a benchmark, to be aware of impacts in the production chain and the added value of products. In the line of circular food systems, an integrated nature-inclusive circular farming approach is needed in order to develop a feasible resource-efficient and sustainable business models that brings shared value into the food chain while invigorating the rural areas including those where agricultural vacancy is occurring. Agroforestry is an example of an integrated nature-inclusive circular farming. It is a multifunctional system that diversifies and adapts the production while reducing the carbon footprint and minimizing the management efforts and input costs; where trees, crops and/or livestock open business opportunities in the food value chains as well as in the waste stream chains. To exploit the opportunities that agroforestry as an integrated resource-efficient farming system adds to the advancement towards (a) valuable circular short food chains, (b) nature-based entrepreneurship (nature-inclusive agriculture), and (c) and additionally, the re-use of abandoned agricultural spaces in the Overijssel province, this project mobilizes the private sector, provincial decision makers, financers and knowledge institutes into developing insights over the feasible implementation of agroforestry systems that can bring economic profit while enhancing and maintaining ecosystem services.
