In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
The EU Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSPD) requires the member states (MS) to pursue Blue Growth while ensuring good environmental status (GES) of sea areas. An ecosystem-based approach (EBA) should be used for the integration of the aims. However, the MSPD does not specify how the MS should arrange their MSP governance, which has led to a variety of governance arrangements and solutions in addressing the aims. We analysed the implementation of the MSPD in Finland, to identify conditions that may enable or constrain the integration of Blue Growth and GES in the framework of EBA. MSP in Finland is an expert-driven regionalized approach with a legally non-binding status. The results suggest that this MSP framework supports the implementation of EBA in MSP. Yet, unpredictability induced by the non-binding status of MSP, ambiguity of the aims of MSP and of the concept of EBA, and the need to pursue economic viability in the coastal municipalities may threaten the consistency of MSP in both spatial and temporal terms. Developing MSP towards a future-oriented adaptive and collaborative approach striving for social learning could improve the legitimacy of MSP and its capacity to combine Blue Growth and GES. The analysis indicates, that in the delivery of successful MSP adhering to the principles of EBA should permeate all levels of governance. The study turns attention to the legal status of MSP as a binding or non-binding planning instrument and the role the legal status plays in facilitating or constraining predictability and adaptability required in MSP.
MULTIFILE
The number of people who combine work and unpaid care is increasing rapidly as more people need care, public and private care systems are progressively under pressure and more people are required to work for longer. Without adequate support, these working carers may experience detrimental effects on their well-being. To adequately support working carers, it is important to first understand the challenges they face. A scoping review was carried out, using Arksey and O’Malley's framework, to map the challenges of combining work and care and solutions described in the literature to address these challenges. The search included academic and grey literature between 2008 and 2018 and was conducted in April 2018, using electronic academic databases and reference list checks. Ninety-two publications were mapped, and the content analysed thematically. A conceptual framework was derived from the analysis which identified primary challenges (C1), directly resulting from combining work and care, primary solutions (S1) aiming to address these, secondary challenges (C2) resulting from solutions and secondary solutions (S2) aiming to address secondary challenges. Primary challenges were: (a) high and/or competing demands; (b) psychosocial/-emotional stressors; (c) distance; (d) carer's health; (e) returning to work; and (f) financial pressure. This framework serves to help those aiming to support working carers to better understand the challenges they face and those developing solutions for the challenges of combining work and care to consider potential consequences or barriers. Gaps in the literature have been identified and discussed.
