In this paper, we propose the concept of controversing as an approach for engaging citizens in debates around the datafied city and in shaping responsible smart cities that incorporate diverse public values. Controversing addresses the engagement of citizens in discussions about the datafication of urban life by productively deploying controversies around data. Attempts to engage citizens in the smart city frequently involve ‘neutral’ data visualisations aimed at making abstract sociotechnical issues more tangible. In addition, citizens are meant to gather around issues already defined externally by others. Instead, we focus on how people might become engaged and develop the capacity to shape alternative urban futures. We suggest that making controversial apparently less contentious issues in the smart city allows people to identify their own issues, come together temporarily as a public, imagine alternative possibilities and thus develop capacities for action. In this context, controversies can act as agents of change and open up new spaces for participation and action. We develop the notion of controversing as a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial, and operationalise the term along the dimensions of recontextualisation, meaning-making and agency. We then look at two cases from the mid-sized city of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, first to test the conceptual potential of controversing to expose how frictions shape citizen engagement, and second to analyse how controversing may frame design-oriented methods aimed at involving diverse participants in discussing datafication and defining public values in the datafied smart city.

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In this paper, we present and reflect upon a creative and participatory approach for engaging citizens in imagining desirable “zero”-waste futures that include different values and perspectives. The approach emerged through a 4-month collaboration involving academic researchers and creative professionals and was prototyped in a formerly industrial neighborhood of Utrecht (het Werkspoorkwartier), currently being developed as a creative circular manufacturing area. With our approach, we inquire into and provide an alternative to predominant technology-centered policy visions, which portray the issues of waste as objective challenges that can be addressed through data-driven technological solutions. Such visions neglect many other perspectives and values, particularly those of citizens that face the issue of waste in everyday life, thus providing only a narrow vision of how the future might look like. To gather and articulate different perspectives on alternative “zero”-waste futures, we focus on citizen-science-inspired and speculative design methods to engage people and stimulate imagining futures that bring to light diverse values and perspectives. In the development of the methods, we work in close collaboration with creative practitioners, both in terms of anchoring the research in a real-world context and in terms of combining our different types of expertise. Reflecting on the project, we discuss the potential of our transdisciplinary approach and the co-produced methods to intervene in how we see and imagine alternative futures. We do so by taking “translation” as an analytical lens to understand how different meanings and visions are created through experiential, material, and affective modes of expression. Specifically, we will analyze the translations that occur in the processes of moving from abstract data to matters of concern, and from desirable futures to actionable presents. Looking at these multiple processes through the lens of translation will serve to investigate how different future imaginaries are generated through different materials and modalities of translation, offering different forms of engagement in shaping inclusive urban futures. Translation here will be conceptualized less as a perfect transference of information and more as an open-ended process of paying attention to different values, and identifying those matters for which to care for in our urban futures.