Lead Investigator: Dr. Emilie Tran, Prof. David Vallat (Sciences Po Lyon)

In collaboration with:

Work package 3 develops a form of experiential learning, on the basis that students are legitimate research participants in the object of the Smart city. The international case study will witness students from HKBU join their contemporaries from Sciences Po Lyon (France), Loughborough (UK) and Virginia (US) in a collective research venture in the context of the Lyon Public Factory. The Public Factory refers to a new Fab Lab, in the main funded by the Lyon City government, which is designed to lessen the divide between research and teaching and learning.

Building on the recent dual degree agreement with Sciences Po Lyon, student assistants in the team engage in co-constructing policy reports for stakeholders based in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region of France. HKBU students in Lyon participate in the activities of the Lyon Public factory, an innovative venture, whereby final year students are engaged in producing policy papers for clients, mainly local and regional authorities. HKBU and Lyon students work jointly on the case in academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22.

HKBU students and the Lyon Institute of Political Studies, France, have already came together in a virtual class in order to write a policy report (as below) on the role of public hospitals during the COVID19 crisis*, which has been used and partly presented by Prof. David Vallat, the Head of the Lyon Public Factory, at the conference on Transnational and Transdisciplinary Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic. In discussion with the Design Team of the Public Factory, one group studies Lyon as the French Smart City. In 2018, Lyon was selected as the French Smart City champion, as the metropolis with the most advanced form of digital governance in France, as well as being a dynamic metropolis at the heart of the four motor regions of Europe (Cole and Lafferre, 2015; Parnet, 2020).

In their reports for stakeholders, the 2020-21 cohort focused on the participatory potential of the Smart City, both in general and in terms of the Lyon case. In general terms, the group considered the participatory claims of smart technologies: does technological co-creation create new forms of involvement in urban governance via participatory budgeting, focus groups, popular consultations, freedom of information and using feedback loops to improve policy implementation (Soonhee & Jooho, 2012; Lee & Meene, 2012). They engaged a specific case of Smart Governance with a mobility theme (municipal bike sharing, subject to final approval). Although we have planned an Open Walked Event Experiment for the same cohort in Hong Kong in 2021-22, the ongoing COVID19 pandemic restricted the possibility of this event.