This book promotes the exploitation of novel and emerging approaches for mapping environmental and urban informatics empowered by citizens. Chapters are grouped in three sections representing the main subjects. The first section describes data acquisition and modeling. The second section focuses on the quality and reliability of data. The final section presents different methods of environmental monitoring and perception. The book includes diverse case studies from Mexico, the United States and Czech Republic. Topics covered in Citizen Empowered Mapping are of interest for research scholars, practitioners, postgraduates, and professionals from a variety of disciplines including geography, environmental science, geographic information science, social science, and computer science.

"Beyond elections, public participation, and citizen input, democracy must produce wise public policy or we're in real trouble. In Empowering Public Wisdom, lifelong activist Tom Atlee proposes innovative and practical ideas for collecting and distilling the wisdom of ordinary people in order to infuse the political process with common sense and provide people with ownership of the process. Empowering Public Wisdom recognizes currently popular forms of progressive democracy advocates, such as citizen participation and voter education, but suggests that what is really needed is a re-thinking of the very concept of democracy; Atlee advocates the use of ""public wisdom,"" a collective intelligence that can be drawn upon to guide public policy and action. Reaching beyond partisan politics, Atlee explores how a diversity of views can be engaged around public issues in ways that generate a coherent, shared ""voice of the people"" that takes most or all of the population's perspectives and needs into account. Atlee's core approach is through ""citizen deliberative councils,"" in which a small group of people randomly selected creates a ""mini-public"" or a microcosm of the

How do we help students work effectively with others from diverse cultural backgrounds? How do we help them understand the world? How do we prepare them for work and life in an era of globalization, volatility, and uncertainty? Empowering Global Citizens offers educators and parents compelling answers to those questions. This book presents The World Course, a curriculum on global citizenship education designed to equip students with the competencies they need to thrive and contribute to sustainable development in an era of globalization. Drawing on curriculum mapping this book offers a coherent and rigorous set of instructional units to support deep learning of twenty-first-century competencies that develop agency, imagination, confidence, and the skills to navigate the complexity of our times. Drawing on a rich conceptual framework of global education, The World Course scaffolds the development of global competency drawing on project-based learning and other pedagogies that support personalization. The course expands children's horizons, helping them understand the world in which they live in all its complexity from kindergarten to high school. This is done through learning activities at the zone for proximal development for each age group, with activities that foster student agency and a growth mindset.

This book analyzes the ongoing transformation in the “smart city” paradigm and explores the possibilities that technological innovations offer for the effective involvement of ordinary citizens in collective knowledge production and decision-making processes within the context of urban planning and management. To so, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from a range of experts including city managers, public policy makers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) specialists, and researchers. The first two parts of the book focus on the generation and use of data by citizens, with or without institutional support, and the professional management of data in city governance, highlighting the social connectivity and livability aspects essential to vibrant and healthy urban environments. In turn, the third part presents inspiring case studies that illustrate how data-driven solutions can empower people and improve urban environments, including enhanced sustainability. The book will appeal to all those who are interested in the required transformation in the planning, management, and operations of data-rich cities and the ways in which such cities can employ the latest technologies to use data efficiently, promoting data access, data sharing, and interoperability.

“Smart City” programs and strategies have become one of the most dominant urban agendas for local governments worldwide in the past two decades. The rapid urbanization rate and unprecedented growth of megacities in the 21st century triggered drastic changes in traditional ways of urban policy and planning, leading to an influx of digital technology applications for fast and efficient urban management. With the rising popularity in making our cities “smart”, several domains of urban management, urban infrastructure, and urban quality-of-life have seen increasing dependence on advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) that optimize and control the day-to-day functioning of urban systems. Smart Cities, essentially, act as digital networks that obtain large-scale real-time data on urban systems, process them, and make decisions on how to manage them efficiently. The book presents 26 chapters, which are organized around five topics: (1) Conceptual framework for smart cities and communities; (2) Technical concepts and models for smart city and communities; (3) Civic engagement and citizen participation; (4) Case studies from the Global North; and (5) Case studies from the Global South.