THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: Stakeholder Engagement and Network Science in Urban Research

Due to a growing social and physical complexity, contemporary cities reveal the profound necessity of scientific approaches, adjusted to the conditions of global transformations and dynamic patterns of urban development. In my thesis, I’m using Stakeholder Engagement, Actor-Network Theory and Agent-Based Modeling, to find the most relevant scenario engaging all stakeholders in Smart-City decision-making.

I use scale-free model of network to represent Actors and Agents influences in decision-making on Smart-City

In my article “Civil Society: Futures of Citizenship and Democracy through Digital Perspective” I depict a post-democracy state for the oldest democracies , which features a crisis in citizenship where the liberalization of the economy, the advent of new Information and Communication Technologies, generational changes in traditional politics, the widespread social networks and a growing mistrust against the leaders, results in a decentralization of powers and new governance forms where no stakeholder, neither individual or group, can imagine get enough power to take decisions without being confronted to the other actors oppositions. This state of fact calls for a renewal of democracy fundamentals: the creation of temporary common consensus in decision-making, which in contemporary unprecedented scales of citizenships makes governance more and more complex.