Spain has decided it wants to be a "Big Society"

The problem is that the square is just too popular and for many of the city's young inhabitants has become the number one venue to meet friends and hang out until the small hours. One resident said it was like living in a permanent party.

Step in Barcelona's fabrication laboratory, one of a network of 1,200 workshops around the world that allow people to test out new designs and ideas, and build products and new technology using a range of cutting-edge tools. Labs share their designs online so that something built in Boston can be replicated in a lab in Shenzhen.

With the help of some EU money, the lab built low-cost, easy-to-use sensors that can detect air pollution, noise levels, humidity and temperature. Families placed the sensors on their balconies and were able to demonstrate that night-time noise levels - with peaks of 100 decibels - were far higher than World Health Organization recommendations. Armed with this information, the residents went to the city council, pressing them to rethink the use of the plaza.

Well that's fine, but I can't help thinking you don't need any new technology or manufacturing for this. You just need civic officials doing their jobs and monitoring noise when there are complaints.

"We wanted to end this top-down approach where cities go to companies and ask them to build infrastructure and then pretend that is a smart city," said Mr Diez. And along the way, he hopes to build a new type of digital economy, one in which citizens own and control their own data - what he calls "citizen-based infrastructure".

Sensors in a Shoebox was a project set up earlier this year in Detroit, aiming to give local teenagers a say in urban planning. The project provides compact sensor kits that allowed the children to collect a range of data from two different locations - one on the waterfront and the other in a local park. "We took the view that we can't have smart, connected cities without smart and connected young people," said Elizabeth Moje, dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan, which headed up the project.

Air quality was important to the teens - a personal issue for many in a city where one in six residents lives with asthma. The children also learned the limitations of data collection. While they were able to measure the number of people who used a certain area, they also had to go out and see for themselves what type of person used the area, explained Prof Moje.

It was also important that the children saw that the data they collected and the observations they had made could have an impact on city planning. Their recommendations were passed on to representatives from the mayor's office, community groups and Citizen Detroit. "We have to teach children to be critical thinkers, as well as how to be good and productive citizens. This enabled them to learn about their communities, even if they don't go on to be engineers or social scientists," said Prof Moje.

Dr Jennifer Gabrys leads the Citizen Sense project at Goldsmiths, University of London, which aims to research how effective citizen-led sensor projects are. Giving people the tools to collect their own data can sometimes be a "perfunctory gesture to make smart city projects more palatable", she said. "Cities increasingly have so many sensors generating so much data, some of which people have access to and some of which they don't. People may not want everything monitored and who decides and shapes this agenda is a big question for future urban democracy."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41015486