As part of the Preparatory Committee Meeting 3 side event, CityNet held a session on the Civic and Youth Participation in the Wired Age on 27th July in Surabaya, Indonesia. The discussion focused on initiatives that aim to make cities inclusive and sustainable with the use of innovative technologies.

Bottom-up stakeholder engagement, participation, education and implementation of digital technologies are crucial to the creation of sustainable cities, as well as enhanced, relevant capacity building for the local governments. This session highlighted examples from cities around the world that have successfully implemented civic and youth participation through innovative technologies to improve urban services and governance, ultimately to develop urban solutions through an inclusive process. The lessons will have relevance for a New Urban Agenda which is ready for implementation.

Cities are aware of urban challenges they’re facing but often lack the capacity to develop and implement technology-based solutions. The objective of this session was for panelists from local governments, private sector, international and civic organizations to showcase best practice initiatives that support bottom-up stakeholder engagement, participation, and the use of digital technologies.

The session has highlighted good examples of sustainable partnerships between private and public institutions, which are CityApp, Block By Block, Pulse Lab Jakarta, Grab, and SDG Action Campaign.

Panelists presented the following initiatives that enable to create people-centered projects with the use of smart technologies:

• Microsoft and CityNet’s joint project CityApp, recently implemented in Sidoarjo Regency, as an excellent example of stakeholder engagement and crowdsource technical solutions (apps) for urban challenges;
• UN-Habitat and Mojang’s collaboration in Block by Block, a public space design initiative using Minecraft as a community participation tool to engage the youth and the poor;
• Pulse Lab Jakarta’s Big Ideas Competition for Sustainable Cities and Urban Communities on engaging youth creativity for innovative urban solutions;
• Public-private partnership on new data to improve mobility services for citizens in rapidly urbanizing cities in Southeast Asia, by Grab; and
• The launch of SDG Action Campaign’s [My World My City] survey tool and the important role of citizen generated data for global goals implementation.

This session concluded with points of recommendations to contribute to the New Urban Agenda of Habitat III.