Current Research Projects
Community-Based Social Enterprises
Power to Change commissioned a team from the University of Westminster, Delft University of Technology and Stockholm University to carry out a comparative study of community-based social enterprise (CBSE) in England, the Netherlands and Sweden. National policy was reviewed and three case studies were selected from each country, in order to provide an evidence base for making comparisons and drawing out more general conclusions about the development of the sector.
Advanced Decision Support For Smart Governance (SmartGov)
The SmartGov project seeks to strengthen contemporary urban governance by offering decision support and two-way communication between citizens, governments and other stakeholders in (Smart) Cities. There is a huge, but underdeveloped potential of Linked Open Data and Social Media as crowdsourcing tools that complement regular data collection for decision-making. SmartGov will innovatively integrate these data sources with Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs), to enable quantitative modelling of complex problems and simulation of dynamic behaviour of factors underlying these problems. Hence, decision-makers and citizens can effectively utilize (currently inaccessible) Open Data, Social Media feeds and expert-based FCMs to simulate impacts of different scenarios and to improve two-way communication between governments and citizens.
Resituating The Local in Cohesion and Territorial Development (RELOCAL)
Spatial justice involves the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them. As part of addressing the challenge of uneven spatial development, territorial cohesion, along with social and economic cohesion, is a major goal of European policy.
RELOCAL project proposes bottom-up perspective within a multilevel context. It departs from the basic premise that localities and their functional spaces represent the contextual nexus where the relationship between individuals and spatial justice unfolds. Therefore, the principal rationale of the RELOCAL project is to contribute to conceptually and empirically enhancing the knowledge base on spatial justice and territorial inequalities and it also contributes to identifying policies promoting spatial justice and socio-economic well-being at various levels of governance.
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