Smart Urban Intermediaries, 2017-2020

DOI

Qualitative dataset including redacted (anonymised) transcripts of entry and exit interviews in the Smart Urban Intermediaries research project. The purpose of this study was to understand and contribute to the work of people who make a difference in urban neighbourhoods. The UK strand of the project focussed on Birmingham and Glasgow, and this data collection is exclusively from that strand. There were also strands in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, but not funded by ESRC.European cities face complex challenges that demand smart solutions. This project puts urban intermediaries, those people who can bring people and resources together in innovative ways, at the heart of smart urban development and sets out to understand how they create social innovation. We carried out fieldwork in four European cities (Birmingham, Copenhagen, Glasgow and Amsterdam) where we developed collaborative working groups, or 'local labs', which were sources of data as well as sites for learning across projects, fields of practice, cities and countries. The project contributes to understand how intermediaries innovate and generate smart urban development that addresses community priorities, needs and aspirations.

This dataset includes 40 interviews with 20 urban practitioners from public, third and community sectors in the UK. Our cross-national qualitative research design was developed to gain insights into the practices of urban practitioners in four North-Western European cities. We started from a broad interest in practices of agents who were reputed to ‘make a difference’ (Durose et al., 2016). We wanted to empirically understand how they developed, sustained and adapted their work practices. We first identified neighbourhoods where urban development had been targeted, for example through government-led interventions, often related to socio-economic disadvantage, or a reputation for community action. We drew upon the insight of our co-operation partners (national and local organisations knowledgeable in the field of urban governance and regeneration), which informed our selection of Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook (Birmingham), Govan (Glasgow), Nieuw-West (Amsterdam) and Nord Vest (Copenhagen) as our four anchor neighbourhoods. We started by using a ‘snowballing’ technique, initially informed by our co-operation partners, to generate a database of approximately 200 potential participants across the four neighbourhoods. We then worked iteratively to identify urban practitioners to participate in the study. In doing so, we aimed to ensure diversity in both position – including, for example, active citizens, community leaders, elected representatives, front-line workers, social entrepreneurs and artists, as well as relationship to the neighbourhood, for example, living or being professionally engaged there. We recruited a cohort of practitioners that was gender balanced and reflected the neighbourhoods in terms of ethnic diversity. The cohort was more ethnically diverse in Birmingham and Amsterdam than in Glasgow and Copenhagen, reflecting the demographic profile of those cities. Across the sample, there was an under-representation of younger people, which may reflect the time taken to establish a repertoire of practice, but may also be seen as a limitation of the research. We shadowed and interviewed 40 practitioners across the four neighbourhoods over a 30-month period. Before and after the shadowing phase, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand what these practitioners do, how they do it and what enables and hinders them in making a difference. Across the research period, we brought practitioners together locally and cross-nationally in series of interactive workshops to reflect on emerging insights from the research. This resulted in a dataset including notes on around 640 hours of shadowing, 80 reflective conversations, 20 interactive workshops and a total of 80 interviews. This dataset comprises the part of the data that can be shared in open access, namely, the transcripts of the entry and exit interviews. The dataset deposited here only includes material from the UK strand of the project (Birmingham and Glasgow) due to different consortium funders for the Danish and Dutch strands.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-854599
Metadata Access https://datacatalogue.cessda.eu/oai-pmh/v0/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_ddi25&identifier=169c03d9ecceb410400c6c65f723c7d8cbd58da3a0d53ffd9d71d4b9d810e388
Provenance
Creator Escobar, O, University of Edinburgh
Publisher UK Data Service
Publication Year 2021
Funding Reference Economic and Social Research Council
Rights Oliver Escobar, University of Edinburgh; The Data Collection is available for download to users registered with the UK Data Service.
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Text
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences
Spatial Coverage Glasgow, Birmingham; United Kingdom