Boston Medical Center, New England’s largest safety-net hospital, occupies a unique position in American medicine. More than 70 percent of its patients identify as people of color, over half live in households earning less than $20,400 a year, and roughly one-third speak a primary language other than English, most commonly Spanish or Haitian Creole. This is precisely the population that bears the heaviest burden of unmet social needs. Prior research has documented that racially and ethnically minoritized groups experience significantly higher rates of food insecurity, housing instability, threats of utility shutoff, and cost-related barriers to medical care compared with White adults. These disparities are not accidents of circumstance; researchers describe them as manifestations of structural violence, the social arrangements embedded within political and economic systems that systematically place certain populations in harm’s way. Any screening tool that fails to account for this reality risks missing the needs it was built to find.

The hospital’s screening program, known as THRIVE, had been integrated into clinical workflows since 2017. But as the years passed, process evaluations revealed a persistent problem: patients frequently struggled to interpret and respond to specific questions during primary care visits, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate data capture. The tool worked on paper but faltered in practice. So between February and August 2023, a team led by researchers at Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine took a fundamentally different approach. They recruited 37 patients who had completed the THRIVE screener during routine primary care visits and invited them to become co-designers, not merely feedback providers. The participants spoke English, Spanish, or Haitian Creole, and the design sessions were conducted in their preferred languages by bilingual facilitators trained in qualitative methods and community engagement.

The mechanics of the initiative reveal how deliberately the team dismantled the usual barriers to participation. Six two-hour design sessions were held in hospital conference rooms after 5:30 in the evening to accommodate work schedules. Patients were recruited through existing advisory councils and clinic-based networks, then supported with transportation arranged through Uber Health, paid childcare when needed, follow-up reminders, and $50 compensation per session plus refreshments. Two sessions were facilitated in English with ten participants, two in Spanish with fifteen, and two in Haitian Creole with twelve. Crucially, the researchers framed participants as experts with lived experience whose time and expertise deserved financial compensation, a framing that stands in sharp contrast to the extractive dynamic that characterizes much clinical research with marginalized communities.

Each session followed a structured and deceptively simple format. After introductions and background on the THRIVE initiative, participants received a printed copy of the existing screening tool and were asked to complete it as though they were sitting in their primary care appointment. This mock screener exercise simulated the real clinical encounter and surfaced confusions that might never appear in a developer’s office. Facilitated discussions then tackled the language, tone, layout, and usability of the form, along with preferences for opt-out options, expectations about how the information would be used, and reactions to new items on social isolation, employment, and education. Participants provided verbal recommendations in their primary languages, documented in real time, with visual mockups and plain-language summaries supporting accessibility across literacy levels.

Three themes emerged with remarkable consistency across all three language groups, and the first was the most sobering: trust and psychological safety. English-speaking participants voiced fears that certain answers could trigger punitive responses, including reports to child protective services or loss of insurance coverage. Spanish-speaking participants noted that some family members, particularly men, might avoid answering altogether due to stigma or shame. Haitian Creole-speaking participants were especially concerned about how their responses could affect their immigration status or legal standing. Across every group, participants demanded clear explanations of how their data would be used and protected. The lesson is uncomfortable but essential: a screening question is never just a question. For patients whose lives intersect with child welfare systems, immigration enforcement, and precarious insurance, the act of disclosure carries perceived risks that designers who have never faced those systems cannot anticipate.

The second theme, clarity and usability, was more prosaic but no less consequential. Participants consistently preferred a single-page screening tool and viewed longer or multi-page forms as burdensome and confusing. They requested larger fonts, cleaner formatting, and clearer instructions about which sections were optional and which were required. Recurrent confusion about the form’s flow, particularly where sections ended or whether both sides of a page needed to be completed, emerged as a persistent barrier. Participants also pushed for plain language and the avoidance of overly technical or repetitive terms. These may sound like minor design quibbles, but in a safety-net setting where a third of patients are navigating the form in a second language, every point of confusion translates directly into missing data and unmet needs.

The third theme, cultural and contextual relevance, produced some of the most concrete redesign recommendations. English-speaking participants asked for the removal of infantilizing language and the reframing of questions that felt accusatory. Haitian Creole-speaking participants stressed the importance of asking about work authorization in a non-threatening manner and called for clarity around the potential immigration consequences of accessing benefits. Spanish-speaking participants highlighted confusion for those who help patients complete forms but are not formal caregivers. On social isolation, participants across all groups supported the inclusion of new questions but suggested alternative phrasing, such as asking whether patients feel connected to their community, to improve clarity and reduce the sting of the inquiry.

The hospital acted on what it heard. The revised THRIVE tool received a rewritten disclosure statement clarifying purpose and confidentiality, questions reframed to begin with the supportive phrasing Do you need support with, and new items capturing housing quality issues, immigration status, financial hardship, and digital health needs. The tool was shortened to 19 data points to reduce respondent burden, its layout was redesigned to guide patients through a more intuitive sequence, and it was paired with multilingual resource guides offering curated, actionable referrals across 15 key domains. The team is now conducting content and psychometric validation of the co-designed instrument, though the published report focuses on the co-design process itself. The authors acknowledge a key limitation: no post-implementation evaluation has yet assessed how the redesigned tool performs in actual clinical practice, leaving an important question for future research.

The implications extend well beyond one Boston hospital. Existing screening instruments, even those described as validated, have not been adequately tested in safety-net settings or in racially and ethnically diverse populations, and there is evidence that some tools under-identify needs among Black patients compared with White patients despite broad clinician consensus on their value. Patients, the research consistently shows, are more willing to disclose sensitive social information when the process feels trustworthy, transparent, and supportive rather than bureaucratic or extractive. The Boston findings align with national priorities including Healthy People 2030 objectives, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Model, and National Committee for Quality Assurance standards for social risk adjustment. Scaling this approach, the authors caution, will require real infrastructure: multilingual facilitation, participant compensation, and institutional commitment to iterative refinement based on community feedback. But the core insight is simple enough to fit on a single-page screener. Screening for social needs is not a data-collection exercise; it is a relational process built on trust, cultural responsiveness, and transparency. Hospitals that treat patients as co-designers rather than data points can identify the barriers of psychological safety, clarity, and cultural relevance before they undermine large-scale implementation, and in doing so, they may finally capture the full picture of what their patients need to be healthy.

Subject of Research: Community-participatory co-design of a multilingual health-related social needs screening tool at an urban safety-net hospital

Article Title: Centering Multilingual Patient Voices in the Co-Design of a Health-Related Social Needs Screening Tool in an Urban Safety-Net Hospital

Article References: Khemraj, U. D., Solomon, P., Eddy, R., Olesinski, E. A., Varela-Poole, K., Phicil, S., Muoto, I., Sandel, M., & De La Vega, P. B. (2026). Centering Multilingual Patient Voices in the Co-Design of a Health-Related Social Needs Screening Tool in an Urban Safety-Net Hospital. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10758-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10758-z

Keywords: health-related social needs, social determinants of health, participatory design, safety-net hospital, health equity, screening tools, multilingual patients, patient engagement, Boston Medical Center, primary care, cultural relevance, psychological safety

The research team, led by Eva Artigues-Barberà and colleagues, set out to test whether a community co-created intervention could shift how young people feel about themselves in an era when social media platforms encourage constant comparison with curated images of other people’s lives. Excessive screen use has been repeatedly linked to poorer self-esteem and body dissatisfaction in adolescents, largely because digital platforms amplify social comparison. Yet most educational interventions have struggled to produce lasting change, and researchers increasingly argue that programs designed without input from the communities they serve often fail to connect with the young people they aim to help.

Bellpuig, a rural municipality in the region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, offered an ideal setting. Rural areas often face limited access to mental health resources, making community-based prevention strategies particularly valuable. The study took place at the Lo Pla d’Urgell institute, where adolescents enrolled in the program participated in educational and participatory activities designed to foster digital balance and promote healthier self-perception. Crucially, the content of these activities was not imposed from above. Through a structured participatory design process, the adolescents themselves, together with the adults around them, shaped what the intervention would look like and how it would unfold.

Methodologically, the study was a quasi-experimental single-group design with measurements taken before and after the intervention. Participants completed validated self-report instruments assessing self-esteem, self-concept, and positive body image at both time points. Because there was no control group, the researchers cannot rule out that some changes might have occurred naturally over time, a limitation common to pre-post designs in community settings. Nevertheless, the statistical approach was rigorous for this type of study. Changes within the group were assessed using two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, a non-parametric method suited to ordinal or non-normally distributed data. Differences in individual change scores between girls and boys were examined with two-sided Mann-Whitney U tests, and the team reported rank-biserial correlations with 95 percent confidence intervals as effect-size estimates, providing a transparent picture of how large the observed changes actually were.

The findings were encouraging. Following the intervention, adolescents showed a moderate improvement in positive body image, self-esteem, and self-concept. In psychological research, a moderate effect is far from trivial; it suggests a meaningful shift in how participants perceived themselves after weeks of engaging with activities they had helped to create. Notably, the improvement appeared to be remarkably equitable. When the researchers compared change scores between girls and boys, they found no notable differences in how much each group benefited, indicating that the intervention worked across sexes rather than favoring one group over another.

However, the baseline data told a more complicated story. Before the intervention began, boys reported higher initial levels of self-esteem and body image than girls. This starting gap is consistent with a substantial body of literature showing that adolescent girls, on average, experience greater body dissatisfaction and lower self-worth, pressures that are often intensified by visual social media platforms and the culture of comparison they foster. The fact that both groups improved to a similar degree suggests the intervention lifted everyone, but it also raises the question of whether targeted approaches might be needed to close the initial gap between girls and boys before or alongside universal programs.

The co-creation element deserves particular attention. Traditional school-based interventions on screen use often rely on top-down messaging: warnings about screen time limits, lectures on cyberbullying, or presentations on the psychological harms of social media. Such approaches frequently meet resistance from adolescents, who may perceive them as out of touch with the realities of their digital lives. By contrast, a co-created program gives young people ownership over the content and format. When adolescents help decide what activities take place, how they are framed, and what goals matter to them, the resulting intervention is more likely to feel relevant and authentic rather than imposed. This participatory logic reflects a broader shift in public health toward ecological models, which recognize that health behaviors are shaped not just by individual knowledge but by families, schools, peer groups, and the wider community environment.

The implications extend beyond one rural town. If community co-creation can produce moderate improvements in self-esteem, self-concept, and body image in a setting with limited mental health infrastructure, the model could be adapted to other communities facing similar constraints. The authors emphasize that the findings offer practical guidance for health professionals, educators, and policymakers who design and evaluate programs aimed at fostering healthy self-perception and digital habits. Rather than prescribing a fixed curriculum, the Bellpuig experience suggests a process: bring together adolescents, families, teachers, healthcare workers, and local stakeholders, and let them collectively define what digital balance means for their community.

Still, important questions remain. The single-group pre-post design cannot establish causality with certainty, and the absence of a control group means that factors such as seasonal effects, natural maturation, or heightened attention from participating in a study could have contributed to the observed improvements. The researchers themselves call for future work to explore the long-term effects of the intervention and to test its adaptability to diverse populations beyond the initial rural Catalan context. Whether the gains in self-esteem and body image persist months or years after the program ends, and whether the co-creation model transfers to urban settings or different cultural contexts, are critical next steps.

What the study does demonstrate is that adolescent mental health in the digital age may be best addressed not by experts talking at young people, but by communities building solutions together. In a period when concerns about screens, social comparison, and youth well-being dominate public debate, the Bellpuig experiment offers a refreshingly constructive counterpoint: when teenagers are treated as partners rather than problems, their self-esteem, self-concept, and body image can move in the right direction, and the whole community learns something in the process.

Subject of Research: Community co-created screen use intervention and adolescent self-esteem, self-concept, and body image

Article Title: A pre–post study of self-esteem, self-concept and body image among adolescents in the context of a co-created community intervention on screen use

Article References: Artigues-Barberà, E., Pollina-Pocallet, M., García-Martínez, E., Sol, J., Pallés, A. A., & Bravo, M. O. (2026). A pre–post study of self-esteem, self-concept and body image among adolescents in the context of a co-created community intervention on screen use. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360373. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360373

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360373

Keywords: adolescents, screen use, self-esteem, body image, self-concept, co-creation, community intervention, digital balance, rural health, Catalonia, participatory design, mental health

The paper, authored by Jonathan Tyler and James Wilson of Barwon Health’s Mental Health, Drugs and Alcohol Service in Geelong, alongside Stephanie L. Bennetts of Deakin University’s Institute for Health Transformation and Rachel M. Tindall of Deakin University and Orygen, presents an integrated Agile co-design model illustrated through reflective analysis of its implementation within a public mental health service in Victoria. The authors’ central claim is architectural rather than cosmetic. Rather than treating co-design as a phase within a conventional improvement project, they argue it should be embedded as an ongoing governance capability, a permanent structural feature of how a service listens, decides and adapts. Agile methods, with their iterative cycles, built-in reflection and tolerance for changing requirements, provide the scaffolding that makes such continuous collaboration operationally feasible.

To understand why this matters, it helps to consider the technical mismatch between traditional project management and the realities of public mental health. Waterfall-style approaches, in which requirements are fixed upfront and delivered in sequential stages, assume that the problem is well understood at the outset and that the operating environment will remain stable. Neither assumption holds in mental health services, where demand fluctuates, workforce pressures shift, and the needs of consumers and carers evolve as reform unfolds. Crucially, service change in this sector must occur alongside ongoing service delivery; clinicians cannot pause care while the system is rebuilt. Agile project management, developed originally for software teams facing exactly this kind of uncertainty, replaces fixed plans with short iterative cycles, frequent review and continuous reprioritisation. Frameworks such as Scrum formalise this into regular ceremonies: planning sessions, stand-up check-ins, reviews and retrospectives that force teams to inspect and adapt their own process.

The evidence base for importing these methods into healthcare is still maturing but increasingly encouraging. A 2024 report in BMJ Open Quality described a multisite home hospital accelerator that used Agile implementation to improve delivery pace and cross-functional collaboration, and a 2022 synthetic scoping review in Applied Sciences documented growing adoption of Agile software development across health systems. Quality improvement science offers a parallel lineage: the plan-do-study-act cycle, long a staple of healthcare improvement, shares Agile’s iterative DNA, and a systematic review in BMJ Quality & Safety found broad evidence that such cyclical methods can drive measurable quality gains. What the Victorian team adds is the fusion of this iterative machinery with co-design’s participatory ethos, so that each cycle is not merely a technical adjustment but a fresh opportunity for consumers, carers and clinicians to shape the direction of change.

That fusion is grounded in a substantial body of research on what co-design actually achieves. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that co-designed, in-person mental health interventions were effective in reducing anxiety and depression symptoms, giving participatory methods an empirical footing beyond principle. Broader reviews of co-production and co-creation in health services, including a 2022 systematic review in BMC Health Services Research, indicate that involving patients and communities mobilises knowledge in ways that top-down redesign cannot, strengthening service relevance, acceptability and trust. Experience-based co-design, pioneered in the United Kingdom and now supported by toolkits from organisations such as the Point of Care Foundation, has demonstrated how systematically gathering patient and staff experience narratives can anchor improvement work in lived reality rather than managerial assumption.

Yet the co-design literature is equally candid about its failures. A 2024 systematic review and thematic synthesis in Health Expectations examined what is known about sharing power in mental health co-production and surfaced persistent concerns about tokenism, with lived experience contributors invited into rooms where the real decisions had already been made. Scholars such as Diana Rose and Jacqui Kalathil have gone further, arguing in Frontiers in Sociology that co-production’s promise of equal partnership is often untenable within institutions that retain control over resources, knowledge and legitimacy. A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Public Health catalogued a bewildering proliferation of co-design concepts, processes, models and frameworks, highlighting how inconsistent definitions complicate both evaluation and replication. Against this backdrop, the Victorian authors position their Agile model not as a replacement for existing co-design frameworks but as a complement, a delivery mechanism that keeps participatory input flowing through continuous system reform rather than being confined to one-off project phases.

The practical context for the model is the reform agenda that followed the Royal Commission, which demanded that lived experience leadership become structural rather than symbolic. The authors’ implementation took place within Barwon Health, a regional service in Geelong whose earlier co-design work, described in papers in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing in 2021 and 2025, documented both the opportunities and the strains of doing this work in a live service environment. The acknowledgements of the new paper credit the members of the Lived Experience and Community Collective, including carer, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and community members, alongside the workforce of the service’s local area, whose contributions shaped the model of care and the improvement work described. That detail matters: the model was not developed in a simulation but in a working public service under real operational pressure.

Technically, the integrated model can be understood through a systems lens. Drawing on the kind of systems thinking popularised by Donella Meadows, the authors treat the service as a set of interlocking feedback loops rather than a machine to be reengineered. Co-design supplies the information channels through which consumer and clinician experience enters the system; Agile supplies the cadence through which that information is converted into decisions, tested, and re-evaluated. Each iteration becomes a feedback loop with a defined rhythm, and the retrospective, the structured reflection at the end of each cycle, becomes the mechanism by which the collaboration itself is improved, not just the service. This is where the model departs most sharply from episodic co-design: the participatory process is itself subject to continuous iteration, so that power-sharing arrangements can be adjusted when they are found to be failing, rather than defended because they were agreed at a project’s launch.

The model also speaks to a stubborn gap in Australian mental health provision, often described in the literature as the missing middle: people whose needs are too complex for primary care but who do not qualify for acute services. A 2025 consensus definition published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry formalised what clinicians have long observed, and Orygen’s policy work has documented the scale of the gap. Services serving this population cannot afford long design cycles during which people fall through the cracks; they need improvement processes that deliver usable change quickly while remaining responsive to feedback. Agile’s emphasis on delivering small increments of working change, rather than waiting for a complete redesign, aligns with that operational reality. Hybrid approaches, blending Agile iteration within broader governance structures, have already found advocates in healthcare leadership circles, suggesting the Victorian model is part of a wider convergence.

None of this resolves the deeper tensions that co-design scholars have identified, and the authors are careful not to overclaim. Their paper is a reflective analysis and a proposed model, not a controlled evaluation, and the authors note that no datasets were generated or analysed in the study. Whether Agile co-design produces measurably better outcomes than other participatory approaches will require the kind of rigorous implementation research that The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on transforming mental health implementation research called for in 2024. But the conceptual contribution is significant at a moment when health systems worldwide, from the NHS’s co-production agenda to New Zealand’s lived experience workforce initiatives, are grappling with how to make participation permanent rather than performative. If the Victorian team is right, the future of co-design may look less like a workshop and more like a heartbeat: a regular, structured pulse of collaboration running through the service indefinitely, turning lived experience from an input at the start of a project into the operating rhythm of the system itself.

Subject of Research: An Agile co-design model for continuous improvement in public mental health services

Article Title: Agile Co-design in Public Mental Health: An Integrated Model for Continuous Service Improvement

Article References: Tyler, J., Wilson, J., Bennetts, S. L., & Tindall, R. M. (2026). Agile Co-design in Public Mental Health: An Integrated Model for Continuous Service Improvement. Community Mental Health Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-026-01733-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10597-026-01733-3

Keywords: co-design, Agile project management, mental health reform, lived experience, participatory design, implementation science, public mental health, service improvement, Victoria Australia, Royal Commission, co-production, healthcare quality

The study, authored by Brady Kennedy of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, Cristian Capotescu of Columbia’s Trust Collaboratory, and Jennifer Laird of Lehman College, challenges the prevailing assumption that trust in smart city technologies can be engineered through better privacy protections, more reliable sensors and clearer communication. Drawing on a thematic synthesis of sociological research on trust alongside the literature on public participation, the authors contend that trust is not an attitude stored in the minds of individuals and measured by surveys, but a property of ongoing social relations between residents and the experts and institutions behind these initiatives.

Smart city initiatives typically combine several layers of technology: distributed sensors and connected devices grouped under the heading of the Internet of Things, which collect data from the built environment; information and communication technologies and cloud computing, which transmit and process that data at scale; and increasingly, artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making, which translate the resulting data into classifications and predictions for operational use. Stated aims range from optimizing public services and improving environmental sustainability to making infrastructure more accessible and cities safer and more livable.

Much existing research on trust in smart cities operates within a risk-benefit logic. Scholars have produced testable models simulating how mistrust hinders deployment, measured public attitudes through surveys, and proposed lists of trust characteristics such as privacy, reliability and fairness that designers can integrate into systems. The assumption is that as initiatives follow prescribed security parameters, privacy standards and governance norms, and communicate those choices transparently, public trust will follow. Kennedy and colleagues call this a technology-centric view that treats trust as flowing in one direction, with the public asked to extend it according to how experts adjust technical features.

In contrast, recent sociological scholarship, particularly from the field of science, technology and society, understands trust as inherently relational. In this account, trust emerges from interactions between trustors, the people doing the trusting; trustees, those in whom trust is placed; and trust objects, the specific focus of the relation at a given time and place. A smart city initiative may be the object of a trust relation, but it is never the trustee: residents extend or withhold trust with respect to the agency, vendor or partnership that designs and operates the system. Crucially, because uncertainty is what makes trust necessary in the first place, its conditions can never be fully engineered away through technical decisions.

The authors further draw on work describing trust as a verb, an active practice of trusting. Trusting is a skillful evaluative process in which residents scrutinize information and conduct rather than placing blind faith in experts. This carries a demand for both sides: the trustor must do the work of assessment, and the trustee must render itself answerable to that scrutiny. Because the trustee in these relations is an institution whose authority is itself at issue, answerability requires that decisions, and the power behind them, be made contestable. Notably, the authors argue that mistrust is not a failure of trust-building but internal to the same relational ties, playing an important role in promoting accountability and public engagement.

From this foundation, the study develops a typology of three participatory roles: the public as co-accessors, co-collectors and co-designers. Each role names the position residents occupy relative to smart city experts, and, because a relation cannot be specified from one side alone, also names what experts must place at stake. As co-accessors, residents shape, monitor and contest how data is gathered and used, while institutions accept the vulnerability of scrutiny. Examples range from static open data dashboards such as London’s DataStore to deeper arrangements like Barcelona’s New Data Deal, which re-envisions collected data as a public commons, and Manchester’s data governance practices, where residents and policymakers negotiate data gathering within structured engagements.

As co-collectors, residents directly produce data for smart city systems, through passive smartphone sensing or active crowdsourcing, while experts accept dependence on evidence they did not themselves produce. The MiraMap platform in Torino, Italy, allows residents to report and track urban problems, research showing it increased trust in government and technology alike. At the furthest extent, residents deploy their own sensors through systems such as HabitatMap AirSense and AirBox to generate environmental evidence independent of official accounts, converting mistrust into an instrument of accountability. As co-designers, finally, residents participate in shaping what is built, with experts relinquishing exclusive control. Iterative workshop approaches that visibly incorporate resident feedback have been shown in follow-up surveys to increase community trust in both the technology and the researchers, while game-based and virtual reality formats help include elderly and non-technical participants.

The framework carries pointed lessons for practitioners. Tokenism and consultation that leave residents feeling passively managed are not failures of technique but interactions in which no reciprocity was established; the mistrust that follows is a proportionate response, as illustrated by the urban data trust proposed for Sidewalk Toronto, constituted by the operator on the operator’s own terms, which failed to generate the mutuality on which trusting depends. The authors also caution that participatory approaches do not encounter a ready-made public but bring one into being, and that formats demanding time, mobility and technical confidence tend to reproduce existing inequalities, underrepresenting marginalized groups. Compensation and trusted community intermediaries can help widen who participates.

Ultimately, the authors argue, smart city professionals should stop treating participation as an instrument for raising approval scores and start treating it as the intentional structuring of reciprocal interaction in which trust, and mistrust, can both operate productively. There is no single modality for building trust, and each initiative will pose context-specific challenges. But without a relational understanding in which experts make themselves genuinely answerable, they warn, even well-intentioned future initiatives will face the same public backlash that has already derailed smart city projects from Toronto to San Diego.

Subject of Research: Trust-building through public participation in smart city initiatives

Article Title: Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building

Article References: Kennedy, B., Capotescu, C., & Laird, J. (2026). Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 177. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Keywords: smart cities, public trust, public participation, sociology of trust, STS, expertise, data governance, participatory design, citizen sensing, urban technology, co-design, mistrust