NUS Cities Lecture Series 26

Our Hearts, Our City - Crystallising Group Shared Values to Inform Policy

People desire certain things in their city. And different people want different things. If a city is not considered a ‘good place to live’, then people will prefer to leave, or live unhappily. City planners love to provide spaces and infrastructures that satisfy all the needs and desires of urban dwellers but…how can they find out what those are? There are thousands of factors. Typically, people don’t know what really satisfies them - what’s really ‘important’ to them - without deep reflection. This intrinsically tacit nature of ‘personal knowledge’ makes it very challenging for city planners to capture – certainly not in questionnaires or surveys, which tend to elicit surface responses.

A different approach is to note that people spend time together in naturally forming groups, and the shared values of those groups can be considered rich manifestations of ‘what is important’ to the people in a city. This lecture will introduce how those shared values can be ‘crystallized’ into tangible, explicit statements with some facilitation assistance. Examples of results for Vienna, Shanghai, and Southampton will be presented for illustration, and possibly some peek previews of results from Singapore. Brief examples of how these ‘group values portraits’ can be used in policy development for health interventions, infrastructure investment, and climate change adaptation, will be given.

Prof. Marie Harder

Prof. Marie Harder is a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University in China since 2011, and University of Brighton in the UK. Her research interests are in the crystallization of shared values of local people for use in urban planning/ resilience/ international development/ ESG/ EIA/ Social Impact. Her team has developed the WeValue InSitu approach which provides a scaffolding process for local groups – civil or expert or community or residential – to crystallise what their existing but usually tacit shared values are. The results are statements that are usually sufficiently concise for use as sustainability indicators where needed. For cities, they have used it to profile the ‘living preferences’ of different groups of people, and thus build up a profile of ‘cultural shared values’. These can then be combined with information from focus groups to produce Conceptual Frameworks of the city on different topics – e.g. Vienna and Shanghai on climate change, and three settlements in the UK for Infrastructure Investments by the government.

Date: 15 April 2025, Tuesday

Location: NUS SDE LT423

Time: 6:30 p.m. SGT - 8:30 p.m. SGT

NUS Cities Lecture Series investigates ideas, policies and projects developed by urban experts, which aspire to create sustainable, resilient, and liveable cities.