Ecuadorian arts university contributing critical digital humanities and citizen engagement expertise to EU smart city and territory research.
Universidad de las Artes (UARTES) is a public arts university based in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that contributes critical humanistic and social science perspectives to technology and urban research. Their work engages with questions of how digital systems, smart city infrastructures, and platform economies affect citizens, communities, and public life. They bring disciplines such as philosophy of technology, critical software studies, and digital theory into applied EU research consortia, offering a Latin American arts institution viewpoint that is rare in H2020 projects. Their role is typically to provide conceptual grounding, citizen-engagement methodology, and critical analysis of sociotechnical systems rather than technical development.
ReaLsMs (2017-2022) explicitly lists critical software studies and philosophy of technology among its keywords, positioning UARTES as the conceptual/critical voice within that smart city consortium.
ReaLsMs focused on real smart cities with citizen engagement and shared/contributive economies, areas where an arts institution contributes participatory design and social analysis.
NesT (2021-2025, Networking Ecologically Smart Territories) marks a thematic shift toward ecological dimensions of smart territory design, though no detailed keywords were available.
In their first H2020 project (2017), UARTES was firmly rooted in the critical humanities of urban digital life — smart cities examined through the lens of citizen rights, contributive economies, and the philosophy of software systems. Their second project (2021) pivots toward ecology and territory, suggesting a broadening from urban digital critique toward sustainability and land-use dimensions of smart environments. The shift mirrors a wider trend in arts and humanities research moving from digital-culture critique toward climate and ecological questions, though the evidence base here is thin — NesT provides no keywords to confirm the depth of this change.
UARTES appears to be moving from purely digital/urban critique toward broader socio-ecological territory research, which could make them a useful partner for projects that need critical social analysis of green transitions or nature-based smart infrastructure.
UARTES has participated exclusively as a third party in both projects, meaning they join MSCA-RISE staff exchange networks without being a formal beneficiary — they host or send researchers but do not lead or coordinate. With 12 unique partners across 5 countries from only 2 projects, the consortia they join are moderately sized and internationally diverse. This profile suggests they are brought in as a specialist voice representing Latin American arts academia rather than as a core technical partner.
UARTES has reached 12 unique consortium partners across 5 countries through just 2 MSCA-RISE projects, indicating their networks are geographically broad relative to their project volume. As an Ecuadorian institution, they likely serve as a Latin American anchor in European-led research exchange programmes.
UARTES is one of very few Latin American arts universities engaged in H2020 research, giving them a genuinely distinctive profile for consortia that need to demonstrate non-European reach or include Global South perspectives in digital and territorial research. Their combination of arts education, critical software theory, and philosophy of technology is rarely found in EU project networks, where humanities partners tend to come from social science or law departments rather than arts institutions. For MSCA-RISE proposals needing a credible arts/humanities partner with intercontinental staff exchange potential, UARTES fills a hard-to-find niche.
