Paper by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko: “Despite the fundamental importance of American local governments for service provision in areas like education and public health, local policy-making remains difficult and expensive to study at scale due to a lack of centralized data. This article introduces LocalView, the largest existing dataset of real-time local government public meetings–the central policy-making process in local government. In sum, the dataset currently covers 139,616 videos and their corresponding textual and audio transcripts of local government meetings publicly uploaded to YouTube–the world’s largest public video-sharing website– from 1,012 places and 2,861 distinct governments across the United States between 2006–2022. The data are processed, downloaded, cleaned, and publicly disseminated (at localview.net) for analysis across places and over time. We validate this dataset using a variety of methods and demonstrate how it can be used to map local governments’ attention to policy areas of interest. Finally, we discuss how LocalView may be used by journalists, academics, and other users for understanding how local communities deliberate crucial policy questions on topics including climate change, public health, and immigration…(More)”.
The Role of Community Engagement in Urban Innovation Towards the Co-Creation of Smart Sustainable Cities
Paper by Bokolo Anthony Jr.: “One of the most recent topics in smart cities is community engagement which has been generally deliberated in both industrial and academic literature around the approaches and tools employed in urban environment. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to advocate for community engagement as a key driver that supports the acquisition of knowledge and requirements needed for innovation and creativity towards achieving an equitable community for social sustainability. A semi-systematic review method is adopted to analyze 71 sources from Web of Science and Scopus databases. Secondary data from the literature is extracted and synthesized to provide narrative and descriptive analysis. Findings from this study presents a developed model that can support community engagement for urban innovation by specifying factors that influences community engagement for smart sustainable city development. The model enables citizens, policy makers, government, urban planners, academics, and enterprises in urban environment to connect, interact, engage, and co-create innovative services. More importantly findings from this research provides theoretical evidence on administrative and non-administrative stakeholder’s involvement towards co-creation of urban services towards smart sustainable cities. Furthermore, this study provides recommendation on how community engagement perspective involving different stakeholders can help to achieve resilient technological driven city by supporting sustainable development and ultimately actualizing a socially inclusive urban space…(More)”
Urban AI Guide
Guide by Popelka, S., Narvaez Zertuche, L., Beroche, H.: “The idea for this guide arose from conversations with city leaders, who were confronted with new technologies, like artificial intelligence, as a means of solving complex urban problems, but who felt they lacked the background knowledge to properly engage with and evaluate the solutions. In some instances, this knowledge gap produced a barrier to project implementation or led to unintended project outcomes.
The guide begins with a literature review, presenting the state of the art in research on urban artificial intelligence. It then diagrams and describes an “urban AI anatomy,” outlining and explaining the components that make up an urban AI system. Insights from experts in the Urban AI community enrich this section, illuminating considerations involved in each component. Finally, the guide concludes with an in-depth examination of three case studies: water meter lifecycle in Winnipeg, Canada, curb digitization and planning in Los Angeles, USA, and air quality monitoring in Vilnius, Lithuania. Collectively, the case studies highlight the diversity of ways in which artificial intelligence can be operationalized in urban contexts, as well as the steps and requirements necessary to implement an urban AI project.
Since the field of urban AI is constantly evolving, we anticipate updating the guide annually. Please consider filling out the contribution form, if you have an urban AI use case that has been operationalized. We may contact you to include the use case as a case study in a future edition of the guide.
As a continuation of the guide, we offer customized workshops on urban AI, oriented toward municipalities and other urban stakeholders, who are interested in learning more about how artificial intelligence interacts in urban environments. Please contact us if you would like more information on this program…(More)”.
Why cities should be fully recognized stakeholders within the UN system
Article by Andràs Szörényi and Pauline Leroy: Cities and their networks have risen on the international scene in the past decades as urban populations have increased dramatically. Cities have become more vocal on issues such as climate change, migration, and international conflict, as these challenges are increasingly impacting urban areas.
What’s more, innovative solutions to these problems are being invented in cities. And yet, despite their outsized contribution to the global economy and social development, cities have very few opportunities to engage in global decision-making and governance. They are not recognized stakeholders at the United Nations, and mayors are rarely afforded an international stage.
The Geneva Cities Hub – established in 2020 by the City and Canton of Geneva, with the support of the Swiss Confederation – enables cities and local governments to connect with Geneva-based international actors and amplify their voices.
Acknowledging cities as international actors is not just a good thing to do; it’s critical to developing policies that stand a chance of implementation.
When goals are announced and solutions are devised without the input of those in charge of implementation, unanticipated challenges inevitably arise. In short, including cities is critical to ensuring that decisions are practicable.
The Geneva Cities Hub has thus been empowered to facilitate the participation of cities in relevant multilateral processes in the Swiss city and beyond. We follow several of those and identify where the contribution of cities is relevant.
How cities can play a key role in multilateralism. Image: Geneva Cities Hub
We then work with states and international organizations to open these processes up and liaise with local governments to support their engagement…(More)”.
Citizen Participation and Knowledge Support in Urban Public Energy Transition—A Quadruple Helix Perspective
Paper by Peter Nijkamp et al: “Climate change, energy transition needs and the current energy crisis have prompted cities to implement far-reaching changes in public energy supply. The present paper seeks to map out the conditions for sustainable energy provision and use, with a particular view to the role of citizens in a quadruple helix context. Citizen participation is often seen as a sine qua non for a successful local or district energy policy in an urban area but needs due scientific and digital support based on evidence-based knowledge (using proper user-oriented techniques such as Q-analysis). The paper sets out to explore the citizen engagement and knowledge base for drastic energy transitions in the city based on the newly developed “diabolo” model, in which in particular digital tools (e.g., dashboards, digital twins) are proposed as useful tools for the interface between citizens and municipal policy. The approach adopted in this paper is empirically illustrated for local energy policy in the city of Rotterdam…(More)”.
Civic Switchboard: Connecting Libraries and Community Information Networks
“Civic Switchboard is an Institute of Museum and Library Services supported effort that aims to develop the capacity of academic and public libraries in civic data ecosystems.
We encourage partnerships between libraries and local data intermediaries that will better serve data users, further democratize data, and support equitable access to information. Our project is created an online guide and toolkit for libraries interested in expanding (or beginning) their role around civic information…(More)”.
Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons
Book edited by Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo: “The rise of ‘smart’ – or technologically advanced – cities has been well documented, while governance of such technology has remained unresolved. Integrating surveillance, AI, automation, and smart tech within basic infrastructure as well as public and private services and spaces raises a complex set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions. The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework provides a descriptive lens through which to structure case studies examining smart tech deployment and commons governance in different cities. This volume deepens our understanding of community governance institutions, the social dilemmas communities face, and the dynamic relationships between data, technology, and human lives. For students, professors, and practitioners of law and policy dealing with a wide variety of planning, design, and regulatory issues relating to cities, these case studies illustrate options to develop best practice. Available through Open Access, the volume provides detailed guidance for communities deploying smart tech…(More)”
The 15-Minute City Quantified Using Mobility Data
Paper by Timur Abbiasov et al: “Americans travel 7 to 9 miles on average for shopping and recreational activities, which is far longer than the 15-minute (walking) city advocated by ecologically-oriented urban planners. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of local trip behavior in US cities using GPS data on individual trips from 40 million mobile devices. We define local usage as the share of trips made within 15-minutes walking distance from home, and find that the median US city resident makes only 12% of their daily trips within such a short distance. We find that differences in access to local services can explain eighty percent of the variation in 15-minute usage across metropolitan areas and 74 percent of the variation in usage within metropolitan areas. Differences in historic zoning permissiveness within New York suggest a causal link between access and usage, and that less restrictive zoning rules, such as permitting more mixed-use development, would lead to shorter travel times. Finally, we document a strong correlation between local usage and experienced segregation for poorer, but not richer, urbanites, which suggests that 15-minute cities may also exacerbate the social isolation of marginalized communities…(More)”.
Smart City Technologies: A Political Economy Introduction to Their Governance Challenges
Paper by Beatriz Botero Arcila: “Smart cities and smart city technologies are terms used to refer to computational models of urbanism and to data-driven and algorithmically intermediated technologies. Smart city technologies intend to plan for and deliver new efficiencies, insights, and conveniences on city services. At the same time, in instances when these tools are involved in decision-making processes that don’t have right or wrong mathematical answers, they present important challenges related to cementing inequality, discrimination, and surveillance. This chapter is an introduction to the governance challenges smart city technologies pose. It includes an overview of the literature, focusing on the risks they pose and it includes a case study of surveillance technologies as an example of the adoption and diffusion patterns of smart city technologies. This is a political economy approach to smart city technologies, which emphasizes the adoption, development, and diffusion patterns of these technologies as a function of institutional, market and ideological dynamics. Such an approach should allow scholars and policymakers to find points of intervention at the level of the institutions and infrastructures that sustain the current shape of these technologies to address and prevent some of risks and harms they create. This should help interested parties add some nuance to binary analyses and identify different actors, institutions, and infrastructures that can be instances of intervention to shape their effects and create change. It should also help those working on developing these tools to imagine how institutions and infrastructures must be shaped to realize their benefits…(More)”.
Active Urbanism and choice architecture: Encouraging the use of challenging city routes for health and fitness
Paper by Anna Boldina, Paul H. P. Hanel & Koen Steemers: “Inactivity is one of the major health risks in technologically developed countries. This paper explores the potential of a series of urban landscape interventions to engage people in physical activity. Online surveys were conducted with 595 participants living in the UK by inviting them to choose between conventional pavement or challenging routes (steppingstones, balancing beams, and high steps) using photorealistic images. Across four experiments, we discovered that 80% of walkers claim they would pick a challenging route in at least one of the scenarios, depending on perceived level of difficulty and design characteristics. Where a challenging option was shorter than a conventional route, this increased the likelihood of being chosen by 10%, and the presence of handrails by 12%. This suggests that people can get nudged into physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape. We discuss implications for policy makers and urban designers…(More)”.