WBUR: “In the spring of 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published a seminal article in The Atlantic Monthly titled “Broken Windows.”
The piece focused public attention on a long-simmering theory in urban sociology: that broken windows, graffiti and other signs of neighborhood decay are correlated with — and may even help cause — some of the biggest problems in America’s cities.
Wilson and Kelling focused on the link to crime, in particular; an abandoned car, they argued, signals that illicit behavior is acceptable on a given block….Some researchers have poked holes in the theory — arguing that broken widows, known in academic circles as “physical disorder,” are more symptom than cause. But there is no disputing the idea’s influence: it’s inspired reams of research and shaped big city policing from New York to Los Angeles…
But a new study out of the Boston Area Research Initiative, a Harvard University-based collaborative of academics and city officials, suggests a new possibility: a cheap, sprawling and easily updated map of the urban condition.
Mining data from Boston’s constituent relationship management (CRM) operation — a hotline, website and mobile app for citizens to report everything from abandoned bicycles to mouse-infested apartment buildings — researchers have created an almost real-time guide to what ails the city…
But a first-of-its-kind measure of civic engagement — how likely are residents of a given block to report a pothole or broken streetlight? — yields more meaningful results.
One early finding: language barriers seem to explain scant reporting in neighborhoods with large populations of Latino and Asian renters; that’s already prompted targeted flyering that’s yielded modest improvements.
The same engagement measure points to another, more hopeful phenomenon: clusters of citizen activists show up not just in wealthy enclaves, as expected, but in low-income areas.”
Beyond Code in the Tomorrow City
Article in the Next City: “Since 2009, the San Francisco-based non-profit Code for America has embedded its budding techies in one-year fellowships with city halls around the country. The goal: To build apps that make city governments run more effectively and bolster engagement between citizens and civil servants. But even Code founder Jennifer Pahlka — who hatched the idea for her organization over beers in Flagstaff, Ariz. and will soon take a year off herself to serve as a White House chief technology officer — admits that apps alone can’t solve the world’s problems. That might explain why the group’s mission is in flux, with hard questions and new projects pushing the increasingly high-profile group into its own 2.0 moment. Journalist Nancy Scola goes inside the Code for America universe, talking to believers and skeptics alike to find out how the organization is evolving and what that means for the future of the civic tech movement and cities at large.
The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism
New paper by Rob Kitchin from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) – NIRSA: “‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities. The paper details a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism”
City Data: Big, Open and Linked
Working Paper by Mark S. Fox (University of Toronto): “Cities are moving towards policymaking based on data. They are publishing data using Open Data standards, linking data from disparate sources, allowing the crowd to update their data with Smart Phone Apps that use Open APIs, and applying “Big Data” Techniques to discover relationships that lead to greater efficiencies.
One Big City Data example is from New York City (Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). Building owners were illegally converting their buildings into rooming houses that contained 10 times the number people they were designed for. These buildings posed a number of problems, including fire hazards, drugs, crime, disease and pest infestations. There are over 900,000 properties in New York City and only 200 inspectors who received over 25,000 illegal conversion complaints per year. The challenge was to distinguish nuisance complaints from those worth investigating where current methods were resulting in only 13% of the inspections resulting in vacate orders.
New York’s Analytics team created a dataset that combined data from 19 agencies including buildings, preservation, police, fire, tax, and building permits. By combining data analysis with expertise gleaned from inspectors (e.g., buildings that recently received a building permit were less likely to be a problem as they were being well maintained), the team was able to develop a rating system for complaints. Based on their analysis of this data, they were able to rate complaints such that in 70% of their visits, inspectors issued vacate orders; a fivefold increase in efficiency…
This paper provides an introduction to the concepts that underlie Big City Data. It explains the concepts of Open, Unified, Linked and Grounded data that lie at the heart of the Semantic Web. It then builds on this by discussing Data Analytics, which includes Statistics, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Finally we discuss Big Data as the extension of Data Analytics to the Cloud where massive amounts of computing power and storage are available for processing large data sets. We use city data to illustrate each.”
Introducing the 21st-Century City Hall
GovTech: “Here are five platforms that are helping redefine civic engagement.
Neighborland: A new way to rally residents
If you’ve ever tried drumming up support for a neighborhood project, you know firsthand how difficult the effort can be. From diverse work schedules to just plain indifference, capturing a community’s attention and rallying residents on an issue can seem impossible at times. Neighborland was created to make that task easier.
The online social engagement platform helps citizens and public officials connect on ideas and plans for a community. After creating a profile on Neighborland, users can post questions or ideas using words and pictures. The posts can be categorized by topic, and users can suggest related actions such as fundraisers and meetings….
Textizen: An easier way to give opinions
Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, struggled to collect feedback from parents. To simplify the process, the district deployed Textizen, which makes sharing comments and responding to survey questions as easy as sending a text message….
Voterheads: Early warning on important issues
It’s a scenario every local government is likely familiar with: There’s a council meeting and while decisions are being made on behalf of everyone in the area, only a small percentage of the population participates in the process. But once a decision is made, citizens complain about the result….Voterheads, a free online engagement platform that alerts citizens via email when their city, county or school board is discussing a topic that they’re interested in. Using a sliding scale, users indicate their degree of opposition or support of a topic like taxes, at which point the system decides if or how quickly that person should be notified about an upcoming public meeting….
Community PlanIt: A game with real-world results
Eric Gordon, an Emerson College professor, creates games and other digital tools that energize civic participation. He runs the university’s Engagement Game Lab and develops programs to make community planning fun and interactive for citizens.
One of his creations is Community PlanIt, an online game that solicits comments from residents about their neighborhoods. City administrators analyze the feedback to make more informed choices about community development….
Open Town Hall: Letting cooler heads prevail
Democracy is a messy process. James Madison said that faction and discord are “sown in the nature of man,” and have “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” Winston Churchill once noted, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”…Peak Democracy’s Open Town Hall moves the public meeting process online, acknowledging some 21st-century realities and offering a few other advantages too….Open Town Hall requires registration, and the topics are presented by the jurisdiction. Rather than restricting input, said Cohen, it broadens the appeal of participation and brings in many more moderate views. Open Town Hall also requires a geocoded address so that input on an issue can be evaluated based on its location. The names and locations view can be turned on or off, depending on the issue and the jurisdiction’s wishes….
3 Platforms to Watch
Placehood.org: Billed as a “virtual place to discuss real places that you want to see transformed,” Placehood connects citizens, developers and city planners. The goal is to repurpose or improve underutilized properties, while letting users comment about a place, post improvement ideas, add images and gather support.
Outline.com: This platform visualizes a public policy’s impact on the state or local economy by simulation. Outline lets citizens perform what-if analyses on budgets and policies and provide feedback to the government. The simulator is being piloted in Massachusetts, and the company hopes to grow the number of users this summer.
PlaceSpeak: Launched in Canada, the online community consultation website connects citizens with local issues. Users’ addresses are verified, allowing the government or organization to specify areas where it would like to get feedback from or generate ideas about.”
Quantifying Our Cities, Ourselves
David Sasaki in Next City: “Over the past few years a merry band of geeks from around the world has given rise to the movement of the quantified self. The mission, as the geeks explain it, is “self knowledge through numbers.” Vanity Fair sarcastically calls them “weirder, hive minder weight watchers.”
The basic premise of the quantified self is perhaps best summed up by a popular slogan from business consultant Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.” If we aspire to run faster, then we must use a stopwatch to time our pace. If we want to lose weight, then we must buy a scale to measure our progress until we reach our goal. Modern self-trackers have the advantages of apps that make it possible to quantitatively analyze sleep, moods, finances, vital signs and even amino acids, all without consulting a single other person….
What if we were to apply the model of the quantified self to the development of our cities? It’s a question that appears to be gaining steam. Esther Dyson, an influential angel investor and technology analyst, has observed the emergence of a suite of applications that enable citizens and governments to monitor the “health” of their communities.
Civic Insight, for example, has partnered with New Orleans to enable citizens to monitor what the local government is doing to address blight. On Monday, the project was announced as one of eight winners of the 2013 Knight News Challenge, which means that the software will be expanding for use in other cities. Yelp has partnered with New York and San Francisco to make restaurant inspection data available on restaurant profile pages. (Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago have already committed to making their restaurant inspection data available using the same standard.) The Daily Brief allows residents of Baltimore, Bloomington and Boston to monitor all the 311 service requests made by citizens each day.”
Visualizing 3 Billion Tweets
Eric Gundersen from Mapbox: “This is a look at 3 billion tweets – every geotagged tweet since September 2011, mapped, showing facets of Twitter’s ecosystem and userbase in incredible new detail, revealing demographic, cultural, and social patterns down to city level detail, across the entire world. We were brought in by the data team at Gnip, who have awesome APIs and raw access to the Twitter firehose, and together Tom and data artist Eric Fischer used our open source tools to visualize the data and build interfaces that let you explore the stories of space, language, and access to technology.
This is big data, and there’s a significant level of geographic overlap between tweets, so Eric wrote an open-source tool that de-duplicated 2.7 billion overlapping datapoints, leaving 280 million unique locations…”
Brazilian Students Dig for Corruption (Video)
New York Times Video: “Student protesters at a public university in Rio de Janeiro are teaching each other how to expose data about the city’s transport system.”
Brazilian Students Dig for Corruption
Student protesters at a public university in Rio de Janeiro are teaching each other how to expose data about the city’s transport system.
When Ordinary Americans Accomplish What the Government Can’t
Ronald Brownstein in The National Journal: “Washington may be paralyzed by partisanship, but across the country, grassroots innovators are crafting solutions to our problems….This special issue of National Journal celebrates these pragmatic problem-solvers in business, the civic sector, local government, and partnerships that creatively combine all three. At a time of endemic stalemate in the nation’s capital, think of it as a report from the America that works (to borrow a recent phrase from The Economist)….
Another significant message is that the communications revolution, by greatly accelerating the sharing of ideas, has produced a “democratization of innovation,” as author Vijay Vaitheeswaran put it in his 2012 book, Need, Speed, and Greed. This dynamic has simultaneously allowed breakthroughs to disseminate faster than ever and empowered more people inside companies and communities to tackle problems previously left to elites. “One of the most interesting stories in social change today is how much creative problem-solving is emerging from citizens scattered far and wide who are taking it upon themselves to fix things and who, in many cases, are outperforming traditional organizations,” David Bornstein, founder of the Dowser.org website that tracks social innovation, wrote in The New York Times last year. Our honoree Eric Greitens, the former Navy SEAL who founded The Mission Continues for other post-9/11 veterans, personifies this trend. Across the categories, many honorees insist they have pursued new approaches in part because they could no longer wait for Washington to address the problems they face. In a world where barriers to the dispersal of ideas are crumbling, waiting for elites to propose answers may soon seem as outdated as waiting for a dial-up connection to the Internet.
The third conclusion limits the first two. Even many of the most dynamic grassroots innovations will remain isolated islands of excellence in this continent-sized society without energy and amplification from the top. Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, notes the federal government is unavoidably a major force on many of the challenges facing America, particularly reforming education, health care, and training; developing regional economic strategies; and providing physical and digital infrastructure. Washington need not direct or control the response to these problems, but change on a massive scale is always harder without stronger signals and incentives than the federal government has provided in recent years. “It is possible to feed change aggressively from the bottom,” Kettl says. “[But] the federal government, for better or worse, inevitably is involved…. There’s a natural limit in what’s possible to bubble up from the bottom….
Special issue at https://web.archive.org/web/2013/http://www.nationaljournal.com/back-in-business ”
Data-Smart City Solutions
Press Release: “Today the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School announced the launch of Data-Smart City Solutions, a new initiative aimed at using big data and analytics to transform the way local government operates. Bringing together leading industry, academic, and government officials, the initiative will offer city leaders a national depository of cases and best practice examples where cities and private partners use analytics to solve city problems. Data-Smart City Solutions is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Data-Smart City Solutions highlights best practices, curates resources, and supports cities embarking on new data projects. The initiative’s website contains feature-length articles on how data drives innovation in different policy areas, profile pieces on municipal leaders at the forefront of implementing data analytics in their cities, and resources for interested officials to begin data projects in their own communities.
Recent articles include an assessment of Boston’s Adopt-a-Hydrant program as a potential harbinger of future city work promoting civic engagement and infrastructure maintenance, and a feature on how predictive technology is transforming police work. The site also spotlights municipal use of data such as San Francisco’s efforts to integrate data from different social service departments to better identify and serve at-risk youth. In addition to visiting the initiative’s website, Data-Smart City Solutions’ work is chronicled in their newsletter as well as on their Twitter page.”