A South African City Says It’s Putting QR Codes On Informal Settlement Cabins To Help Services. But Residents And Privacy Experts Are Uncertain.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ray Mwareya: “Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system.

Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system…(More)”.

Culver City, Calif., Uses AR to Showcase Stormwater Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Edinger: “Culver City, Calif., and Trigger XR have teamed up to enhance a stormwater project by adding an interactive augmented reality experience.

Government agencies have been seeing the value of augmented and virtual reality for improved training and accessibility in recent years. Now, governments are launching innovative projects to help educate and engage residents — from a project in Charlotte, N.C., that revives razed Black neighborhoods to efforts to animate parks in Buffalo, N.Y., and Fairfax, Va.

For Culver City, an infrastructure project’s signage will bring the project to life with an augmented reality experience that educates the public on both the project itself and the city’s history…

…as is the case with many infrastructure projects, a big portion of the action would happen out of sight, motivating the project team to include “interpretive signage” that explains the purpose of the project through an interactive, virtual experience, Sean Singletary, the city’s senior civil engineer, explained in a written response…

The AR experience will soon be available for visitors, who will be able to learn about the project by reading the information on the signs — printed in both Spanish and English — or by scanning the QR code to get deeper.

There are six different “experiences” in augmented reality that users can participate in. In one experience, users can visualize the stormwater project that exists beneath their feet or watch images of the city’s history float past them as if they were walking through a museum. Another features a turtle that is native to Ballona Creek, which will swim around users as informational text boxes about the turtle’s history and keeping the creek clean pop up to enhance the experience…(More)”.

AI-powered cameras to enforce bus lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Teale: “New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use an automated camera system to ensure bus lanes in New York City are free from illegally parked vehicles.

The MTA is partnering with Hayden AI to deploy Automated Bus Lane Enforcement camera systems to 300 buses, which will be mounted on the interior of the windshield and powered by artificial intelligence. The agency has the option to add the cameras to 200 more buses if it chooses.

Chris Carson, Hayden AI’s CEO and co-founder, said when the cameras detect an encroachment on a bus lane, they use real-time automated license plate recognition and edge computing to compile a packet of evidence that includes the time, date and location of the offense, as well as a brief video that shows the violator’s license plate. 

That information is encrypted and sent securely to the cloud, where MTA officials can access and analyze it for violations. If there is no encroachment on a bus lane, the cameras do not record anything…

An MTA spokesperson said the agency will also use data from the system to identify locations that have the highest instances of vehicles blocking bus lanes. New York City has 140 miles of bus lanes and has plans to build 150 more miles in the next four years, but congestion and lane violations from other road users slows the speed of the buses. The city already uses cameras and police patrols to attempt to enforce proper bus lane use…(More)”.

The end of participatory destination governance as we thought to know it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Eva C. Erdmenger: “In response to rising anti-tourism movements, the role of residents in destination governance has experienced a revival in tourism research. Participatory destination governance approaches have been advocated as problem-solvers for increasing conflicts, yet their implementation is still lacking. Besides a considerable amount of positivist research drafting the best participatory governance model, the socially constructed perspective of those who are supposed to participate has been widely neglected until now. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to reveal residents’ views on participating in tourism activities and destination governance processes. In pursuit of this, a mixed qualitative research method of focus groups and photo elicitation has been deployed in Copenhagen and Munich in 2020 following a social constructionist epistemology. The findings confirm that residents are not willing to participate in destination governance per se due to a lack of time, access, awareness, prioritization, knowledge, qualification, and opportunities. At the same time, residents were interested in a socio-cultural exchange with like-minded tourists and are generally proud to share their city. Ultimately, the perspectives of residents on tourism should be considered for the implementation of an inclusive urban destination governance. Via psychological, political, and social empowerment, destination governance should foster residents’ (1) motivation to connect with other city users (including tourists); (2) opportunity to influence local tourism development if they are affected by it; and (3) ability to benefit from local tourism (at least indirectly). Ultimately, by understanding how and to what extent residents’ are actually willing to participate in tourism and its governance enables tourism professionals to proactively realize a more resilient destination development while mitigating potential social conflicts caused by the renaissance of (over)tourism…(More)”.

Participatory Systems Mapping for Municipal Prioritization and Planning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amanda Pomeroy–Stevens, Bailey Goldman & Karen Grattan: “Rapidly growing cities face new and compounding health challenges, leading governments and donors to seek innovative ways to support healthier, more resilient urban growth. One such approach is the systems mapping process developed by Engaging Inquiry (EI) for the USAID-funded Building Healthy Cities project (BHC) in four cities in Asia. This paper provides details on the theory and methods of the process. While systems mapping is not new, the approach detailed in this paper has been uniquely adapted to the purpose of municipal planning. Strategic stakeholder engagement, including participatory workshops with a diverse group of stakeholders, is at the core of this approach and led to deeper insights, greater buy-in, and shared understanding of the city’s unique opportunities and challenges. This innovative mapping process is a powerful tool for defining municipal priorities within growing cities across the globe, where the situation is rapidly evolving. It can be used to provide evidence-based information on where to invest to gain the biggest impact on specific goals. This paper is part of a collection in this issue providing a detailed accounting of BHC’s systems mapping approach across four project cities…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence in the City: Building Civic Engagement and Public Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Collection of essays edited by Ana Brandusescu, Ana, and Jess Reia: “After navigating various challenging policy and regulatory contexts over the years, in different regions, we joined efforts to create a space that offers possibilities for engagement focused on the expertise, experiences and hopes to shape the future of technology in urban areas. The AI in the City project emerged as an opportunity to connect people, organizations, and resources in the networks we built over the last decade of work on research and advocacy in tech policy. Sharing non-Western and Western perspectives from five continents, the contributors questioned, challenged, and envisioned ways public trust and meaningful civic engagement can flourish and persist as data and AI become increasingly pervasive in our lives. This collection of essays brings together a group of multidisciplinary scholars, activists, and practitioners working on a diverse range of initiatives to map strategies going forward. Divided into five parts, the collection brings into focus: 1) Meaningful engagement and public participation; 2) Addressing inequalities and building trust; 3) Public and private boundaries in tech policy; 4) Legal perspectives and mechanisms for accountability; and 5) New directions for local and urban governance. The focus on civil society and academia was deliberate: a way to listen to and learn with people who have dedicated many years to public interest advocacy, governance and policy that represents the interests of their communities…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Initiatives in City Management: The Perspective of Polish Local Governments

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Paper by Ewa Glińska, Halina Kiryluk and Karolina Ilczuk: “The past decade has seen a rise in the significance of the Internet facilitating the communication between local governments and local stakeholders. A growing role in this dialog has been played by crowdsourcing. The paper aims to identify areas, forms, and tools for the implementation of crowdsourcing in managing cities in Poland as well as the assessment of benefits provided by the use of crowdsourcing initiatives by representatives of municipal governments. The article utilized a quantitative study method of the survey realized on a sample of 176 city governments from Poland. Conducted studies have shown that crowdsourcing initiatives of cities concern such areas as culture, city image, spatial management, environmental protection, security, recreation and tourism as well as relations between entrepreneurs and city hall, transport and innovations. Forms of stakeholder engagement via crowdsourcing involve civic budgets, “voting/polls/surveys and interviews” as well as “debate/discussion/meeting, workshop, postulates and comments”. The larger the city the more often its representatives employ the forms of crowdsourcing listed above. Local governments most frequently carry out crowdsourcing initiatives by utilizing cities’ official web pages, social media, and special platforms dedicated to public consultations. The larger the city the greater the value placed on the utility of crowdsourcing…(More)”.

Crime Prediction Keeps Society Stuck in the Past

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Gilliard: “…All of these policing systems operate on the assumption that the past determines the future. In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, digital media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that the most common methods used by technologies such as PredPol and Chicago’s heat list to make predictions do nothing of the sort. Rather than anticipating what might happen out of the myriad and unknowable possibilities on which the very idea of a future depends, machine learning and other AI-based methods of statistical correlation “restrict the future to the past.” In other words, these systems prevent the future in order to “predict” it—they ensure that the future will be just the same as the past was.

“If the captured and curated past is racist and sexist,” Chun writes, “these algorithms and models will only be verified as correct if they make sexist and racist predictions.” This is partly a description of the familiar garbage-in/garbage-out problem with all data analytics, but it’s something more: Ironically, the putatively “unbiased” technology sold to us by promoters is said to “work” precisely when it tells us that what is contingent in history is in fact inevitable and immutable. Rather than helping us to manage social problems like racism as we move forward, as the McDaniel case shows in microcosm, these systems demand that society not change, that things that we should try to fix instead must stay exactly as they are.

It’s a rather glaring observation that predictive policing tools are rarely if ever (with the possible exception of the parody “White Collar Crime Risk Zone” project) focused on wage theft or various white collar crimes, even though the dollar amounts of those types of offenses far outstrip property crimes in terms of dollar value by several orders of magnitude. This gap exists because of how crime exists in the popular imagination. For instance, news reports in recent weeks bludgeoned readers with reports of a so-called “crime wave” of shoplifting at high-end stores. Yet just this past February, Amazon agreed to pay regulators a whopping $61.7 million, the amount the FTC says the company shorted drivers in a two-and-a-half-year period. That story received a fraction of the coverage, and aside from the fine, there will be no additional charges.

The algorithmic crystal ball that promises to predict and forestall future crimes works from a fixed notion of what a criminal is, where crimes occur, and how they are prosecuted (if at all). Those parameters depend entirely on the power structure empowered to formulate them—and very often the explicit goal of those structures is to maintain existing racial and wealth hierarchies. This is the same set of carceral logics that allow the placement of children into gang databases, or the development of a computational tool to forecast which children will become criminals. The process of predicting the lives of children is about cementing existing realities rather than changing them. Entering children into a carceral ranking system is in itself an act of violence, but as in the case of McDaniel, it also nearly guarantees that the system that sees them as potential criminals will continue to enact violence on them throughout their lifetimes…(More)”.

Algorithm Claims to Predict Crime in US Cities Before It Happens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Carrington York: “A new computer algorithm can now forecast crime in a big city near you — apparently. 

The algorithm, which was formulated by social scientists at the University of Chicago and touts 90% accuracy, divides cities into 1,000-square-foot tiles, according to a study published in Nature Human Behavior. Researchers used historical data on violent crimes and property crimes from Chicago to test the model, which detects patterns over time in these tiled areas tries to predict future events. It performed just as well using data from other big cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the study showed. 

The new tool contrasts with previous models for prediction, which depict crime as emerging from “hotspots” that spread to surrounding areas. Such an approach tends to miss the complex social environment of cities, as well as the nuanced relationship between crime and the effects of police enforcement, thus leaving room for bias, according to the report.

“It is hard to argue that bias isn’t there when people sit down and determine which patterns they will look at to predict crime because these patterns, by themselves, don’t mean anything,” said Ishanu Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study. “But now, you can ask the algorithm complex questions like: ‘What happens to the rate of violent crime if property crimes go up?”

But Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, said in a series of tweets that the focus should be on targeting underlying inequities rather than on predictive policing, while also noting that the research appears to ignore securities fraud or environmental crimes…(More)”

Mapping Urban Trees Across North America with the Auto Arborist Dataset

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Blog: “Over four billion people live in cities around the globe, and while most people interact daily with others — at the grocery store, on public transit, at work — they may take for granted their frequent interactions with the diverse plants and animals that comprise fragile urban ecosystems. Trees in cities, called urban forests, provide critical benefits for public health and wellbeing and will prove integral to urban climate adaptation. They filter air and water, capture stormwater runoff, sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, and limit erosion and drought. Shade from urban trees reduces energy-expensive cooling costs and mitigates urban heat islands. In the US alone, urban forests cover 127M acres and produce ecosystem services valued at $18 billion. But as the climate changes these ecosystems are increasingly under threat.

Urban forest monitoring — measuring the size, health, and species distribution of trees in cities over time — allows researchers and policymakers to (1) quantify ecosystem services, including air quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and benefits to public health; (2) track damage from extreme weather events; and (3) target planting to improve robustness to climate change, disease and infestation.

However, many cities lack even basic data about the location and species of their trees. …

Today we introduce the Auto Arborist Dataset, a multiview urban tree classification dataset that, at ~2.6 million trees and >320 genera, is two orders of magnitude larger than those in prior work. To build the dataset, we pulled from public tree censuses from 23 North American cities (shown above) and merged these records with Street View and overhead RGB imagery. As the first urban forest dataset to cover multiple cities, we analyze in detail how forest models can generalize with respect to geographic distribution shifts, crucial to building systems that scale. We are releasing all 2.6M tree records publicly, along with aerial and ground-level imagery for 1M trees…(More)”