Book by Chun HO WU, George To Sum Ho, Fatos Xhafa, Andrew W. H. IP, Reinout Van Hille: “Collective Intelligence for Smart Cities begins with an overview of the fundamental issues and concepts of smart cities. Surveying the current state-of-the-art research in the field, the book delves deeply into key smart city developments such as health and well-being, transportation, safety, energy, environment and sustainability. In addition, the book focuses on the role of IoT cloud computing and big data, specifically in smart city development. Users will find a unique, overarching perspective that ties together these concepts based on collective intelligence, a concept for quantifying mass activity familiar to many social science and life science researchers. Sections explore how group decision-making emerges from the consensus of the collective, collaborative and competitive activities of many individuals, along with future perspectives…(More)”
The Sky’s Not The Limit: How Lower-Income Cities Can Leverage Drones
Report by UNDP: “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an important role in last-mile service delivery around the world. However, COVID-19 has highlighted a potentially broader role that UAVs could play – in cities. Higher-income cities are exploring the technology, but there is little documentation of use cases or potential initiatives in a development context. This report provides practical and applied guidance to lower-income cities looking to explore how drones can support key urban objectives…(More)”.
Can politicians and citizens deliberate together? Evidence from a local deliberative mini-public
Paper by Kimmo Grönlund, Kaisa Herne, Maija Jäske, and Mikko Värttö: “In a deliberative mini-public, a representative number of citizens receive information and discuss given policy topics in facilitated small groups. Typically, mini-publics are most effective politically and can have the most impact on policy-making when they are connected to democratic decision-making processes. Theorists have put forward possible mechanisms that may enhance this linkage, one of which is involving politicians within mini-publics with citizens. However, although much research to date has focussed on mini-publics with many citizen participants, there is little analysis of mini-publics with politicians as coparticipants. In this study, we ask how involving politicians in mini-publics influences both participating citizens’ opinions and citizens’ and politicians’ perceptions of the quality of the mini-public deliberations. We organised an online mini-public, together with the City of Turku, Finland, on the topic of transport planning. The participants (n = 171) were recruited from a random sample and discussed the topic in facilitated small groups (n = 21). Pre- and postdeliberation surveys were collected. The effect of politicians on mini-publics was studied using an experimental intervention: in half of the groups, local politicians (two per group) participated, whereas in the other half, citizens deliberated among themselves. Although we found that the participating citizens’ opinions changed, no trace of differences between the two treatment groups was reported. We conclude that politicians, at least when they are in a clear minority in the deliberating small groups, can deliberate with citizens without negatively affecting internal inclusion and the quality of deliberation within mini-publics….(More)”.
Shaping the Future of Small and Medium-Sized Cities: A Framework for Digital Transformation
Report by the World Economic Forum: “Digital transformation is becoming a crucial support mechanism for countries as they respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and undergo economic rebuilding and sustained development. For small and medium-sized cities (SMCs), digital transformation can disrupt traditional business models, breakthrough geographical and spatial boundaries, and create new ways to live in the digital era. However, the digital transformation of SMCs presents challenges such as insufficient digital talent, funds, and resources, poor understanding and application of digital technologies, and a lack of intercity interaction and cooperation mechanisms. This report analyses the challenges, needs, and concerns of SMCs undergoing digital transformation in China, Japan, Brazil, and Singapore, proposes a methodological reference model, and suggests actions for various urban stakeholders…(More)”.
Technology of the Oppressed
Book by David Nemer: “Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish.
Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom…(More)”.
The power of data: how Helsinki is improving citizens’ lives
WEF Blog: “New technologies, such as artificial intelligence, internet of things and the metaverse, demand data as the foundational resource for solving systemic challenges, from pandemic response to climate change. Yet despite an abundance of both supply and demand, the evolution from data to insight still presents many challenges.
On the one hand, data often remains siloed within territorial boundaries and corporate environments and is unavailable to benefit people, society and the planet. On the other, the type of governance needed to assure proper oversight, transparency and accountability by those using data is still being understood.
As the data universe expands, it becomes exponentially more complex, requiring solutions that integrate political, economic, social, environmental, technological and, most importantly, human aspects…
Through its partnership with the City of Helsinki, the Forum has convened a global community of technologists, anthropologists and policy and data experts to develop data policy that serves the general public and meets their expectations…(More)”.
Trust but Verify: Validating New Measures for Mapping Social Infrastructure in Cities
Paper by Timothy Fraser et al: “Scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the value of social capital – the connections that generate and enable trust among people – in responding to and recovering from shocks and disasters. However, some communities have more social infrastructure, that is, sites that produce and maintain social capital, than others. Community centers, libraries, public pools, and parks serve as locations where people can gather, interact, and build social ties. Much research on urban spaces relies on Google maps because of its ubiquity and this article tests the degree to which it can accurately, reliably, and effectively capture social infrastructure. In this study, we map the social infrastructure of Boston using Google Maps Places API and then ground truth our measures, mapping social infrastructure on street corners with in-person site observations to evaluate the accuracy of available data. We find that though we may need to use multi-vectored measurement when trying to capture social infrastructure, Google maps serve as reliable measurements with a predictable, acceptable margin of error…(More)”.
Unmet Desire
Essay by I vividly remember March 2020, the month the United States shut down as COVID-19 spread uncontrollably and upended daily life. At the time, I worked at Cornell University in upstate New York. As we adjusted to a new normal, my Cornell colleague Elizabeth Day and I suspected that local leaders were facing unprecedented policy challenges that were not making the major headlines.
We decided to reach out to county policymakers throughout upstate New York, inviting them to share challenges they were facing. We offered to discuss research that might prove helpful. Responses soon poured in.
One county executive was trying to figure out how to provide childcare for first responders. Childcare centers were ordered closed, but first responders could not stay home to watch their kids. The executive needed systematic research on other options. A second local policymaker watched as her county’s offices shuttered and work moved online; she needed research on how other local leaders had used mobile vans to provide necessary services to rural residents without internet. Another county official sought to design a high-quality survey to elicit frank responses from municipal leaders about COVID-related challenges. In this case, she needed to discuss the fundamentals of survey design and implementation with an expert.
These responses led us to engage in an informal collaboration with each of these policymakers. By informal collaboration, I mean a collaborative exchange in which people with diverse forms of knowledge, expertise, and lived experience share what they know with the goal of developing an expanded understanding of a problem—yet still remain autonomous decisionmakers. In these cases, we as researchers brought knowledge about policy analysis and survey fundamentals, and the policymakers brought detailed knowledge about their present needs, local context, and historical challenges. All this diverse information was crucial to chart a way forward that was informed by evidence.
Yet it turns out our interactions were highly unusual. During our conversations, all the policymakers revealed that researchers from colleges and universities in their immediate area had never reached out in this way, and that they had no regular communication with local researchers.
This disconnect is a problem. Local policymakers are responsible for almost $2 trillion of spending annually, and they oversee many areas in which technical knowledge is essential, such as promoting economic development, building and maintaining roads, educating children, policing, fighting fires, determining acceptable land use, and providing public transportation…(More)”.
Transparency of open data ecosystems in smart cities: Definition and assessment of the maturity of transparency in 22 smart cities
Paper by Martin Lnenicka et al: “This paper focuses on the issue of the transparency maturity of open data ecosystems seen as the key for the development and maintenance of sustainable, citizen-centered, and socially resilient smart cities. This study inspects smart cities’ data portals and assesses their compliance with transparency requirements for open (government) data. The expert assessment of 34 portals representing 22 smart cities, with 36 features, allowed us to rank them and determine their level of transparency maturity according to four predefined levels of maturity – developing, defined, managed, and integrated. In addition, recommendations for identifying and improving the current maturity level and specific features have been provided. An open data ecosystem in the smart city context has been conceptualized, and its key components were determined. Our definition considers the components of the data-centric and data-driven infrastructure using the systems theory approach. We have defined five predominant types of current open data ecosystems based on prevailing data infrastructure components. The results of this study should contribute to the improvement of current data ecosystems and build sustainable, transparent, citizen-centered, and socially resilient open data-driven smart cities…(More)”.
Using ANPR data to create an anonymized linked open dataset on urban bustle
Paper by Brecht Van de Vyvere & Pieter Colpaert: “ANPR cameras allow the automatic detection of vehicle license plates and are increasingly used for law enforcement. However, also statistical data generated by ANPR cameras are a potential source of urban insights. In order for this data to reach its full potential for policy-making, we research how this data can be shared in digital twins, with researchers, for a diverse set of machine learning models, and even Open Data portals. This article’s key objective is to find a way to anonymize and aggregate ANPR data in a way that it still can provide useful visualizations for local decision making. We introduce an approach to aggregate the data with geotemporal binning and publish it by combining nine existing data specifications. We implemented the approach for the city of Kortrijk (Belgium) with 43 ANPR cameras, developed the ANPR Metrics tool to generate the statistical data and dashboards on top of the data, and tested whether mobility experts from the city could deduct valuable insights. We present a couple of insights that were found as a result, as a proof that anonymized ANPR data complements their currently used traffic analysis tools, providing a valuable source for data-driven policy-making…(More)”.