The Smart Enough City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
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Open Access Book by Ben Green: “Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself….(More)”.

Artists as ‘Creative Problem-Solvers’ at City Agencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sophie Haigney at The New York Times: “Taja Lindley, a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and activist, will spend the next year doing an unconventional residency — she’ll be collaborating with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, working on a project that deals with unequal birth outcomes and maternal mortality for pregnant and parenting black people in the Bronx.

Ms. Lindley is one of four artists who were selected this year for the City’s Public Artists in Residence program, or PAIR, which is managed by New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. The program, which began in 2015, matches artists and public agencies, and the artists are tasked with developing creative projects around social issues.

Ms. Lindley will be working with the Tremont Neighborhood Health Action Center, part of the department of health, in the Bronx. “People who are black are met with skepticism, minimized and dismissed when they seek health care,” Ms. Lindley said, “and the voices of black people can really shift medical practices and city practices, so I’ll really be centering those voices.” She said that performance, film and storytelling are likely to be incorporated in her project.

The other three artists selected this year are the artist Laura Nova, who will be in residence with the Department for the Aging; the artist Julia Weist, who will be in residence with the Department of Records and Information Services; and the artist Janet Zweig, who will be in residence with the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability. Each will receive $40,000. There is a three-month-long research phase and then the artists will spend a minimum of nine months creating and producing their work….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing a Constitution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Case Study by Cities of Service: “Mexico City was faced with a massive task: drafting a constitution. Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, who oversaw the drafting and adoption of the 212-page document, hoped to democratize the process. He appointed a drafting committee made up of city residents and turned to the Laboratório para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) to engage everyday citizens. LabCDMX conducted a comprehensive survey and employed the online platform Change.org to solicit ideas for the new constitution. Several petitioners without a legal or political background seized on the opportunity and made their voices heard with successful proposals on topics like green space, waterway recuperation, and LGBTI rights in a document that will have a lasting impact on Mexico City’s governance….(More)”.

New York City ‘Open Data’ Paves Way for Innovative Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Leo Gringut at the International Policy Digest: “The philosophy behind “Open Data for All” turns on the idea that easy access to government data offers everyday New Yorkers the chance to grow and innovate: “Data is more than just numbers – it’s information that can create new opportunities and level the playing field for New Yorkers. It’s the illumination that changes frameworks, the insight that turns impenetrable issues into solvable problems.” Fundamentally, the newfound accessibility of City data is revolutionizing NYC business. According to Albert Webber, Program Manager for Open Data, City of New York, a key part of his job is “to engage the civic technology community that we have, which is very strong, very powerful in New York City.”

Fundamentally, Open Data is a game-changer for hundreds of New York companies, from startups to corporate giants, all of whom rely on data for their operations. The effect is set to be particularly profound in New York City’s most important economic sector: real estate. Seeking to transform the real estate and construction market in the City, valued at a record-setting $1 trillion in 2016, companies have been racing to develop tools that will harness the power of Open Data to streamline bureaucracy and management processes.

One such technology is the Citiscape app. Developed by a passionate team of real estate experts with more than 15 years of experience in the field, the app assembles data from the Department of Building and the Environmental Control Board into one easy-to-navigate interface. According to Citiscape Chief Operational Officer Olga Khaykina, the secret is in the app’s simplicity, which puts every aspect of project management at the user’s fingertips. “We made DOB and ECB just one tap away,” said Khaykina. “You’re one tap away from instant and accurate updates and alerts from the DOB that will keep you informed about any changes to ongoing project. One tap away from organized and cloud-saved projects, including accessible and coordinated interaction with all team members through our in-app messenger. And one tap away from uncovering technical information about any building in NYC, just by entering its address.” Gone are the days of continuously refreshing the DOB website in hopes of an update on a minor complaint or a status change regarding your project; Citiscape does the busywork so you can focus on your project.

The Citiscape team emphasized that, without access to Open Data, this project would have been impossible….(More)”.

How the NYPD is using machine learning to spot crime patterns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Colin Wood at StateScoop: “Civilian analysts and officers within the New York City Police Department are using a unique computational tool to spot patterns in crime data that is closing cases.

A collection of machine-learning models, which the department calls Patternizr, was first deployed in December 2016, but the department only revealed the system last month when its developers published a research paper in the Informs Journal on Applied Analytics. Drawing on 10 years of historical data about burglary, robbery and grand larceny, the tool is the first of its kind to be used by law enforcement, the developers wrote.

The NYPD hired 100 civilian analysts in 2017 to use Patternizr. It’s also available to all officers through the department’s Domain Awareness System, a citywide network of sensors, databases, devices, software and other technical infrastructure. Researchers told StateScoop the tool has generated leads on several cases that traditionally would have stretched officers’ memories and traditional evidence-gathering abilities.

Connecting similar crimes into patterns is a crucial part of gathering evidence and eventually closing in on an arrest, said Evan Levine, the NYPD’s assistant commissioner of data analytics and one of Patternizr’s developers. Taken independently, each crime in a string of crimes may not yield enough evidence to identify a perpetrator, but the work of finding patterns is slow and each officer only has a limited amount of working knowledge surrounding an incident, he said.

“The goal here is to alleviate all that kind of busywork you might have to do to find hits on a pattern,” said Alex Chohlas-Wood, a Patternizr researcher and deputy director of the Computational Policy Lab at Stanford University.

The knowledge of individual officers is limited in scope by dint of the NYPD’s organizational structure. The department divides New York into 77 precincts, and a person who commits crimes across precincts, which often have arbitrary boundaries, is often more difficult to catch because individual beat officers are typically focused on a single neighborhood.

There’s also a lot of data to sift through. In 2016 alone, about 13,000 burglaries, 15,000 robberies and 44,000 grand larcenies were reported across the five boroughs.

Levine said that last month, police used Patternizr to spot a pattern of three knife-point robberies around a Bronx subway station. It would have taken police much longer to connect those crimes manually, Levine said.

The software works by an analyst feeding it “seed” case, which is then compared against a database of hundreds of thousands of crime records that Patternizr has already processed. The tool generates a “similarity score” and returns a rank-ordered list and a map. Analysts can read a few details of each complaint before examining the seed complaint and similar complaints in a detailed side-by-side view or filtering results….(More)”.

Catch Me Once, Catch Me 218 Times

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Kaplan at Slate: “…It was 2010, and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had recently rolled out a database called GraffitiTracker—software also used by police departments in Denver and Los Angeles County—and over the previous year, they had accumulated a massive set of images that included a couple hundred photos with his moniker. Painting over all Kyle’s handiwork, prosecutors claimed, had cost the county almost $100,000, and that sort of damage came with life-changing consequences. Ultimately, he made a plea deal: one year of incarceration, five years of probation, and more than $87,000 in restitution.

Criticism of police technology often gets mired in the complexities of the algorithms involved—the obscurity of machine learning, the feedback loops, the potentials for racial bias and error. But GraffitiTracker can tell us a lot about data-driven policing in part because the concept is so simple. Whenever a public works crew goes to clean up graffiti, before they paint over it, they take a photo and put it in the county database. Since taggers tend to paint the same moniker over and over, now whenever someone is caught for vandalism, police can search the database for their pseudonym and get evidence of all the graffiti they’ve ever done.

In San Diego County, this has radically changed the way that graffiti is prosecuted and has pumped up the punishment for taggers—many of whom are minors—to levels otherwise unthinkable. The results have been lucrative. In 2011, the first year San Diego started using GraffitiTracker countywide (a few San Diego jurisdictions already had it in place), the amount of restitution received for graffiti jumped from about $170,000 to almost $800,000. Roughly $300,000 of that came from juvenile cases. For the jurisdictions that weren’t already using GraffitiTracker, the jump was even more stark: The annual total went from $45,000 to nearly $400,000. In these cities, the average restitution ordered in adult cases went from $1,281 to $5,620, and at the same time, the number of cases resulting in restitution tripled. (San Diego has said it makes prosecuting vandalism easier.)

Almost a decade later, San Diego County and other jurisdictions are still using GraffitiTracker, yet it’s received very little media attention, despite the startling consequences for vandalism prosecution. But its implications extend far beyond tagging. GraffitiTracker presaged a deeper problem with law enforcement’s ability to use technology to connect people to crimes that, as Deputy District Attorney Melissa Ocampo put it to me, “they thought they got away with.”…(More)”.

The Referendum and Other Essays on Constitutional Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Matt Qvortrup: “Until recently, referendums were little used. After the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, they have come to the fore as a mechanism with the potential to disrupt the status quo and radically change political direction. This book looks at the historical development of the referendum, its use in different jurisdictions, and the types of constitutional questions it seeks to address. Written in an engaging style, the book offers a clear, objective overview of this important political and constitutional tool….(More)”.

Seeing, Naming, Knowing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Nora N. Khan for Brooklyn Rail: “…. Throughout this essay, I use “machine eye” as a metaphor for the unmoored orb, a kind of truly omnidirectional camera (meaning, a camera that can look in every direction and vector that defines the dimensions of a sphere), and as a symbolic shorthand for the sum of four distinct realms in which automated vision is deployed as a service. (Vision as a Service, reads the selling tag for a new AI surveillance camera company).10 Those four general realms are: 

1. Massive AI systems fueled by the public’s flexible datasets of their personal images, creating a visual culture entirely out of digitized images. 

2. Facial recognition technologies and neural networks improving atop their databases. 

3. The advancement of predictive policing to sort people by types. 

4. The combination of location-based tracking, license plate-reading, and heat sensors to render skein-like, live, evolving maps of people moving, marked as likely to do X.

Though we live the results of its seeing, and its interpretation of its seeing, for now I would hold on blaming ourselves for this situation. We are, after all, the living instantiations of a few thousand years of such violent seeing globally, enacted through imperialism, colonialism, caste stratification, nationalist purges, internal class struggle, and all the evolving theory to support and galvanize the above. Technology simply recasts, concentrates, and amplifies these “tendencies.” They can be hard to see at first because the eye’s seeing seems innocuous, and is designed to seem so. It is a direct expression of the ideology of software, which reflects its makers’ desires. These makers are lauded as American pioneers, innovators, genius-heroes living in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, vibrating at a highly specific frequency, the generative nexus of failed communalism and an emerging Californian Ideology. That seductive ideology has been exported all over the world, and we are only now contending with its impact.

Because the workings of machine visual culture are so remote from our sense perception, and because it so acutely determines our material (economic, social), and affective futures, I invite you to see underneath the eye’s outer glass shell, its holder, beyond it, to the grid that organizes its “mind.” That mind simulates a strain of ideology about who exactly gets to gather data about those on that grid below, and how that data should be mobilized to predict the movements and desires of the grid dwellers. This mind, a vast computational regime we are embedded in, drives the machine eye. And this computational regime has specific values that determine what is seen, how it is seen, and what that seeing means….(More)”.

Civic Tech for Civic Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog Post by Jason Farra: “When it came to gathering input for their new Environmental Master Plan, the Town of Okotoks, AB decided to try something different. Rather than using more traditional methods of consulting residents, they turned to a Canadian civic tech company called Ethelo.

Ethelo’s online software “enables groups to evaluate scenarios, apply constraints, prioritize options and come up with decisions that will get broad support from the group,” says John Richardson, the company’s CEO and founder.

Okotoks gathered over 350 responses, with residents able to compare and evaluate different solutions for a variety of environmental issues, including what kind of transportation and renewable energy options they wanted to see in their town.

One of the options presented to Okotoks residents in the online engagement site for the town’s Environmental Master Plan.

“Ethelo offered a different opportunity in terms of allowing a conversation to happen online,” Marni Hutchison, Communications Specialist with the Town of Okotoks, said in a case study of the project. “We can see the general consensus as it’s forming and participants have more opportunities to see different perspectives.”

John sees this as part of a broader shift in how governments and other organizations are approaching stakeholder engagement, particularly with groups like IAP2 working to improve engagement practices by training practitioners.

Rather than simply consulting, then informing residents about decisions, civic tech startups like Ethelo allow governments to involve residents more actively in the actual decision-making process….(More)”.

PayStats helps assess the impact of the low-emission area Madrid Central

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BBVA API Market: “How do town-planning decisions affect a city’s routines? How can data help assess and make decisions? The granularity and detailed information offered by PayStats allowed Madrid’s city council to draw a more accurate map of consumer behavior and gain an objective measurement of the impact of the traffic restriction measures on commercial activity.

In this case, 20 million aggregate and anonymized transactions with BBVA cards and any other card at BBVA POS terminals were analyzed to study the effect of the changes made by Madrid’s city council to road access to the city center.

The BBVA PayStats API is targeted at all kinds of organizations including the public sector, as in this case. Madrid’s city council used it to find out how restricting car access to Madrid Central impacted Christmas shopping. From information gathered between December 1 2018 and January 7 2019, a comparison was made between data from the last two Christmases as well as the increased revenue in Madrid Central (Gran Vía and five subareas) vs. the increase in the entire city.

According to the report drawn up by council experts, 5.984 billion euros were spent across the city. The sample shows a 3.3% increase in spending in Madrid when compared to the same time the previous year; this goes up to 9.5% in Gran Vía and reaches 8.6% in the central area….(More)”.