The Computable City: Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Michael Batty: “At every stage in the history of computers and communications, it is safe to say we have been unable to predict what happens next. When computers first appeared nearly seventy-five years ago, primitive computer models were used to help understand and plan cities, but as computers became faster, smaller, more powerful, and ever more ubiquitous, cities themselves began to embrace them. As a result, the smart city emerged. In The Computable City, Michael Batty investigates the circularity of this peculiar evolution: how computers and communications changed the very nature of our city models, which, in turn, are used to simulate systems composed of those same computers.

Batty first charts the origins of computers and examines how our computational urban models have developed and how they have been enriched by computer graphics. He then explores the sequence of digital revolutions and how they are converging, focusing on continual changes in new technologies, as well as the twenty-first-century surge in social media, platform economies, and the planning of the smart city. He concludes by revisiting the digital transformation as it continues to confound us, with the understanding that the city, now a high-frequency twenty-four-hour version of itself, changes our understanding of what is possible…(More)”.

Civic Trust: What’s In A Concept?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Oscar Romero and Kim Ochilo: “We will only be able to improve civic trust once we know how to measure it…

A visualization of the ways to measure civic trust

Recently, there’s been a noticeable decline in trust toward institutions across different sectors of society. This is a serious issue, as evidenced by surveys including the Edelman Trust Barometer, Gallup, and Pew Research.

Diminishing trust presents substantial obstacles. It threatens to weaken the foundation of a pluralistic democracy, adversely affects public health, and hinders the collaboration needed to tackle worldwide challenges such as climate change. Trust forms the cornerstone of democratic social contracts and is crucial for maintaining the civic agreements essential for the prosperity and cohesion of communities, cities, and countries alike.

Yet to increase civic trust, we need to know what we mean by it and how to measure it, which turns out to be a challenging exercise. Toward that end, The GovLab at New York University and the New York Civic Engagement Commission joined forces to catalog and identify methodologies to quantify and understand the nuances of civic trust.

“Building trust across New York is essential if we want to deepen civic engagement,” said Sarah Sayeed, Chair and Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Commission. “Trust is the cornerstone of a healthy community and robust democracy.”

This blog delves into various strategies for developing metrics to measure civic trust, informed by our own desk research, which categorizes civic trust metrics into descriptive, diagnostic, and evaluative measures…(More)”.

How will AI shape our future cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ying Zhang: “For city planners, a bird’s-eye view of a map showing buildings and streets is no longer enough. They need to simulate changes to bus routes or traffic light timings before implementation to know how they might affect the population. Now, they can do so with digital twins – often referred to as a “mirror world” – which allows them to simulate scenarios more safely and cost-effectively through a three-dimensional virtual replica.

Cities such as New York, Shanghai and Helsinki are already using digital twins. In 2022, the city of Zurich launched its own version. Anyone can use it to measure the height of buildings, determine the shadows they cast and take a look into the future to see how Switzerland’s largest city might develop. Traffic congestion, a housing shortage and higher energy demands are becoming pressing issues in Switzerland, where 74% of the population already lives in urban areas.

But updating and managing digital twins will become more complex as population densities and the levels of detail increase, according to architect and urban designer Aurel von Richthofen of the consultancy Arup.

The world’s current urban planning models are like “individual silos” where “data cannot be shared, which makes urban planning not as efficient as we expect it to be”, said von Richthofen at a recent event hosted by the Swiss innovation network Swissnex. …

The underlying data is key to whether a digital twin city is effective. But getting access to quality data from different organisations is extremely difficult. Sensors, drones and mobile devices may collect data in real-time. But they tend to be organised around different knowledge domains – such as land use, building control, transport or ecology – each with its own data collection culture and physical models…(More)”

Digitalisation and citizen engagement: comparing participatory budgeting in Rome and Barcelona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book chapter by Giorgia Mattei, Valentina Santolamazza and Martina Manzo: “The digitalisation of participatory budgeting (PB) is an increasing phenomenon in that digital tools could help achieve greater citizen engagement. However, comparing two similar cases – i.e. Rome and Barcelona – some differences appear during the integration of digital tools into the PB processes. The present study describes how digital tools have positively influenced PB throughout different phases, making communication more transparent, involving a wider audience, empowering people and, consequently, making citizens’ engagement more effective. Nevertheless, the research dwells on the different elements adopted to overcome the digitalisation limits and shows various approaches and results…(More)”.

To Design Cities Right, We Need to Focus on People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tim Keane: “Our work in the U.S. to make better neighborhoods, towns and cities is a hapless and obdurate mess. If you’ve attended a planning meeting anywhere, you have probably witnessed the miserable process in action—unrestrainedly selfish fighting about false choices and seemingly inane procedures. Rather than designing places for people, we see cities as a collection of mechanical problems with technical and legal solutions. We distract ourselves with the latest rebranded ideas about places—smart growth, resilient cities, complete streets, just cities, 15-minute cities, happy cities—rather than getting down to the actual work of designing the physical place. This lacks a fundamental vision. And it’s not succeeding.

Our flawed approach to city planning started a century ago. The first modern city plan was produced for Cincinnati in 1925 by the Technical Advisory Corporation, founded in 1913 by George Burdett Ford and E.P. Goodrich in New York City. New York adopted the country’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, an effort Ford led. Not coincidentally, the advent of zoning, and then comprehensive planning, corresponded directly with the great migration of six million Black people from the South to Northern, Midwestern and Western cities. New city planning practices were a technical means to discriminate and exclude.

This first comprehensive plan also ushered in another type of dehumanization: city planning by formula. To justify widening downtown streets by cutting into sidewalks, engineers used a calculation that reflected the cost to operate an automobile in a congested area—including the cost of a human life, because crashes killed people. Engineers also calculated the value of a sidewalk through a formula based on how many people the elevators in adjoining buildings could deliver at peak times. In the end, Cincinnati’s planners recommended widening the streets for cars, which were becoming more common, by shrinking sidewalks. City planning became an engineering equation, and one focused on separating people and spreading the city out to the maximum extent possible…(More)”.

Six ways to democratise city planning 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by DemocracyNext: “To live in thriving and healthy cities, we propose six possible ways to instigate systemic changes that can democratise the governance of urban planning decisions through Citizens’ Assemblies. Depending on a city’s current starting point, at least one, if not multiple, of these options can be seen as an initial ‘way in’ to begin making systemic changes to urban planning decision making. The six ways are outlined as different entry points on the following page…(More)”.

The City as a License: Design, Rights and Civics in a Blockchain Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue by Martijn de Waal et al: “Building upon critical work on smart cities, platform urbanism and algorithmic governance, this special issue proposes the ‘generative metaphor’ of the City as a License as a lens to analyze the digitally enhanced management of urban resources and infrastructures from a perspective of rights and agency. Such a perspective has become especially urgent with the rise of new data practices around the emergence of distributed ledger technologies, as they may introduce additional layers of complexity to the ‘algorithmic governance’ of cities. This is particularly due to their tokenization of resources, identities, and rights and automatic administration of access to urban resources. Contributions in this special issue investigate the affordances of distributed ledger technologies with regards to civic agency in the governance of collective urban resources. Could these newly emerging management systems for energy production and consumption or property rights contribute to pro-social and sustainable ways of governing and managing communities and their resources, according to the logic of the commons? The lens of the City as a License not only allows for such an analysis of potentialities, but also for a critical view on these techno-social systems, such as the way in which they may repeat the inequities and obfuscations of existing systems, produce unintended consequences through complex processes, and complicate accountability…(More)”.

The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Des Fitzgerald: “Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?

Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today’s green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are – in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory…(More)”.

Privacy and the City: How Data Shapes City Identities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bilyana Petkova: “This article bridges comparative constitutional law to research inspired by city leadership and the opportunities that technology brings to the urban environment. It looks first to some of the causes of rapid urbanization and finds them in the pitfalls of antidiscrimination law in federations and quasi-federations such as the United States and the European Union. Short of achieving antidiscrimination based on nationality, the EU has experimented with data privacy as an identity clause that could bring social cohesion the same way purportedly freedom of speech has done in the US. In the City however, diversity replaces antidiscrimination, making cities attractive to migrants across various walks of life. The consequence for federalism is the obvious decline of top-down or vertical, state-based federalism and the rise of legal urbanism whereby cities establish loose networks of cooperation between themselves. These types of arrangements are not yet a threat to the State or the EU but might become such if cities are increasingly isolated from the political process (e.g. at the EU level) and lack legal means to assert themselves in court. City diversity and openness to different cultures in turn invites a connection to new technologies since unlike antidiscrimination that is usually strictly examined on a case-by-case level, diversity can be more readily computed. Finally, the article focuses on NYC and London initiatives to suggest a futuristic vision of city networks that instead of using social credit score like in China, deploy data trusts to populate their urban environments, shape city identities and exchange ideas for urban development…(More)”.

How to craft fair, transparent data-sharing agreements

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephanie Kanowitz: “Data collaborations are critical to government decision-making, but actually sharing data can be difficult—not so much the mechanics of the collaboration, but hashing out the rules and policies governing it. A new report offers three resources that will make data sharing more straightforward, foster accountability and build trust among the parties.

“We’ve heard over and over again that one of the biggest barriers to collaboration around data turns out to be data sharing agreements,” said Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder of the Governance Lab at New York University and an author of the November report, “Moving from Idea to Practice.” It’s sometimes a lot to ask stakeholders “to provide access to some of their data,” he said.

To help, Verhulst and other researchers identified three components of successful data-sharing agreements: conducting principled negotiations, establishing the elements of a data-sharing agreement and assessing readiness.

To address the first, the report breaks the components of negotiation into a framework with four tenets: separating people from the problem, focusing on interests rather than positions, identifying options and using objective criteria. From discussions with stakeholders in data sharing agreement workshops that GovLab held through its Open Data Policy Lab, three principles emerged—fairness, transparency and reciprocity…(More)”.