city & municipal

The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion

Curated on October 22, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore: “Urban History 101 teaches us that the built environment is not the product of invisible, uncontrollable market forces, but of human-made tools that could have been used differently (or not at all). The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion is an encyclopedia of 202 tools–or what we call “weapons”–used by architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, activists, and other urban actors in the United States use to restrict or increase access to urban space. The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion inventories these weapons, examines how they have been used, and speculates about how they might be deployed (or retired) to make more open cities in which more people feel welcome in more spaces.

The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion includes minor, seemingly benign weapons like no loitering signs and bouncers, but also big, headline-grabbing things like eminent domaon and city-county consolidation. It includes policies like expulsive zoning and annexation, but also practices like blockbusting, institutions like neighborhood associations, and physical things like bombs and those armrests that park designers put on benches to make sure homeless people don’t get too comfortable. It includes historical things that aren’t talked about too much any more (e.g., ugly laws), things that seem historical but aren’t (e.g., racial steering), and things that are brand new (e.g., aging improvement district).

With contributions from over fifty of the best minds in architecture, urban planning, urban history, and geography, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion offers a wide-ranging view of the policies, institutions, and social practices that shape our cities. It can be read as a historical account of the making of the modern American city, a toolbox of best practices for creating better, more just spaces, or as an introduction to the process of city-making in The United States….(More)”.

Civic Creativity: Role-Playing Games in Deliberative Process

Curated on October 9, 2017October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Gordon, Jason Haas, and Becky Michelson at the International Journal of Communication: “This article analyzes the use of a role-playing game in a civic planning process. We focus on the qualities of interactions generated through gameplay, specifically the affordances of voluntary play within a “magic circle” of the game, that directly impact participants’ ability to generate new ideas about the community. We present the results of a quasi-experimental study where a role-playing game (RPG) called @Stake is incorporated into participatory budgeting meetings in New York City and compared with meetings that incorporated a trivia game. We provide evidence that the role-playing game, which encourages empathy, is more effective than a game that tests knowledge for generating what we call civic creativity, or an individual’s ability to come up with new ideas. Rapid ideation and social learning nurtured by the game point to a kind of group creativity that fosters social connection and understanding of consequence outside of the game. We conclude with thoughts on future research….(More)”.

Paraguay’s transparency alchemists

Curated on October 5, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Story by the Open Contracting Partnership: “….The “Cocido de oro” scandal is seen as part of a well-organized and well-informed youth movement that has sprung up in Paraguay in recent years. An equally dramatic controversyinvolving alleged corruption and unfair staff appointments at one of the country’s top public universities led to the resignation of the Chancellor and other senior staff in September 2015. Mostly high school and university students, they are no longer willing to tolerate the waste and corruption in public spending — a hangover from 35 years of authoritarian rule. They expect their government to be more open and accountable, and public decision-making processes to be more inclusive and democratic.

Thanks to government initiatives that have sought to give citizens greater access to information about public institutions, these students, along with investigative journalists and other civil society groups, are starting to engage actively in civic affairs. And they are data-savvy, basing recommendations on empirical evidence about government policies and processes, how they are implemented, and whether they are working.

Leading the pack is the country’s public procurement office, which runs a portal that ranks among the most open government data sources in the world. Together with information about budgets, public bodies’ payrolls, and other government data, this is helping Paraguayans to tackle some of the biggest long-standing problems faced by the government, like graft, overpricing, nepotism and influence-peddling….

The government recognizes there’s still a long way to go in their quest to open up public data. Few institutions have opened their databases or publish their data on an open data portal, and use of the data that has been published is still limited, according to a report on the country’s third OGP Action Plan. Priority data sets aren’t accessible in ways that meet the needs of civil society, the report adds.

And yet, the tremors of a tectonic shift in transparency and accountability in Paraguay are already being felt. In a short time, armed with access to information, citizens have started engaging with how public money is and should be spent.

The government is now doubling down on its strategy of fostering public participation, using cutting-edge technology to increase citizens’ access to data about their state institutions. Health, education, and municipal-level government, and procurement spending across these areas are being prioritized….(More).

How We Can Stop Earthquakes From Killing People Before They Even Hit

Curated on October 5, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Justin Worland in Time Magazine: “…Out of that realization came a plan to reshape disaster management using big data. Just a few months later, Wani worked with two fellow Stanford students to create a platform to predict the toll of natural disasters. The concept is simple but also revolutionary. The One Concern software pulls geological and structural data from a variety of public and private sources and uses machine learning to predict the impact of an earthquake down to individual city blocks and buildings. Real-time information input during an earthquake improves how the system responds. And earthquakes represent just the start for the company, which plans to launch a similar program for floods and eventually other natural disasters….

Previous software might identify a general area where responders could expect damage, but it would appear as a “big red blob” that wasn’t helpful when deciding exactly where to send resources, Dayton says. The technology also integrates information from many sources and makes it easy to parse in an emergency situation when every moment matters. The instant damage evaluations mean fast and actionable information, so first responders can prioritize search and rescue in areas most likely to be worst-hit, rather than responding to 911 calls in the order they are received.

One Concern is not the only company that sees an opportunity to use data to rethink disaster response. The mapping company Esri has built rapid-response software that shows expected damage from disasters like earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes. And the U.S. government has invested in programs to use data to shape disaster response at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)….(More)”.

Mobility Score

Curated on October 3, 2017October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“MobilityScore® helps you understand how easy it is to get around. It works at any location or address within the US and Canada and gives you a score ranging from 0 (no mobility choices) to 100 (excellent mobility choices).

What do we mean by mobility? Any transportation option that can help you move around your city. Transportation is changing massively as new choices emerge: ridesharing, bikesharing, carsharing. Private and on-demand mobility services have sprung up. However, tools for measuring transportation access have not kept up. That’s why we created MobilityScore as an easy-to-understand measure of transportation access.

Technical Details

MobilityScore includes all the transportation choices that can be found on TransitScreen displays, including the following services:

Public transit (subways, trains, buses, ferries, cable cars…)
Car sharing services (Zipcar, Enterprise, and one-way services like car2go)
Bike sharing services
Hailed ride sharing services (e.g. taxis, Uber, Lyft)

We have developed a common way of comparing how choices that might seem very different contribute to your mobility. For each mobility choice, we measure how long it will take you until you can start moving on it – for example, the time it takes you to leave your building, walk to a subway station, and wait for a train.

Because we’re measuring how easy it is for you to move around the city, we also consider what mobility choices look like at different times of the day and different days of the week. Mobility data is regularly collected for most services, while ridehailing (Uber/Lyft) data is based on a geographic model of arrival times.

MobilityScore’s framework is future-proof. Just like we do with TransitScreen, we will integrate future services into the calculation as they emerge (e.g. microtransit, autonomous vehicles, mobility-as-a-service)….(More)”

Enhancing Citizen Engagement in the Face of Climate Change Risks: A Case Study of the Flood Early Warning System and Health Information System in Semarang City, Indonesia

Curated on October 3, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Aniessa Delima Sari and Nyoman Prayoga in book on Climate Change in Cities: “This case study describes how two climate resilience action projects in Semarang City, Indonesia, were able to provide new mechanisms allowing better engagement between the Semarang city government and its citizens. With the introduction of the Flood Early Warning System (FEWS), flood-prone communities in the Beringin River Basin are now able to evacuate to safe shelters before flood incidents occur. Through the Health Information and Early Warning System (HIEWS), citizens can access real-time information related to dengue fever cases in the city. Although the focus areas are different, both projects aim to help communities become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, specifically floods and vector-borne disease. We find similar patterns in the two cases, in which efforts to enhance community participation are essential to guarantee the success of the projects. Enhanced community engagement is achieved through the thoughtful consideration of local knowledge and social networks, intensive assistance to increase awareness and motivation of the community, and understanding governance structures to ensure that funds are allocated through formal handover processes to continue and expand the results of the interventions. These findings are useful and important to guide any climate change adaptation projects toward better sustainability and ownership, especially in the application of an early warning system or information system that requires technology, sustainable budget allocation from the local government to operate and maintain the system, and buy-in from local communities…(More)”

New program wants to improve cities with the power of tweets and Flickr uploads

Curated on October 1, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Marissa Clifford at Curbed: “Want to watch street life unfold outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long after it’s closed for the day? Or uncover the hidden ways both tourists and locals alike use Manhattan’s most famous landmarks? Now you can, all thanks to the power of data.

Urban Pulse, open-source software developed at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, uses data to create a map that visualizes how people move through cities. From Urban Pulse’s interface, you can observe, for example, how tourists navigate Central Park.

Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who worked in the early years of the 20th century, developed a theory of urban environments that used the human body as an organizing analogy: They likened the mundane processes of everyday urban life (things like phone calls and taxi rides) to the heartbeat. Urban Pulse brings that analogy into the 21st century, replacing statistics about phone calls with social media and other digital data.

Essentially, Urban Pulse is a dynamic, comparative heat map. And the hot spots on the map are made up of what the research team dubbed “pulses” and “beats,” terminology that was inspired by Park and Burgess’s original analogy.

But Urban Pulse’s findings don’t simply reinforce what we already know about cities. By pinpointing how, when, and by whom city spaces are most often used, the data has the power to upend our preconceptions about civic space. This has potentially far-reaching implications for urban planners, architects, and city planners.

But what is a “pulse?” And where is that social media data coming from? Simply put, a pulse is a graphic representation of the kinds of open source data that serve as proxies for human activity, like tweets and Flickr uploads. Though Urban Pulse currently only uses data from Flickr and Twitter, it is free to download on GitHub, and its creators are hoping to see a wider variety of data types input by the open source community….(More)”.

Gamification, Participatory Democracy and Engaged Public(s)

Curated on September 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “The use of game-design elements – a phenomenon known as ‘gamification’ – features prominently within on-going processes of innovation of governance. According to the research and advisory firm Gartner, 2,000 of the top public organizations worldwide have at least one gamified application and/or process in place. Examples of gamification in public governance include “Run that town” (ideated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to raise citizens’ awareness of the national census), the “Red Balloon Challenge” (initiated by the United States’ Defence Advanced Research Project Agency to test systems for improving cooperation among soldiers, experts and diplomatic officers overseas), and “Manor Labs” (a web platform that awarded “Innobucks”, a type of virtual commodity, to residents of the City of Manor, in Texas, for proposing ideas related with urban development).
The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to determine who is actually participating in public policy processes via gamification; second, to weigh the impact that the public(s) engaged by gamification has on democratic governance; third, to assess the societal environment within which gamification might flourish or establish plausibly….(More)”.