Report by Justin Kollar, Niko McGlashan, and Sarah Williams: “The use of data in urban development is controversial because of the numerous examples showing its use to reinforce inequality rather than inclusion. From the development of Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, which excluded many minority communities from mortgages, to zoning laws used to reinforce structural racism, data has been used by those in power to elevate some while further marginalizing others. Yet data can achieve the opposite outcome by exposing inequity, encouraging dialogue and debate, making developers and cities more accountable, and ultimately creating new digital tools to make development processes more inclusive. Using data for action requires that we build teams to ask and answer the right questions, collect the right data, analyze the data ingeniously, ground-truth the results with communities, and share the insights with broader groups so they can take informed action. This paper looks at the development of two recent approaches in New York and Seattle to measure equity in urban development. We reflect on these approaches through the lens of data action principles (Williams 2020). Such reflections can highlight the challenges and opportunities for furthering the measurement and achievement of equitable development by other groups, such as real estate developers and community organizations, who seek to create positive social impact through their activities…(More)”.
Governing the informed city: examining local government strategies for information production, consumption and knowledge sharing across ten cities
Paper by Katrien Steenmans et al: “Cities are more and more embedded in information flows, and their policies are increasingly called assessment frameworks to understand the impact of the systems of knowledge underpinning local government. Encouraging a more systemic view on the data politics of the urban age, this paper investigates the information ecosystem in which local governments are embedded. Seeking to go beyond the ‘smart city’ paradigm into a more overt discussion of the structures of information-driven urban governance, it offers a preliminary assessment across ten case studies (Barcelona, Bogotá, Chicago, London, Medellín, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mumbai, Seoul and Warsaw). It illustrates how both internal and external actors to local government are deeply involved throughout information mobilization processes, though in different capacities and to different extents, and how the impact of many of these actors is still not commonly assessed and/or leveraged by cities. Seeking to encourage more systematic analysis the governance of knowledge collection, dissemination, analysis, and use in cities, the paper advocates for an ‘ecosystem’ view of the emerging ‘informed cities’ paradigm…(More)”.
Social approach to the transition to smart cities
Report by the European Parliamentary Research Services (EPRS): “This study explores the main impacts of the smart city transition on our cities and, in particular, on citizens and territories. In our research, we start from an analysis of smart city use cases to identify a set of key challenges, and elaborate on the main accelerating factors that may amplify or contain their impact on particular groups and territories. We then present an account of best practices that can help mitigate or prevent such challenges, and make some general observations on their scalability and replicability. Finally, based on an analysis of EU regulatory frameworks and a mapping of current or upcoming initiatives in the domain of smart city innovation, capacity-building and knowledge capitalisation, we propose six policy options to inform future policy-making at EU level to support a more inclusive smart city transition…(More)”.
Crafting the future: involving young people in urban design
Article by Alastair Bailey: “About 60 per cent of urban populations will be under 18 years of age by 2030, according to UN Habitat, but attempts to involve young people in the design of their cities remain in their infancy. Efforts to enlist this generation have often floundered due to a range of problems — not least an unwillingness to listen to their needs.
“The actual involvement of young people in planning is negligible” says Simeon Shtebunaev, a Birmingham City University doctoral researcher in youth and town planning and researcher at urban social enterprise Social Life. However, new technologies offer a way forward. Digitisation has come to be seen as a “panacea to youth engagement” in many cities, notes Shtebunaev.
Hargeisa, the largest city of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa and home to 1.5mn people, has already been demonstrating what can be achieved by digitally engaging with young people — notably through the Minecraft video game. This enables users to design and build structures in a manner similar to expensive 3D modelling software.
Despite large-scale reconstruction, the city still bears the scars of the 1981-91 civil war, during which former Somalian dictator Said Barre sought to wipe out members of the city’s dominant Isaaq clan to enforce his own rule. Up to an estimated 200,000 Isaaq died.
In September 2019, though, “Urban Visioning Week” brought Hargeisa residents together over five days to discuss the city’s future as part of the UN’s Joint Programme on Local Governance. The aim was for residents to identify the city’s problems and what improvements they felt were needed…(More)”.
Integrating AI into Urban Planning Workflows: Democracy Over Authoritarianism
Essay by Tyler Hinkle: “As AI tools become integrated into urban planning, a dual narrative of promise and potential pitfalls emerges. These tools offer unprecedented efficiency, creativity, and data analysis, yet if not guided by ethical considerations, they could inadvertently lead to exclusion, manipulation, and surveillance.
While AI, exemplified by tools like NovelAI, holds the potential to aggregate and synthesize public input, there’s a risk of suppressing genuine human voices in favor of algorithmic consensus. This could create a future urban landscape devoid of cultural depth and diversity, echoing historical authoritarianism.
In a potential dystopian scenario, an AI-based planning software gains access to all smart city devices, amassing data to reshape communities without consulting their residents. This data-driven transformation, devoid of human input, risks eroding the essence of community identity, autonomy, and shared decision-making. Imagine AI altering traffic flow, adjusting public transportation routes, or even redesigning public spaces based solely on data patterns, disregarding the unique needs and desires of the people who call that community home.
However, an optimistic approach guided by ethical principles can pave the way for a brighter future. Integrating AI with democratic ideals, akin to Fishkin’s deliberative democracy, can amplify citizens’ voices rather than replacing them. AI-driven deliberation can become a powerful vehicle for community engagement, transforming Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation into a true instrument of empowerment. In addition, echoing the calls for alignment to be addresses holistically for AI, there will be alignment issues with AI as it becomes integrated into urban planning. We must take the time to ensure AI is properly aligned so it is a tool to help communities and not hurt them.
By treading carefully and embedding ethical considerations at the core, we can unleash AI’s potential to construct communities that are efficient, diverse, and resilient, while ensuring that democratic values remain paramount…(More)”.
City/Science Intersections: A Scoping Review of Science for Policy in Urban Contexts
Paper by Gabriela Manrique Rueda et al: “Science is essential for cities to understand and intervene on the increasing global risks. However, challenges in effectively utilizing scientific knowledge in decision-making processes limit cities’ abilities to address these risks. This scoping review examines the development of science for urban policy, exploring the contextual factors, organizational structures, and mechanisms that facilitate or hinder the integration of science and policy. It investigates the challenges faced and the outcomes achieved. The findings reveal that science has gained influence in United Nations (UN) policy discourses, leading to the expansion of international, regional, and national networks connecting science and policy. Boundary-spanning organizations and collaborative research initiatives with stakeholders have emerged, creating platforms for dialogue, knowledge sharing, and experimentation. However, cultural differences between the science and policy realms impede the effective utilization of scientific knowledge in decision-making. While efforts are being made to develop methods and tools for knowledge co-production, translation, and mobilization, more attention is needed to establish science-for-policy organizational structures and address power imbalances in research processes that give rise to ethical challenges…(More)”.
Data can help decarbonize cities – let us explain
Article by Stephen Lorimer and Andrew Collinge: “The University of Birmingham, Alan Turing Institute and Centre for Net Zero are working together, using a tool developed by the Centre, called Faraday, to model a more detailed understanding of energy flows within the district and between it and the neighbouring 8,000 residents. Faraday is a generative AI model trained on one of the UK’s largest smart metre datasets. The model is helping to unlock a more granular view of energy sources and changing energy usage, providing the basis for modelling future energy consumption and local smart grid management.
The partners are investigating the role that trusted data aggregators can play if they can take raw data and desensitize it to a point where it can be shared without eroding consumer privacy or commercial advantage.
Data is central to both initiatives and all cities seeking a renewable energy transition. But there are issues to address, such as common data standards, governance and data competency frameworks (especially across the built environment supply chain)…
Building the governance, standards and culture that delivers confidence in energy data exchange is essential to maximizing the potential of carbon reduction technologies. This framework will ultimately support efficient supply chains and coordinate market activity. There are lessons from the Open Banking initiative, which provided the framework for traditional financial institutions, fintech and regulators to deliver innovation in financial products and services with carefully shared consumer data.
In the energy domain, there are numerous advantageous aspects to data sharing. It helps overcome barriers in the product supply chain, from materials to low-carbon technologies (heat pumps, smart thermostats, electric vehicle chargers etc). Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) providers can use data to support installers and property owners.
Data interoperability allows third-party products and services to communicate with any end-user device through open or proprietary Internet of Things gateway platforms such as Tuya or IFTTT. A growing bank of post-installation data on the operation of buildings (such as energy efficiency and air quality) will boost confidence in the future quality of retrofits and make for easier decisions on planning approval and grid connections. Finally, data is increasingly considered key in securing the financing and private sector investment crucial to the net zero effort.
None of the above is easy. Organizational and technical complexity can slow progress but cities must be at the forefront of efforts to coordinate the energy data ecosystem and make the case for “data for decarbonization.”…(More)”.
How data-savvy cities can tackle growing ethical considerations
Bloomberg Cities Network: “Technology for collecting, combining, and analyzing data is moving quickly, putting cities in a good position to use data to innovate in how they solve problems. However, it also places a responsibility on them to do so in a manner that does not undermine public trust.
To help local governments deal with these issues, the London Office of Technology and Innovation, or LOTI, has a set of recommendations for data ethics capabilities in local government. One of those recommendations—for cities that are mature in their work in this area—is to hire a dedicated data ethicist.
LOTI exists to support dozens of local boroughs across London in their collective efforts to tackle big challenges. As part of that mission, LOTI hired Sam Nutt to serve as a data ethicist that local leaders can call on. The move reflected the reality that most local councils don’t have the capacity to have their own data ethicist on staff and it put LOTI in a position to experiment, learn, and share out lessons learned from the approach.
Nutt’s role provides a potential framework other cities looking to hire data ethicists can build on. His position is based on job specifications for data ethicists published by the UK government. He says his work falls into three general areas. First, he helps local councils work through ethical questions surrounding individual data projects. Second, he helps them develop more high-level policies, such as the Borough of Camden’s Data Charter. And third, he provides guidance on how to engage staff, residents, and stakeholders around the implications of using technology, including research on what’s new in the field.
As an example of the kinds of ethical issues that he consults on, Nutt cites repairs in publicly subsidized housing. Local leaders are interested in using algorithms to help them prioritize use of scarce maintenance resources. But doing so raises questions about what criteria should be used to bump one resident’s needs above another’s.
“If you prioritize, for example, the likelihood of a resident making a complaint, you may be baking in an existing social inequality, because some communities do not feel as empowered to make complaints as others,” Nutt says. “So it’s thinking through what the ethical considerations might be in terms of choices of data and how you use it, and giving advice to prevent potential biases from creeping in.”
Nutt acknowledges that most cities are too resource constrained to hire a staff data ethicist. What matters most, he says, is that local governments create mechanisms for ensuring that ethical considerations of their choices with data and technology are considered. “The solution will never be that everyone has to hire a data ethicist,” Nutt says. “The solution is really to build ethics into your default ways of working with data.”
Stefaan Verhulst agrees. “The question for government is: Is ethics a position? A function? Or an institutional responsibility?” says Verhulst, Co-Founder of The GovLab and Director of its Data Program. The key is “to figure out how we institutionalize this in a meaningful way so that we can always check the pulse and get rapid input with regard to the social license for doing certain kinds of things.”
As the data capabilities of local governments grow, it’s also important to empower all individuals working in government to understand ethical considerations within the work they’re doing, and to have clear guidelines and codes of conduct they can follow. LOTI’s data ethics recommendations note that hiring a data ethicist should not be an organization’s first step, in part because “it risks delegating ethics to a single individual when it should be in the domain of anyone using or managing data.”
Training staff is a big part of the equation. “It’s about making the culture of government sensitive to these issues,” Verhulst says, so “that people are aware.”..(More)”.
Public Sector Use of Private Sector Personal Data: Towards Best Practices
Paper by Teresa Scassa: “Governments increasingly turn to the private sector as a source of data for various purposes. In some cases, the data that they seek to use is personal data. The public sector use of private sector personal data raises several important law and public policy concerns. These include the legal authority for such uses; privacy and data protection; ethics; transparency; and human rights. Governments that use private sector personal data without attending to the issues that such use raises may breach existing laws, which in some cases may not be well-adapted to evolving data practices. They also risk undermining public trust.
This paper uses two quite different recent examples from Canada where the use of private sector personal data by public sector actors caused considerable backlash and led to public hearings and complaints to the Privacy Commissioner. The examples are used to tease out the complex and interwoven law and policy issues. In some cases, the examples reveal issues that are particular to the evolving data society and that are not well addressed by current law or practice. The paper identifies key issues and important gaps and makes recommendations to address these. Although the examples discussed are Canadian and depend to some extent on Canadian law and institutions, the practices at issue are ones that are increasingly used around the world, and many of the issues raised are broadly relevant…(More)”.
Primer on Data Sharing
Primer by John Ure: “…encapsulates insights gleaned from the Inter-Modal Transport Data Sharing Programme, a collaborative effort known as Data Trust 1.0 (DT1), conducted in Hong Kong between 2020 and 2021. This initiative was a pioneering project that explored the feasibility of sharing operational data between public transport entities through a Trusted Third Party. The objective was to overcome traditional data silos and promote evidence-based public transport planning.
DT1, led by the ‘HK Team’ in conjunction with Dr. Jiangping Zhou and colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, successfully demonstrated that data sharing between public transport companies, both privately-owned and government-owned, was viable. Operational data, anonymised and encrypted, were shared with a Trusted Third Party and aggregated for analysis, supported by a Transport Data Analytics Service Provider. The data was used solely for analysis purposes, and confidentiality was maintained throughout.
The establishment of the Data Trust was underpinned by the creation of a comprehensive Data Sharing Framework (DSF). This framework, developed collaboratively, laid the groundwork for future data sharing endeavours. The DSF has been shared internationally, fostering the exchange of knowledge and best practices across diverse organisations and agencies. The Guide serves as a repository of lessons learned, accessible studies, and references, aimed at facilitating a comprehensive understanding of data sharing methodologies.
The central aim of the Guide is twofold: to promote self-learning and to offer clarity on intricate approaches related to data sharing. Its intention is to encourage researchers, governmental bodies, commercial enterprises, and civil society entities, including NGOs, to actively engage in data sharing endeavours. By combining data sets, these stakeholders can glean enhanced insights and contribute to the common good…(More)”.