Fighting poverty with synthetic data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jack Gisby, Anna Kiknadze, Thomas Mitterling, and Isabell Roitner-Fransecky: “If you have ever used a smartwatch or other wearable tech to track your steps, heart rate, or sleep, you are part of the “quantified self” movement. You are voluntarily submitting millions of intimate data points for collection and analysis. The Economist highlighted the benefits of good quality personal health and wellness data—increased physical activity, more efficient healthcare, and constant monitoring of chronic conditions. However, not everyone is enthusiastic about this trend. Many fear corporations will use the data to discriminate against the poor and vulnerable. For example, insurance firms could exclude patients based on preconditions obtained from personal data sharing.

Can we strike a balance between protecting the privacy of individuals and gathering valuable information? This blog explores applying a synthetic populations approach in New York City,  a city with an established reputation for using big data approaches to support urban management, including for welfare provisions and targeted policy interventions.

To better understand poverty rates at the census tract level, World Data Lab, with the support of the Sloan Foundation, generated a synthetic population based on the borough of Brooklyn. Synthetic populations rely on a combination of microdata and summary statistics:

  • Microdata consists of personal information at the individual level. In the U.S., such data is available at the Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) level. PUMA are geographic areas partitioning the state, containing no fewer than 100,000 people each. However, due to privacy concerns, microdata is unavailable at the more granular census tract level. Microdata consists of both household and individual-level information, including last year’s household income, the household size, the number of rooms, and the age, sex, and educational attainment of each individual living in the household.
  • Summary statistics are based on populations rather than individuals and are available at the census tract level, given that there are fewer privacy concerns. Census tracts are small statistical subdivisions of a county, averaging about 4,000 inhabitants. In New York City, a census tract roughly equals a building block. Similar to microdata, summary statistics are available for individuals and households. On the census tract level, we know the total population, the corresponding demographic breakdown, the number of households within different income brackets, the number of households by number of rooms, and other similar variables…(More)”.

Collective Intelligence to Co-Create the Cities of the Future: Proposal of an Evaluation Tool for Citizen Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Fanny E. Berigüete, Inma Rodriguez Cantalapiedra, Mariana Palumbo and Torsten Masseck: “Citizen initiatives (CIs), through their activities, have become a mechanism to promote empowerment, social inclusion, change of habits, and the transformation of neighbourhoods, influencing their sustainability, but how can this impact be measured? Currently, there are no tools that directly assess this impact, so our research seeks to describe and evaluate the contributions of CIs in a holistic and comprehensive way, respecting the versatility of their activities. This research proposes an evaluation system of 33 indicators distributed in 3 blocks: social cohesion, urban metabolism, and transformation potential, which can be applied through a questionnaire. This research applied different methods such as desk study, literature review, and case study analysis. The evaluation of case studies showed that the developed evaluation system well reflects the individual contribution of CIs to sensitive and important aspects of neighbourhoods, with a lesser or greater impact according to the activities they carry out and the holistic conception they have of sustainability. Further implementation and validation of the system in different contexts is needed, but it is a novel and interesting proposal that will favour decision making for the promotion of one or another type of initiative according to its benefits and the reality and needs of the neighbourhood…(More)”.

Augmented Reality Is Coming for Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Greg Lindsay: “It’s still early in the metaverse, however — no killer app has yet emerged, and the financial returns on disruption are falling as interest rates rise.

Already, a handful of companies have come forward to partner with cities instead of fighting them. For example, InCitu uses AR to visualize the building envelopes of planned projects in New York City, Buffalo, and beyond in hopes of winning over skeptical communities through seeing-is-believing. The startup recently partnered with Washington, DC’s Department of Buildings to aid its civic engagement efforts. Another of its partners is Snap, the Gen Z social media giant currently currying favor with cities and civic institutions as it pivots to AR for its next act…

For cities to gain the metaverse they want tomorrow, they will need to invest the scarce staff time and resources today. That means building a coalition of the willing among Apple, Google, Niantic, Snap and others; throwing their weight behind open standards through participation in umbrella groups such as the Metaverse Standards Forum; and becoming early, active participants in each of the major platforms in order to steer traffic toward designated testbeds and away from highly trafficked areas.

It’s a tall order for cities grappling with a pandemic crisis, drug-and-mental-health crisis, and climate crisis all at once, but a necessary one to prevent the metaverse (of all things!) from becoming the next one…(More)”.

Critical factors influencing information disclosure in public organisations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Francisca Tejedo-Romero & Joaquim Filipe Ferraz Esteves Araujo: “Open government initiatives around the world and the passage of freedom of information laws are opening public organisations through information disclosure to ensure transparency and encourage citizen participation and engagement. At the municipal level, social, economic, and political factors are found to account for this trend. However, the findings on this issue are inconclusive and may differ from country to country. This paper contributes to this discussion by analysing a unitary country where the same set of laws and rules governs the constituent municipalities. It seeks to identify critical factors that affect the disclosure of municipal information. For this purpose, a longitudinal study was carried out over a period of 4 years using panel data methodology. The main conclusions seem to point to municipalities’ intention to increase the dissemination of information to reduce low levels of voter turnout and increase civic involvement and political participation. Municipalities governed by leftist parties and those that have high indebtedness are most likely to disclose information. Additionally, internet access has created new opportunities for citizens to access information, which exerts pressure for greater dissemination of information by municipalities. These findings are important to practitioners because they indicate the need to improve citizens’ access to the Internet and maintain information disclosure strategies beyond election periods…(More)”.

Atlas of the Senseable City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti: “What have smart technologies taught us about cities? What lessons can we learn from today’s urbanites to make better places to live? Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti argue that the answers are in the maps we make. For centuries, we have relied on maps to navigate the enormity of the city. Now, as the physical world combines with the digital world, we need a new generation of maps to navigate the city of tomorrow. Pervasive sensors allow anyone to visualize cities in entirely new ways—ebbs and flows of pollution, traffic, and internet connectivity.
 
This book explores how the growth of digital mapping, spurred by sensing technologies, is affecting cities and daily lives. It examines how new cartographic possibilities aid urban planners, technicians, politicians, and administrators; how digitally mapped cities could reveal ways to make cities smarter and more efficient; how monitoring urbanites has political and social repercussions; and how the proliferation of open-source maps and collaborative platforms can aid activists and vulnerable populations. With its beautiful, accessible presentation of cutting-edge research, this book makes it easy for readers to understand the stakes of the new information age—and appreciate the timeless power of the city…(More)”

The Platformization of Public Participation: Considerations for Urban Planners Navigating New Engagement Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Pamela Robinson & Peter Johnson: “Professional urban planners have an ethical obligation to work in the public interest. Public input and critique gathered at public meetings and other channels are used to inform planning recommendations to elected officials. Pre-pandemic, the planning profession worked with digital tools, but in-person meetings were the dominant form of public participation. The pandemic imposed a shift to digital channels and tools, with the result that planners’ use of technology risks unitizing public participation. As the use of new platforms for public participation expands, we argue it has the potential to fundamentally change participation, a process we call platformization. We frame this as a subset of the broader emergence of platform urbanism. This chapter evaluates six public participation platforms, identifying how the tools they provide map onto key participation frameworks from Arnstein (1969), Fung (2006), and IAP2 (2018). Through this analysis, we examine how the platformization of public participation poses ethical and scholarly challenges to the work of professional planners…(More)”.

How civic capacity gets urban social innovations started

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christof Brandtner: “After President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, several hundred mayors signed national and global treaties announcing their commitments to “step up and do more,” as a senior official of the City of New York told me in a poorly lit room in 2017. Cities were rushing to the forefront of adopting practices and policies to address contemporary social and environmental problems, such as climate change.

What the general enthusiasm masked is significant variation in the extent and speed at which cities adopt these innovations…My study of the geographic dispersion of green buildings certified with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, published in the American Journal of Sociology, suggests that the organizational communities within cities play a significant role in adopting urban innovations. Cities with a robust civic capacity, where values-oriented organizations actively address social problems, are more likely to adopt new practices quickly and extensively. Civic capacity matters not only through structural channels, as a sign of ample resources and community social capital, but also through organizational channels. Values-oriented organizations are often early adopters of new practices, such as green construction, solar panels, electric vehicles, or equitable hiring practices. By creating proofs of concepts, these early adopters can serve as catalysts of municipal policies and widespread adoption…(More)”.

Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Massimiliano Luca, Gian Maria Campedelli, Simone Centellegher, Michele Tizzoni, and Bruno Lepri: “Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale…(More)”.

Boston Isn’t Afraid of Generative AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Beth Simone Noveck: “After ChatGPT burst on the scene last November, some government officials raced to prohibit its use. Italy banned the chatbot. New York City, Los Angeles Unified, Seattle, and Baltimore School Districts either banned or blocked access to generative AI tools, fearing that ChatGPT, Bard, and other content generation sites could tempt students to cheat on assignments, induce rampant plagiarism, and impede critical thinking. This week, US Congress heard testimony from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and AI researcher Gary Marcus as it weighed whether and how to regulate the technology.

In a rapid about-face, however, a few governments are now embracing a less fearful and more hands-on approach to AI. New York City Schools chancellor David Banks announced yesterday that NYC is reversing its ban because “the knee jerk fear and risk overlooked the potential of generative AI to support students and teachers, as well as the reality that our students are participating in and will work in a world where understanding generative AI is crucial.” And yesterday, City of Boston chief information officer Santiago Garces sent guidelines to every city official encouraging them to start using generative AI “to understand their potential.” The city also turned on use of Google Bard as part of the City of Boston’s enterprise-wide use of Google Workspace so that all public servants have access.

The “responsible experimentation approach” adopted in Boston—the first policy of its kind in the US—could, if used as a blueprint, revolutionize the public sector’s use of AI across the country and cause a sea change in how governments at every level approach AI. By promoting greater exploration of how AI can be used to improve government effectiveness and efficiency, and by focusing on how to use AI for governance instead of only how to govern AI, the Boston approach might help to reduce alarmism and focus attention on how to use AI for social good…(More)”.

Can Mobility of Care Be Identified From Transit Fare Card Data? A Case Study In Washington D.C.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniela Shuman, et al: “Studies in the literature have found significant differences in travel behavior by gender on public transit that are largely attributable to household and care responsibilities falling disproportionately on women. While the majority of studies have relied on survey and qualitative data to assess “mobility of care”, we propose a novel data-driven workflow utilizing transit fare card transactions, name-based gender inference, and geospatial analysis to identify mobility of care trip making. We find that the share of women travelers trip-chaining in the direct vicinity of mobility of care places of interest is 10% – 15% higher than men….(More)”.