Airbnb and New York City Reach a Truce on Home-Sharing Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paris Martineau at Wired: “For much of the past decade, Airbnb and New York City have been embroiled in a high-profile feud. Airbnb wants legitimacy in its biggest market. City officials want to limit home-sharing platforms, which they argue exacerbate the city’s housing crisis and pose safety risks by allowing people to transform homes into illegal hotels.

Despite years of lawsuits, countersuits, lobbying campaigns, and failed attempts at legislation, progress on resolving the dispute has been incremental at best. The same could be said for many cities around the nation, as local government officials struggle to come to grips with the increasing popularity of short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO in high-tourism areas.

In New York last week, there were two notable breaks in the logjam. On May 14, Airbnb agreed to give city officials partially anonymized host and reservation data for more than 17,000 listings. Two days later, a judge ordered Airbnb to turn over more detailed and nonanonymized information on dozens of hosts and hundreds of guests who have listed or stayed in more than a dozen buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the past seven years.

In both cases, the information will be used by investigators with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement to identify hosts and property owners who may have broken the city’s notoriously strict short-term rental laws by converting residences into de facto hotels by listing them on Airbnb.

City officials originally subpoenaed Airbnb for the data—not anonymized—on the more than 17,000 listings in February. Mayor Bill de Blasio called the move an effort to force the company to “come clean about what they’re actually doing in this city.” The agreement outlining the data sharing was signed as a compromise on May 14, according to court records.

In addition to the 17,000 listings identified by the city, Airbnb will also share data on every listing rented through its platform between January 1, 2018, and February 18, 2019, that could have potentially violated New York’s short-term rental laws. The city prohibits rentals of an entire apartment or home for less than 30 days without the owner present in the unit, making many stays traditionally associated with services like Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO illegal. Only up to two guests are permitted in the short-term rental of an apartment or room, and they must be given “free and unobstructed access to every room and to each exit within the apartment,” meaning hosts can’t get around the ban on whole-apartment rentals by renting out three separate private rooms at once….(More)”.

Smart and Digital Cities: From Computational Intelligence to Applied Social Sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Vitor Nazário Coelho, Igor Machado Coelho, Thays A.Oliveira and Luiz Satoru  Ochi: “This book presents up-to-date information on the future digital and smart cities. In particular, it describes novel insights about the use of computational intelligence techniques and decentralized technologies, covering urban aspects and services, cities governance and social sciences. The topics covered here range from state-of-the-art computational techniques to current discussions regarding drones, blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrencies.


The idealization of this material emerged with a journey of free knowledge exchange from a diverse group of authors, who met each other through four different events (workshops and special sessions) organized with the purpose of boosting the concepts surrounding smart cities.
We believe that this book comprises innovative and precise information regarding state-of-the-art applications and ideas for the future of cities and society. It will surely be useful not only for the academic community but also to the industry professionals and city managers….(More)”.

Problematizing data-driven urban practices: Insights from five Dutch ‘smart cities’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Damion J.Bunders and KrisztinaVarró: Recently, the concept of the smart city has gained growing popularity. As cities worldwide have set the aim to harness digital technologies to their development, increasing focus came to lie on the potential challenges and concerns related to data-driven urban practices. In the existing literature, these challenges and concerns have been dominantly approached from a pragmatic approach based on the a priori assumed ‘goodness’ of the smart city; for a small group of critics, the very notion of the smart city is questionable. This paper takes the middle-way by interrogating how municipal and civil society stakeholders problematize the challenges and concerns related to data-driven practices in five Dutch cities, and how they act on these concerns in practice.

The lens of problematization posits that the ways of problematizing data-driven practices contribute to their actual enactment, and that this is an inherently political process. The case study shows that stakeholders do not only perceive practical challenges but are widely aware of and are (partly) pro-actively engaging with perceived normative-ethical and societal concerns, leading to different (sometimes inter-related) technological, legal/political, organizational, informative and participative strategies. Nonetheless, the explicit contestation of smart city policies through these strategies remains limited in scope. The paper argues that more research is needed to uncover the structural-institutional dynamics that facilitate and/or prevent the repoliticization of smart city projects….(More)”.

Collab: A new digital tool for community participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sidewalk Labs: “The long-term success of a neighborhood is predicated on its community members feeling a sense of ownership and belonging — of believing that, together, they are the stewards of their community. But it’s increasingly rare for 21st century city residents to join in the shared project of shaping their neighborhoods. Stop to consider: when was the last time you attended a community meeting? Volunteered at a neighborhood charity? Called your local representative? For many of us, the answer is never.

While there are many reasons for this decline in civic participation, one contributing factor is transparency. It’s not always clear how input will be used or if the organizations charged with community decisions are able to receive and act on that feedback. Another factor is that people may not always feel they are sufficiently knowledgeable on certain issues to meaningfully contribute.

To help address these challenges, governments and companies around the world have begun building tools that leverage technology to make participation more informed, transparent, and relevant to people’s daily lives.

The City of Barcelona is at the forefront of this trend, having created Decidim, an open-source digital tool inspired by social media that keeps residents up to date on processes and garners their input (the tool has since spread globally). The City of Bologna recently launched an Office of Civic Imaginationdesigned specifically to build greater participation through regulation, engagement labs throughout the city, and digital tools. Startups are also getting into the mix, such as Neighborland, which offers a customizable platform for engagement between city planners and communities. And some communities have even started creating their own tools, such as YouthScore, which allows youth to rate their neighborhoods based on their youth friendliness.

These examples are part of a promising trajectory towards inclusive digital participation that could enable people to engage with and enhance the places where they live, work, and visit. We’re excited by the idea of a future where community members can easily influence the decisions, spaces, and technologies that impact them — and where decision-making entities can be even more responsive to community input.

Our hope is that these tools kickstart a virtuous cycle: the more community members feel empowered to shape their communities, the more they will participate. The more they participate, the more decision-makers can be enabled to be more inclusive and responsive to community voices, inspiring more community members to participate. And so on.

As Barcelona, Bologna, and Neighborland show, there are many different ways that digital tools — in coordination with strong in-person and more traditional approaches — can unlock civic participation. One promising approach is leveraging technology to bring transparency into processes and decision points that could allow community members to better understand the issues at hand, provide input, and, hopefully, feel satisfied that their voices have been heard. What’s more, we believe that by providing community members with an informed, nuanced understanding of the required trade-offs of a decision, digital tools could even encourage more decisions that put collective good ahead of individual interests.

So we decided to create a prototype — one small contribution towards a more civically-engaged urban future.

Creating Collab

As a first step, we partnered with Digital Public Square, a Toronto-based non-profit that works globally to rethink and redesign how to leverage technology to support communities. Together, we came up with the idea for Collab, a digital tool that could support communities hoping to increase participation and make more inclusive, collaborative decisions….(More)”.

San Francisco becomes the first US city to ban facial recognition by government agencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Colin Lecher at The Verge: “In a first for a city in the United States, San Francisco has voted to ban its government agencies from using facial recognition technology.

The city’s Board of Supervisors voted eight to one to approve the proposal, set to take effect in a month, that would bar city agencies, including law enforcement, from using the tool. The ordinance would also require city agencies to get board approval for their use of surveillance technology, and set up audits of surveillance tech already in use. Other cities have approved similar transparency measures.“

The plan, called the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, was spearheaded by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. In a statement read ahead of the vote, Peskin said it was “an ordinance about having accountability around surveillance technology.”

“This is not an anti-technology policy,” he said, stressing that many tools used by law enforcement are still important to the city’s security. Still, he added, facial recognition is “uniquely dangerous and oppressive.”

The ban comes amid a broader debate over facial recognition, which can be used to rapidly identify people and has triggered new questions about civil liberties. Experts have raised specific concerns about the tools, as studies have demonstrated instances of troubling bias and error rates.

Microsoft, which offers facial recognition tools, has called for some form of regulation for the technology — but how, exactly, to regulate the tool has been contested. Proposals have ranged from light regulation to full moratoriums. Legislation has largely stalled, however.

San Francisco’s decision will inevitably be used as an example as the debate continues and other cities and states decide whether and how to regulate facial recognition. Civil liberties groups like the ACLU of Northern California have already thrown their support behind the San Francisco plan, while law enforcement in the area has pushed back….(More)”.

Data Science for Local Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jonathan Bright, Bharath Ganesh, Cathrine Seidelin and Thomas Vogl: “The Data Science for Local Government project was about understanding how the growth of ‘data science’ is changing the way that local government works in the UK. We define data science as a dual shift which involves both bringing in new decision making and analytical techniques to local government work (e.g. machine learning and predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and A/B testing) and also expanding the types of data local government makes use of (for example, by repurposing administrative data, harvesting social media data, or working with mobile phone companies). The emergence of data science is facilitated by the growing availability of free, open-source tools for both collecting data and performing analysis.

Based on extensive documentary review, a nationwide survey of local authorities, and in-depth interviews with over 30 practitioners, we have sought to produce a comprehensive guide to the different types of data science being undertaken in the UK, the types of opportunities and benefits created, and also some of the challenges and difficulties being encountered.

Our aim was to provide a basis for people working in local government to start on their own data science projects, both by providing a library of dozens of ideas which have been tried elsewhere and also by providing hints and tips for overcoming key problems and challenges….(More)”

A Smart City Stakeholder Classification Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anthea Van der Hoogen, Brenda Scholtz and Andre Calitz: “Cities globally are facing an increasing forecasted citizen growth for the next decade. It has therefore become a necessity for cities to address their initiatives in smarter ways to overcome the challenges of possible extinction of resources. Cities in South Africa are trying to involve stakeholders to help address these challenges. Stakeholders are an important component in any smart city initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to report on a review of existing literature related to smart cities, and to propose a Smart City Stakeholder Classification Model. The common dimensions of smart cities are identified and the roles of the various stakeholders are classified according to these dimensions in the model. Nine common dimensions and related factors were identified through an analysis of existing frameworks for smart cities. The model was then used to identify and classify the stakeholders participating in two smart city projects in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa….(More)”.

The State of Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein and Fernando Perini: “It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? 

The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come….(More)”.

San Francisco teams up with Uber, location tracker on 911 call responses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gwendolyn Wu at San Francisco Chronicle: “In an effort to shorten emergency response times in San Francisco, the city announced on Monday that it is now using location data from RapidSOS, a New York-based public safety tech company, and ride-hailing company Uber to improve location coordinates generated from 911 calls.

An increasing amount of emergency calls are made from cell phones, said Michelle Cahn, RapidSOS’s director of community engagement. The new technology should allow emergency responders to narrow down the location of such callers and replace existing 911 technology that was built for landlines and tied to home addresses.

Cell phone location data currently given to dispatchers when they receive a 911 call can be vague, especially if the person can’t articulate their exact location, according to the Department of Emergency Management.

But if a dispatcher can narrow down where the emergency is happening, that increases the chance of a timely response and better result, Cahn said.

“It doesn’t matter what’s going on with the emergency if we don’t know where it is,” she said.

RapidSOS shares its location data — collected by Apple and Google for their in-house map apps — free of charge to public safety agencies. San Francisco’s 911 call center adopted the data service in September 2018.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates agencies could save as many as 10,000 lives a year if they shave a minute off response times. Federal officials issued new rules to improve wireless 911 calls in 2015, asking mobile carriers to provide more accurate locations to call centers. Carriers are required to find a way to triangulate the caller’s location within 50 meters — a much smaller radius than the eight blocks city officials were initially presented in October when the caller dialed 911…(More)”.

Open data promotes citizen engagement at the local level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Afua Bruce at the Hill: “The city of Los Angeles recently released three free apps for its citizens: one to report broken street lighting, one to make 311 requests and one to get early alerts about earthquakes. Though it may seem like the city is just following a trend to modernize, the apps are part of a much larger effort to spread awareness of the more than 1,100 datasets that the city has publicized for citizens to view, analyze and share. In other words, the city has officially embraced the open data movement.

In the past few years, communities across the country have realized the power of data once only available to government. Often, the conversation about data focuses on criminal justice, because the demand for this data is being met by high-profile projects like Kamala Harris’ Open Justice Initiative, which makes California criminal justice data available to the citizenry and  the Open Data Policing Project, which provides a publicly searchable database of stop, search and use-of-force data. But the possibilities for data go far beyond justice and show the possibility for use in a variety of spaces, such as efforts to preserve local wildlife, track potholes and  understand community health trends….(More)”.