Case Study by Cities of Service: “Mexico City was faced with a massive task: drafting a constitution. Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, who oversaw the drafting and adoption of the 212-page document, hoped to democratize the process. He appointed a drafting committee made up of city residents and turned to the Laboratório para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) to engage everyday citizens. LabCDMX conducted a comprehensive survey and employed the online platform Change.org to solicit ideas for the new constitution. Several petitioners without a legal or political background seized on the opportunity and made their voices heard with successful proposals on topics like green space, waterway recuperation, and LGBTI rights in a document that will have a lasting impact on Mexico City’s governance….(More)”.
Some notes on smart cities and the corporatization of urban governance
Presentation by Constance Carr and Markus Hesse: “We want to address a discrepancy; that is, the discrepancy between processes and practices of technological development on one hand and/or production processes of urban change and urban problems on the other. There’s a gap here, that we can illustrate with the case of the
The scholarly literature on digital cities is quite clear that there are externalities, uncertainties
Obviously, digitization and technology have revolutionized geography in many ways. And, this is nothing new. Roughly twenty years ago, with the rise of the Internet, some, such as MIT’s Bill Mitchell (1995), speculated that it and other ITs would eradicate space into the ‘City of Bits’. However, even back then statements like these didn’t go uncriticised by those who pointed at the inherent technological determinism and exposed that there is a complex relationship between urban development, urban planning, and technological innovation; that the relationship was neither new, nor trivial such that tech, itself, would automatically and necessarily be productive, beneficial, and central to cities.
What has changed is the proliferation of digital technologies and their applications. We agree with Ash et al. (2016) that geography has experienced a ‘digital turn’ where urban geography now produced by, through and of digitization. And, while digitalization of urbanity has provided benefits, it has also come sidelong a number of unsolved problems.
First, behind the production of big data, algorithms, and digital design, there are certain epistemologies – ways of knowing. Data is not value-free. Rather, data is an end product of political and associated methods of framing that structure the production of data. So, now that we “live in a present characterized by a […] diverse array of spatially-enabled digital devices, platforms, applications and services,” (Ash et al. 2016: 28), we can interrogate how these processes and algorithms are informed by socio-economic inequalities, because the risk is that new technologies will simply reproduce them.
Second, the circulation of data around the globe invokes questions about who owns and regulates them when stored and processed in remote geographic locations
Using street imagery and crowdsourcing internet marketplaces to measure motorcycle helmet use in Bangkok, Thailand
Hasan S. Merali, Li-Yi Lin, Qingfeng Li, and Kavi Bhalla in Injury Prevention: “The majority of Thailand’s road traffic deaths occur on
Using Google Maps, 3000 intersections in Bangkok were selected at random. At each intersection, hyperlinks of four images 90° apart were extracted. These 12 000 images were processed in Amazon Mechanical Turk using crowdsourcing to identify images containing motorcycles. The remaining images were sorted manually to determine helmet use
After processing, 462 unique motorcycle drivers were
This novel method of estimating helmet use has produced results similar to traditional methods. Applying this technology can reduce
Circular City Data
First Volume of Circular City, A Research Journal by New Lab edited by André Corrêa d’Almeida: “…Circular City Data is the topic being explored in the first iteration of New Lab’s The Circular City program, which looks at data and knowledge as the energy, flow, and medium of collaboration. Circular data refers to the collection, production, and exchange of data, and business insights, between a series of collaborators around a shared set of inquiries. In some scenarios, data may be produced by start-ups and of high value to the city; in other cases, data may be produced by the city and of potential value to the public, start-ups, or enterprise companies. The conditions that need to be in place to safely, ethically, and efficiently extrapolate the highest potential value from data are what this program aims to uncover.
Similar to living systems, urban systems can be enhanced if the total pool of data available, i.e., energy, can be democratized and decentralized and data analytics used widely to positively impact quality of life. The abundance of data available, the vast differences in capacity across organizations to handle it, and the growing complexity of urban challenges provides an opportunity to test how principles of circular city data can help establish new forms of public and private partnerships that make cities more economically prosperous, livable, and resilient. Though we talk of an overabundance of data, it is often still not visible or tactically wielded at the local level in a way that benefits people.
Circular City Data is an effort to build a safe environment whereby start-ups, city agencies, and larger firms can collect, produce, access and exchange data, as well as business insights, through transaction mechanisms that do not necessarily require currency, i.e., through reciprocity. Circular data is data that travels across a number of stakeholders, helping to deliver insights and make clearer the opportunities where such stakeholders can work together to improve outcomes. It includes cases where a set of “circular” relationships need to be in place in order to produce such data and business insights. For example, if an AI company lacks access to raw data from the city, they won’t be able to provide valuable insights to the city. Or, Numina required an established relationship with the DBP in order to access infrastructure necessary for them to install their product and begin generating data that could be shared back with them. ***
Next, the case study documents and explains how The Circular City program was conceived, designed, and implemented, with the goal of offering lessons for scalability at New Lab and replicability in other cities around the world. The three papers that follow investigate and methodologically test the value of circular data applied to three different, but related, urban challenges: economic growth, mobility, and resilience.
Contents
- Introduction to The Circular City Research Program (André Corrêa d’Almeida)
- The Circular City Program: The Case Study (André Corrêa d’Almeida and Caroline McHeffey)
- Circular Data for a Circular City: Value Propositions for Economic Development (Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Young, and Andrew J. Zahuranec)
- Circular Data for a Circular City: Value Propositions for Mobility (Arnaud Sahuguet)
- Circular Data for a Circular City: Value Propositions for Resilience and Sustainability (Nilda Mesa)
Conclusio (André Corrêa d’Almeida)
The tools of citizen science: An evaluation of map-based crowdsourcing platforms
Paper by Zachary Lamoureux and Victoria Fast: “There seems to be a persistent yet inaccurate sentiment that collecting vast amounts of data via citizen science is virtually free, especially compared to the cost of privatized scientific endeavors (Bonney et al., 2009; Cooper, Hochachka & Dhondt, 2011). However, performing scientific procedures with the assistance of the public is often far more complex than traditional scientific
Citizen science promotes the participation of the public in scientific endeavors (Hecker et al., 2018). While citizen science is not synonymous with volunteered geographic information (VGI)— broadly defined as the creation of geographic information by citizens (Goodchild, 2007)—it often produces geographic information. Similar to VGI, citizen science projects tend to follow specific protocols to ensure the crowdsourced geographic data serves as an input for (scientific) research (Haklay, 2013). Also similar to VGI, citizen science projects often require software applications and specialized training to facilitate citizen data collection. Notably, citizen science projects are increasingly requiring a
In this research, we investigate publicly available commercial and opensource map-based tools that enable citizen science projects. Building on a comprehensive comparative framework, we conduct a systematic evaluation and overview of five map-based crowdsourcing platforms: Ushahidi, Maptionnaire, Survey123 (ArcGIS Online), Open Data Kit, and GIS Cloud. These tools have additional uses that extend beyond the field of citizen science; however, the scope of the investigation was narrowed to focus on aspects most suitable for citizen science endeavors, such as the collection, management, visualization and dissemination of crowdsourced data. It is our intention to provide information on how these publicly available crowdsourcing platforms suit generic geographic citizen science crowdsourcing needs….(More)”.
From Smart-Cities to Smart-Communities: How Can We Evaluate the Impacts of Innovation and Inclusive Processes in Urban Context?
Paper by Francesca De Filippi, Cristina Coscia
Privacy and Smart Cities: A Canadian Survey
Report by Sara Bannerman and Angela Orasch: “This report presents the findings of a national survey of Canadians about smart-city privacy conducted in October and November 2018. Our research questions were: How concerned are Canadians about smart-city privacy? How do these concerns intersect with age, gender, ethnicity, and location? Moreover, what are the expectations of Canadians with regards to their ability to control, use, or opt-out of data collection in
What is a smart city?
A ‘smart city’ adopts digital and data-driven technologies in the planning, management
In 2017, a framework agreement was established between Waterfront Toronto, the organization charged with revitalizing Toronto’s waterfront, and Sidewalk Labs,
Algorithmic fairness: A code-based primer for public-sector data scientists
Paper by Ken Steif and Sydney Goldstein: “As the number of government algorithms
Legitimate Change & The Critical Role of Cities
Blog by Indy Johar: “We are living in the midst of rapid change and mounting evidence of the fragility of public trust in societal institutions. Increasingly our means of change are restricted not by capital or capacity (though we often like to point at these shortfalls), but rather by our means to create legitimacy, or shared coherence as to the proposed direction of travel, even as the climate threats to our
How do we address the growing fragility of legitimacy in our increasingly complex contexts? There are multiple forces, trends and drivers in play — including major demographic shifts, climate destabilisation, nutrient system hazards, and industrial revolution 4.0 consequences — which are creating feedback loops with second and third order spillovers and unintended or unimagined effects.
Cities are the sites where these complex systems knot together — including property rights, food systems, logistics, financial systems, water systems, human development institutions, schools, universities, etc. Transforming these underlying systems in an integrated manner is required in order to address the challenges we face and open up opportunities to create the full decarbonisation of our society, unlock inclusive innovation capacity of our economy, and build climate stabilisation resilience . This requires system innovation at the city scale.
It is this complexity, knot of systems of systems and the need for socially legitimate solutions, which is forcing a new architecture of legitimacy and the growing global calls for the strategic devolution of nation states — and the rise of the city. But this transition is about more than just nation states handing over power to cities (which to date has been much of the call — understandably). If cities are to be genuine “engines” of Human Development 2.0, where we can address and transcend our societal challenges to create a regenerative industrial revolution 4.0, they will need to transform the lock-in of systems and unleash the economies of scope, context and systems change to create a legitimate landscape for solutions in a complex the world. It is this latter work that needs to be developed and reimagined.
Remaking legitimacy involves remaking the deliberative and participatory infrastructure of civic debate and civic policy making. This needs to go beyond just new tools of opinion harvesting (whilst they do have
Nudging Citizens through Technology in Smart Cities
Sofia Ranchordas in the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology: “In the last decade, several smart cities throughout the world have started employing Internet of Things, big data, and algorithms to nudge citizens to save more water and energy, live healthily, use public transportation, and participate more actively in local affairs. Thus far, the potential and implications of data-driven nudges and behavioral insights in smart cities have remained an overlooked subject in the legal literature. Nevertheless, combining technology with behavioral insights may allow smart cities to nudge citizens more systematically and help these urban centers achieve their sustainability goals and promote civic engagement. For example, in Boston, real-time feedback on driving has increased road safety and in Eindhoven, light sensors have been used to successfully reduce nightlife crime and disturbance. While nudging tends to be well-intended, data-driven nudges raise a number of legal and ethical issues. This article offers a novel and interdisciplinary perspective on nudging which delves into the legal, ethical, and trust implications of collecting and processing large amounts of personal and impersonal data to influence citizens’ behavior in smart cities….(More)”.