Citicafe: conversation-based intelligent platform for citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amol Dumrewal et al in the Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data: “Community civic engagement is a new and emerging trend in urban cities driven by the mission of developing responsible citizenship. The recognition of civic potential in every citizen goes a long way in creating sustainable societies. Technology is playing a vital role in helping this mission and over the last couple of years, there have been a plethora of social media avenues to report civic issues. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and other online portals help citizens to report issues and register complaints. These complaints are analyzed by the public services to help understand and in-turn address these issues. However, once the complaint is registered, often no formal or informal feedback is given back from these sites to the citizens. This de-motivates citizens and may deter them from registering further complaints. In addition, these sites offer no holistic information about a neighborhood to the citizens. It is useful for people to know whether there are similar complaints posted by other people in the same area, the profile of all complaints and a know-how of how and when these complaints will be addressed.

In this paper, we create a conversation-based platform CitiCafe for enhancing citizen engagement front-ended by a virtual agent with a Twitter interface. This platform back-end stores and processes information pertaining to civic complaints in a city. A Twitter based conversation service allows citizens to have a direct correspondence with CitiCafe via “tweets” and direct messages. The platform also helps citizens to (a) report problems and (b) gather information related to civic issues in different neighborhoods. This can also help, in the long run, to develop civic conversations among citizens and also between citizens and public services….(More)”.

Data-Driven Regulation and Governance in Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sofia Ranchordas and Abram Klop in Berlee, V. Mak, E. Tjong Tjin Tai (Eds), Research Handbook on Data Science and Law (Edward Elgar, 2018): “This paper discusses the concept of data-driven regulation and governance in the context of smart cities by describing how these urban centres harness these technologies to collect and process information about citizens, traffic, urban planning or waste production. It describes how several smart cities throughout the world currently employ data science, big data, AI, Internet of Things (‘IoT’), and predictive analytics to improve the efficiency of their services and decision-making.

Furthermore, this paper analyses the legal challenges of employing these technologies to influence or determine the content of local regulation and governance. It explores in particular three specific challenges: the disconnect between traditional administrative law frameworks and data-driven regulation and governance, the effects of the privatization of public services and citizen needs due to the growing outsourcing of smart cities technologies to private companies; and the limited transparency and accountability that characterizes data-driven administrative processes. This paper draws on a review of interdisciplinary literature on smart cities and offers illustrations of data-driven regulation and governance practices from different jurisdictions….(More)”.

Smarter New York City: How City Agencies Innovate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by André Corrêa d’Almeida: “Innovation is often presented as being in the exclusive domain of the private sector. Yet despite widespread perceptions of public-sector inefficiency, government agencies have much to teach us about how technological and social advances occur. Improving governance at the municipal level is critical to the future of the twenty-first-century city, from environmental sustainability to education, economic development, public health, and beyond. In this age of acceleration and massive migration of people into cities around the world, this book explains how innovation from within city agencies and administrations makes urban systems smarter and shapes life in New York City.
Using a series of case studies, Smarter New York City describes the drivers and constraints behind urban innovation, including leadership and organization; networks and interagency collaboration; institutional context; technology and real-time data collection; responsiveness and decision making; and results and impact. Cases include residential organic-waste collection, an NYPD program that identifies the sound of gunshots in real time, and the Vision Zero attempt to end traffic casualties, among others. Challenging the usefulness of a tech-centric view of urban innovation, Smarter New York City brings together a multidisciplinary and integrated perspective to imagine new possibilities from within city agencies, with practical lessons for city officials, urban planners, policy makers, civil society, and potential private-sector partners….(More)”.

World’s biggest city database shines light on our increasingly urbanised planet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EU Joint Research Centers: “The JRC has launched a new tool with data on all 10,000 urban centres scattered across the globe. It is the largest and most comprehensive database on cities ever published.

With data derived from the JRC’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), researchers have discovered that the world has become even more urbanised than previously thought.

Populations in urban areas doubled in Africa and grew by 1.1 billion in Asia between 1990 and 2015.

Globally, more than 400 cities have a population between 1 and 5 million. More than 40 cities have 5 to 10 million people, and there are 32 ‘megacities’ with above 10 million inhabitants.

There are some promising signs for the environment: Cities became 25% greener between 2000 and 2015. And although air pollution in urban centres was increasing from 1990, between 2000 and 2015 the trend was reversed.

With every high density area of at least 50,000 inhabitants covered, the city centres database shows growth in population and built-up areas over the past 40 years.  Environmental factors tracked include:

  • ‘Greenness’: the estimated amount of healthy vegetation in the city centre
  • Soil sealing: the covering of the soil surface with materials like concrete and stone, as a result of new buildings, roads and other public and private spaces
  • Air pollution: the level of polluting particles such as PM2.5 in the air
  • Vicinity to protected areas: the percentage of natural protected space within 30 km distance from the city centre’s border
  • Disaster risk-related exposure of population and buildings in low lying areas and on steep slopes.

The data is free to access and open to everyone. It applies big data analytics and a global, people-based definition of cities, providing support to monitor global urbanisation and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The information gained from the GHSL is used to map out population density and settlement maps. Satellite, census and local geographic information are used to create the maps….(More)”.

Urban Big Data: City Management and Real Estate Markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Richard Barkham, Sheharyar Bokhari and Albert Saiz: “In this report, we discuss recent trends in the application of urban big data and their impact on real estate markets. We expect such technologies to improve quality of life and the productivity of cities over the long run.

We forecast that smart city technologies will reinforce the primacy of the most successful global metropolises at least for a decade or more. A few select metropolises in emerging countries may also leverage these technologies to leapfrog on the provision of local public services.

In the long run, all cities throughout the urban system will end up adopting successful and cost-effective smart city initiatives. Nevertheless, smaller-scale interventions are likely to crop up everywhere, even in the short run. Such targeted programs are more likely to improve conditions in blighted or relatively deprived neighborhoods, which could generate gentrification and higher valuations there. It is unclear whether urban information systems will have a centralizing or suburbanizing impact. They are likely to make denser urban centers more attractive, but they are also bound to make suburban or exurban locations more accessible…(More)”.

Reimagining Democracy: What if votes were a currency? A crypto-currency?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Opinion piece by Praphul Chandra: “… The first key tenet of this article is that the institution of representative democracy is a severely limited realization of democratic principles. These limitations span three dimensions:

First, citizen representation is extremely limited. The number of individuals whose preference an elected representative is supposed to represent is so large as to be essentially meaningless.

The problem is exacerbated in a rapidly urbanizing world with increasing population densities but without a corresponding increase in the number of representatives. Furthermore, since urban settings often have individuals from very different cultural backgrounds, their preferences are diverse too.

Is it realistic to expect that a single individual would be able to represent the preferences of such large & diverse communities?

Second, elected representatives have limited accountability. The only opportunity that citizens have to hold elected representatives accountable is often years away — ample time for incidents to be forgotten and perceptions to be manipulated. Since human memory over-emphasizes the recent past, elected representatives manipulate perception of their performance by populist measures closer to forthcoming elections.

Third, citizen cognition is not leveraged. The current model where default participation is limited to choosing representatives every few years does not engage the intelligence of citizens in solving the societal challenges we face today. Instead, it treats citizens as consumers offering them a menu card to choose their favourite representative.

To summarize, representative democracy does not scale well. With our societies becoming denser, more interconnected and more complex, the traditional tools of democracy are no longer effective.

Design Choices of Representative Democracy: Consider the following thought experiment: what would happen if we think of votes as a currency? Let’s call such a voting currency — GovCoin. In today’s representative democracy,

(i) GovCoins are in short supply — one citizen gets one GovCoin (vote) every 4–5 years.

(ii) GovCoins (Votes) have a very high negative rate: if you do not use them on election day, they lose all value.

(iii) GovCoins (Votes) are “accepted” by very few people: you can give your GovCoins to only pre-selected “candidates”

These design choices reflect fundamental design choices of representative democracy — they were well suited for the time when they were designed:

Since governance needs continuity and since elections were a costly and time-consuming exercise, citizens elected representatives once every 4–5 years. This also meant that elections had to be coordinated — so participation was coordinated to a particular election day requiring citizens to vote simultaneously.

Since the number of people who were interested in politics as a full-time profession was limited, the choice set of representatives was limited to a few candidates.

Are these design choices valid today? Do we really need citizens physically travelling to polling booths? With today’s technology? Must the choice of citizen participation in governance be binary: either jump in full time or be limited to vote once every 4–5 years? Aren’t there other forms of participation in this spectrum? Is limiting participation the only way to ensure governance continuity?

Rethinking Democracy: What if we reconsider the design choices of democracy? Let’s say we:

(i) increase the supply of GovCoins so that every citizen gets one unit every month;

(ii) relax the negative rate so that even if you do not “use” your GovCoin, you do not lose it i.e. you can accumulate GovCoins and use them at a later time;

(iii) enable you to give your GovCoins to anyone or any public issue / project.

What would be the impact of these design choices?

By increasing the supply of GovCoins, we inject liquidity into the system so that information (about citizens’ preferences & beliefs) can flow more fluidly. This effectively increases the participation potential of citizens in governance. Rather than limiting participation to once every 4–5 years, citizens can participate as much and as often as they want. This is a fundamental change when we consider institutions as information processing systems.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins to anyone, we realize a form of liquid democracy where I can delegate my influence to you — maybe because I trust your judgement and believe that your choice will be beneficial to me as well. In effect, we have changed the default option of participation from ‘opt out’ to ‘opt in’ — every citizen can receive GovCoins from every other citizen. The total GovCoins a citizen holds is a measure of how much influence she holds in democratic decisions. We evolve from a binary system (elected representative or citizen) to a continuous spectrum where your GovCoin ‘wealth’ is measure of your social capital.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins directly to a policy decision, we realize a form of direct democracy where citizens can express their preferences (and the strength of their preferences) on an issue directly rather than relying on a representative to do so.

By allowing citizens to accumulate GovCoins, we allow them to participate when they want. If I feel strongly about an issue, I can spend my GovCoins and influence this decision; If I am indifferent about an issue, I hold on to my GovCoins so that I can have a larger influence in future decisions. A small negative interest rate on GovCoins may still be needed to ensure that (i) citizens do not hoard the currency and (ii) to ensure that net influence of any individual is finite and time bounded.

Realizing Democracy: Given today’s technology landscape, realizing a democracy with new design choices is no longer a pipe dream. The potential to do this is here and now. A key enabling technology is blockchains (or Distributed Ledger Technologies) which allow the creation of new currencies. Implementing votes as a currency opens the door to realizing new forms of democracy….(More)”.

Artificial intelligence and smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Michael Batty at Urban Analytics and City Sciences: “…The notion of the smart city of course conjures up these images of such an automated future. Much of our thinking about this future, certainly in the more popular press, is about everything ranging from the latest App on our smart phones to driverless cars while somewhat deeper concerns are about efficiency gains due to the automation of services ranging from transit to the delivery of energy. There is no doubt that routine and repetitive processes – algorithms if you like – are improving at an exponential rate in terms of the data they can process and the speed of execution, faithfully following Moore’s Law.

Pattern recognition techniques that lie at the basis of machine learning are highly routinized iterative schemes where the pattern in question – be it a signature, a face, the environment around a driverless car and so on – is computed as an elaborate averaging procedure which takes a series of elements of the pattern and weights them in such a way that the pattern can be reproduced perfectly by the combinations of elements of the original pattern and the weights. This is in essence the way neural networks work. When one says that they ‘learn’ and that the current focus is on ‘deep learning’, all that is meant is that with complex patterns and environments, many layers of neurons (elements of the pattern) are defined and the iterative procedures are run until there is a convergence with the pattern that is to be explained. Such processes are iterative, additive and not much more than sophisticated averaging but using machines that can operate virtually at the speed of light and thus process vast volumes of big data. When these kinds of algorithm can be run in real time and many already can be, then there is the prospect of many kinds of routine behaviour being displaced. It is in this sense that AI might herald in an era of truly disruptive processes. This according to Brynjolfsson and McAfee is beginning to happen as we reach the second half of the chess board.

The real issue in terms of AI involves problems that are peculiarly human. Much of our work is highly routinized and many of our daily actions and decisions are based on relatively straightforward patterns of stimulus and response. The big questions involve the extent to which those of our behaviours which are not straightforward can be automated. In fact, although machines are able to beat human players in many board games and there is now the prospect of machines beating the very machines that were originally designed to play against humans, the real power of AI may well come from collaboratives of man and machine, working together, rather than ever more powerful machines working by themselves. In the last 10 years, some of my editorials have tracked what is happening in the real-time city – the smart city as it is popularly called – which has become key to many new initiatives in cities. In fact, cities – particularly big cities, world cities – have become the flavour of the month but the focus has not been on their long-term evolution but on how we use them on a minute by minute to week by week basis.

Many of the patterns that define the smart city on these short-term cycles can be predicted using AI largely because they are highly routinized but even for highly routine patterns, there are limits on the extent to which we can explain them and reproduce them. Much advancement in AI within the smart city will come from automation of the routine, such as the use of energy, the delivery of location-based services, transit using information being fed to operators and travellers in real time and so on. I think we will see some quite impressive advances in these areas in the next decade and beyond. But the key issue in urban planning is not just this short term but the long term and it is here that the prospects for AI are more problematic….(More)”.

Who Owns Urban Mobility Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Zipper at City Lab: “How, exactly, should policymakers respond to the rapid rise of new private mobility services such as ride-hailing, dockless shared bicycles, and microtransit?   … The most likely solution is via a data exchange that anonymizes rider data and gives public experts (and perhaps academic and private ones too) the ability to answer policy questions.

This idea is starting to catch on. The World Bank’s OpenTraffic project, founded in 2016, initially developed ways to aggregate traffic information derived from commercial fleets. A handful of private companies like Grab and Easy Taxi pledged their support when OpenTraffic launched. This fall, the project become part of SharedStreets, a collaboration between the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), the World Resources Institute, and the OECD’s International Transport Forum to pilot new ways of collecting and sharing a variety of public and private transport data. …(More).

People-Led Innovation: Toward a Methodology for Solving Urban Problems in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Methodology by Andrew Young, Jeffrey Brown, Hannah Pierce, and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “More and more people live in urban settings. At the same time, and often resulting from the growing urban population, cities worldwide are increasingly confronted with complex environmental, social, and economic shocks and stresses. When seeking to develop adequate and sustainable responses to these challenges, cities are realizing that traditional methods and existing resources often fall short.

people-led-innovation-coverAddressing 21st century challenges will require innovative approaches.

“People-Led Innovation: Toward a Methodology for Solving Urban Problems in the 21st Century,” is a new methodology by The GovLab and Bertelsmann Foundation aimed at empowering public entrepreneurs, particularly city-level government officials, to engage the capacity and expertise of people in solving major public challenges. This guide focuses on unlocking an undervalued asset for innovation and the co-creation of solutions: people and their expertise…..

Designed for city officials, and others seeking ways to improve people’s lives, the methodology provides:

  • A phased approach to helping leaders develop approaches in an iterative manner that is more effective and legitimate by placing people, and groups of people, at the center of all stages of problem-solving process, including: problem definition, ideation, experimentation, and iteration.
  • A flexible framework that instead of rigid prescriptions, provides suggested checklists to probe a more people-led approach when developing innovative solutions to urban challenges.
  • A matrix to determine what kind of engagement (e.g., commenting, co-creating, reviewing, and/or reporting), and by whom (e.g., community-based organizations, residents, foundation partners, among others) is most appropriate at what stage of the innovation lifecycle.
  • A curation of inspirational examples, set at each phase of the methodology, where public entrepreneurs and others have sought to create positive impacts by engaging people in practice….(More)”.

Developing online illustrative and participatory tools for urban planning: towards open innovation and co-production through citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Virpi Oksman and Minna Kulju in the International Journal of Services Technology and Management: “This article examines the challenge of involving various stakeholders in urban planning through user-driven innovation and collaborative design and leveraging these processes to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Consequently, we introduce a novel illustrative and participatory tool combining mixed reality visualisations with user-centred interactions and feedback-tools so as to promote user insights and involve them in design.

This article analyses how these co-design services should be designed and offered to users in order to effectively support public participation and citizen-governance collaboration in future urban planning projects. We conclude that, in order to provide real benefit and value for urban planning and smart city solutions, participatory service should be integrated as part of the decision-making. Adoption of this kind of services system also means reforming of some of work processes in governance and planning how to exploit the results of the participatory processes to make informed decisions….(More)”