Matthew Hutson at Science: “When someone roughs up a pedestrian, robs a store, or kills in cold blood, police want to know whether the perpetrator was a gang member: Do they need to send in a special enforcement team? Should they expect a crime in retaliation? Now, a new algorithm is trying to automate the process of identifying gang crimes. But some scientists warn that far from reducing gang violence, the program could do the opposite by eroding trust in communities, or it could brand innocent people as gang members. That has created some tensions. At a presentation of... (More >)
Citicafe: conversation-based intelligent platform for citizen engagement
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... (More >)
Data-Driven Regulation and Governance in Smart Cities
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... (More >)
Smarter New York City: How City Agencies Innovate
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... (More >)
World’s biggest city database shines light on our increasingly urbanised planet
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... (More >)
Urban Big Data: City Management and Real Estate Markets
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... (More >)
Reimagining Democracy: What if votes were a currency? A crypto-currency?
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... (More >)
Artificial intelligence and smart cities
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... (More >)
Who Owns Urban Mobility Data?
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... (More >)
People-Led Innovation: Toward a Methodology for Solving Urban Problems in the 21st Century
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. Addressing 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... (More >)
