Essay by Luis Muñoz in the Special Issue of “Sensors” on Smart City: Vision and Reality : “In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore, a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets, and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications. (View Full-Text)”
The ethical impact of data science
Theme issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A compiled and edited by Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi: “This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping data ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artificial intelligence, artificial agents, machine learning and robots) and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data ethics builds on the foundation provided by computer and information ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the level of abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enable them. And it emphasizes the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by data science. Because of such complexity, data ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of data science and its applications within a consistent, holistic and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics will data ethics provide solutions that can maximize the value of data science for our societies, for all of us and for our environments….(More)”
Table of Contents:
- The dynamics of big data and human rights: the case of scientific research; Effy Vayena, John Tasioulas
- Facilitating the ethical use of health data for the benefit of society: electronic health records, consent and the duty of easy rescue; Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Julian Savulescu, Barbara J. Sahakian
- Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions; Luciano Floridi
- Compelling truth: legal protection of the infosphere against big data spills; Burkhard Schafer
- Locating ethics in data science: responsibility and accountability in global and distributed knowledge production systems; Sabina Leonelli
- Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy; Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, Nick Doty
- Beyond privacy and exposure: ethical issues within citizen-facing analytics; Peter Grindrod
- The ethics of smart cities and urban science; Rob Kitchin
- The ethics of big data as a public good: which public? Whose good? Linnet Taylor
- Data philanthropy and the design of the infraethics for information societies; Mariarosaria Taddeo
- The opportunities and ethics of big data: practical priorities for a national Council of Data Ethics; Olivia Varley-Winter, Hetan Shah
- Data science ethics in government; Cat Drew
- The ethics of data and of data science: an economist’s perspective; Jonathan Cave
- What’s the good of a science platform? John Gallacher
Council on Community Solutions
Fact Sheet by The White House on “Establishing a Council on Community Solutions to Align Federal Efforts with Local Priorities and Citizens’ Needs”: “Today, building on the Administration’s efforts to modernize the way the Federal Government works with cities, counties, and communities — rural, tribal, urban, and sub-urban – the President signed an Executive Order establishing a Community Solutions Council. The Council will provide a lasting structure for Federal agencies to strengthen partnerships with communities and improve coordination across the Federal Government in order to more efficiently deliver assistance and maximize impact.
Across the country, citizens and local leaders need a Federal Government that is more effective, responsive, and collaborative in addressing their needs and challenges. Far too often, the Federal Government has taken a “one-size-fits-all” approach to working with communities and left local leaders on their own to find Federal resources and navigate disparate programs. Responding to the call for change from local officials and leaders nationwide, and grounded in the belief that the best solutions come from the bottom up, not from the top down, Federal agencies have increasingly taken on a different approach to working with communities to deliver better outcomes in more than 1,800 cities, towns, regions, and tribal communities nationwide.
As a part of this new way of working, Federal agencies are partnering with local officials to support local plans and visions. They are crossing agency and program silos to support cities, towns, counties and tribes in implementing locally-developed plans for improvement – from re-lighting city streets to breathing new life into half-empty rural main streets. And by using data to measure success and harnessing technology, Federal agencies are focusing on community-driven solutions and what works, while monitoring progress to make investments that have a strong base of evidence behind them.
Building on this success, the President today signed an Executive Order (EO) that will continue to make government work better for the American people. The EO establishes a Council for Community Solutions to streamline and improve the way the Federal Government works with cities, counties, and communities – rural, tribal, urban and sub-urban – to improve outcomes. The Council includes leadership from agencies, departments and offices across the Federal Government and the White House, who together will develop and implement policy that puts local priorities first, highlights successful solutions based on best practices, and streamlines Federal support for communities. Further, the Council, where appropriate, will engage with representatives and leaders of organizations, businesses and communities to expand and improve partnerships that address the most pressing challenges communities face….
- Harnessing Data and Technology to Improve Outcomes for Communities: The Federal government is working to foster collaborations between communities and the tech sector, non-profits and citizens to help communities develop new ways to use both Federal and local data to address challenges with greater precision and innovation. As a result, new digital tools are helping citizens find affordable housing near jobs and transportation, matching unemployed Americans with jobs that meet their skills, enabling local leaders to use data to better target investments, and more…(More)”
Thinking about Smart Cities: The Travels of a Policy Idea that Promises a Great Deal, but So Far Has Delivered Modest Results
Paper by Amy K. Glasmeier and Molly Nebiolo in Sustainability: “… explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance–laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess “smart investments”, regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become “smart”….(More)”
The Digital City and Mediated Urban Ecologies
Book by Kristin Scott: “…This book examines the phenomenon of the “digital city” in the US by looking at three case studies: New York City, San Antonio, and Seattle. Kristin Scott considers how digital technologies are increasingly built into the logic and organization of urban spaces and argues that while each city articulates ideals such as those of open democracy, civic engagement, efficient governance, and enhanced security, competing capitalist interests attached to many of these digital technological programs make the “digital city” problematic….(More)”
How to ensure smart cities benefit everyone
By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in mega-cities. How all those people live, and what their lives are like, will depend on important choices leaders make today and in the coming years.
Technology has the power to help people live in communities that are more responsive to their needs and that can actually improve their lives. For example, Beijing, notorious for air pollution, is testing a 23-foot-tall air purifier that vacuums up smog, filters the bad particles and releases clear air.
This isn’t a vision of life like on “The Jetsons.” It’s real urban communities responding in real-time to changing weather, times of day and citizen needs. These efforts can span entire communities. They can vary from monitoring traffic to keep cars moving efficiently or measuring air quality to warn residents (or turn on massive air purifiers) when pollution levels climb.
Using data and electronic sensors in this way is often referred to as building “smart cities,” which are the subject of a major global push to improve how cities function. In part a response to incoherent infrastructure design and urban planning of the past, smart cities promise real-time monitoring, analysis and improvement of city decision-making. The results, proponents say, will improve efficiency, environmental sustainability and citizen engagement.
Smart city projects are big investments that are supposed to drive social transformation. Decisions made early in the process determine what exactly will change. But most research and planning regarding smart cities is driven by the technology, rather than the needs of the citizens. Little attention is given to the social, policy and organizational changes that will be required to ensure smart cities are not just technologically savvy but intelligently adaptive to their residents’ needs. Design will make the difference between smart city projects offering great promise or actually reinforcing or even widening the existing gaps in unequal ways their cities serve residents.
City benefits from efficiency
A key feature of smart cities is that they create efficiency. Well-designed technology tools can benefit government agencies, the environment and residents. Smart cities can improve the efficiency of city services by eliminating redundancies, finding ways to save money and streamlining workers’ responsibilities. The results can provide higher-quality services at lower cost….
Environmental effects
Another way to save money involves real-time monitoring of energy use, which can also identify opportunities for environmental improvement.
The city of Chicago has begun implementing an “Array of Things” initiative by installing boxes on municipal light poles with sensors and cameras that can capture air quality, sound levels, temperature, water levels on streets and gutters, and traffic.
The data collected are expected to serve as a sort of “fitness tracker for the city,” by identifying ways to save energy, to address urban flooding and improve living conditions.
Helping residents
Perhaps the largest potential benefit from smart cities will come from enhancing residents’ quality of life. The opportunities cover a broad range of issues, including housing and transportation, happiness and optimism, educational services, environmental conditions and community relationships.
Efforts along this line can include tracking and mapping residents’ health, using data to fight neighborhood blight, identifying instances of discrimination and deploying autonomous vehicles to increase residents’ safety and mobility….(More)“.
Civic Crowd Analytics: Making sense of crowdsourced civic input with big data tools
Paper by Tanja Aitamurto that: “… examines the impact of crowdsourcing on a policymaking process by using a novel data analytics tool called Civic CrowdAnalytics, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods such as concept extraction, word association and sentiment analysis. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we examine the influence of civic input on the city’s Comprehensive City Plan update. The findings show that the impact of citizens’ voices depends on the volume and the tone of their demands. A higher demand with a stronger tone results in more policy changes. We also found an interesting and unexpected result: the city government in Palo Alto mirrors more or less the online crowd’s voice while citizen representatives rather filter than mirror the crowd’s will. While NLP methods show promise in making the analysis of the crowdsourced input more efficient, there are several issues. The accuracy rates should be improved. Furthermore, there is still considerable amount of human work in training the algorithm….(More)”
Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing Our Cities
Book by Peter Hirshberg, Dale Dougherty, and Marcia Kadanoff: “Maker City, or the Maker City Playbook is a comprehensive set of case studies and how-to information useful for city leaders, civic innovators, nonprofits, and others engaged in urban economic development. The Maker City Playbook is committed to going beyond stories to find patterns and discern promising practices to help city leaders make even more informed decisions.
- Chapter 1: Introduction and a Call to Action
- Chapter 2: The Maker movement and Cities
- Chapter 3: The Maker City as Open Ecosystem
- Chapter 4: Education and Learning in the Maker City
- Chapter 5: Workforce Development in the Maker City
- Chapter 6: Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chain inside the Maker City
- Chapter 7: Real Estate Matters in the Maker City
- Chapter 8: Civic Engagement in the Maker City
- Chapter 9: The Future of the Maker City
Maker City Project is a collaboration between the Kauffman Foundation, the Gray Area for the Arts, and Maker Media. Read for free here: https://makercitybook.com/“
Crowdsourcing and cellphone data could help guide urban revitalization
Science Magazine: “For years, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have been developing a database of images captured at regular distances around several major cities. The images are scored according to different visual characteristics — how safe the depicted areas look, how affluent, how lively, and the like….Adjusted for factors such as population density and distance from city centers, the correlation between perceived safety and visitation rates was strong, but it was particularly strong for women and people over 50. The correlation was negative for people under 30, which means that males in their 20s were actually more likely to visit neighborhoods generally perceived to be unsafe than to visit neighborhoods perceived to be safe.
In the same paper, the researchers also identified several visual features that are highly correlated with judgments that a particular area is safe or unsafe. Consequently, the work could help guide city planners in decisions about how to revitalize declining neighborhoods.,,,
Jacobs’ theory, Hidalgo says, is that neighborhoods in which residents can continuously keep track of street activity tend to be safer; a corollary is that buildings with street-facing windows tend to create a sense of safety, since they imply the possibility of surveillance. Newman’s theory is an elaboration on Jacobs’, suggesting that architectural features that demarcate public and private spaces, such as flights of stairs leading up to apartment entryways or archways separating plazas from the surrounding streets, foster the sense that crossing a threshold will bring on closer scrutiny….(More)”
Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design
Book by Shin’ichi Konomi and George Roussos: “In recent years, the presence of ubiquitous computing has increasingly integrated into the lives of people in modern society. As these technologies become more pervasive, new opportunities open for making citizens’ environments more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.
Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the interaction between people and computing systems in contemporary society, showcasing how ubiquitous computing influences and shapes urban environments. Highlighting the impacts of these emerging technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, academicians, and practitioners interested in the influential state of pervasive computing within urban contexts….(Table of Contents and List of Contributors)”.