The Digital City and Mediated Urban Ecologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
 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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation Global: “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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by  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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”.

Empowering cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The real story on how citizens and businesses are driving smart cities” by the Economist Intelligence Unit: “Digital technologies are the lifeblood of today’s cities. They are applied widely in industry and society, from information and communications technology (ICT) to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which objects are connected to the Internet. As sensors turn any object into part of an intelligent urban network, and as computing power facilitates analysis of the data these sensors collect, elected officials and city administrators can gain an unparalleled understanding of the infrastructure and services of their city. However, to make the most of this intelligence, another ingredient is essential: citizen engagement. Thanks to digital technologies, citizens can provide a steady flow of feedback and ideas to city officials.

This study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Philips Lighting, investigates how citizens and businesses in 12 diverse cities around the world—Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—envision the benefits of smart cities. The choices of the respondents to the survey reflect the diverse nature of the challenges and opportunities facing different cities, from older cities in mature markets, where technology is at work with infrastructure that may be centuries old, to new cities in emerging markets, which have the opportunity to incorporate digital technologies as they grow.

Coupled with expert perspectives, these insights paint a fresh picture of how digital technologies can empower people to contribute-giving city officials a roadmap to smart city life in the 21st century….(More)”

Open Innovation: Practices to Engage Citizens and Effectively Implement Federal Initiatives

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United States Government Accountability Office: “Open innovation involves using various tools and approaches to harness the ideas, expertise, and resources of those outside an organization to address an issue or achieve specific goals. GAO found that federal agencies have frequently used five open innovation strategies to collaborate with citizens and external stakeholders, and encourage their participation in agency initiatives.

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GAO identified seven practices that agencies can use to effectively implement initiatives that involve the use of these strategies:

  • Select the strategy appropriate for the purpose of engaging the public and the agency’s capabilities.
  • Clearly define specific goals and performance measures for the initiative.
  • Identify and engage external stakeholders and potential partners.
  • Develop plans for implementing the initiative and recruiting participants.
  • Engage participants and partners while implementing the initiative.
  • Collect and assess relevant data and report results.
  • Sustain communities of interested partners and participants.

Aspects of these practices are illustrated by the 15 open innovation initiatives GAO reviewed at six selected agencies: the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation (DOT); the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

For example:

• With the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, NASA used a challenge and citizen science effort, beginning in 2014, to improve the accuracy of its asteroid detection program and develop an application for citizen scientists.

• Since 2009, DOT’s Federal Highway Administration has used an ideation initiative called Every Day Counts to identify innovations to improve highway project delivery. Teams of federal, state, local, and industry experts then implement the ideas chosen through this process….(More)”

NYC cyclists crowd-source map showing cars in bike lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Founded by a cyclist frustrated at the lack of local government action on enforcing bike safety, the Cars In Bike Lanes map geo-tags and time-stamps each contribution. New York City riders upload their photos, including a description of the cross streets where the incident occurred. License plate details are made visible, and users of the map can click to find out if a driver is a repeat offender.

The interactive map is open source, and the founder says he hopes other cities and developers customize the site for their areas. Development plans for the site will focus on increasing the numbers of cyclists using, and contributing to, it. And ideally, it will put pressure on local governments to actively enforce safety regulations designed to protect cyclists.

Cycle safety is a common urban problem, and cities around the world are designing different solutions. In The Netherlands,flashing LED lights warn cars of approaching cyclists at busy intersections. In Denmark, bikes fitted with radio frequency identification tags turn traffic lights in favor of the cyclist….(More)”

Seeing Cities Through Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Thakuriah, Piyushimita (Vonu), Tilahun, Nebiyou, and Zellner, Moira: “… introduces the latest thinking on the use of Big Data in the context of urban systems, including  research and insights on human behavior, urban dynamics, resource use, sustainability and spatial disparities, where it promises improved planning, management and governance in the urban sectors (e.g., transportation, energy, smart cities, crime, housing, urban and regional economies, public health, public engagement, urban governance and political systems), as well as Big Data’s utility in decision-making, and development of indicators to monitor economic and social activity, and for urban sustainability, transparency, livability, social inclusion, place-making, accessibility and resilience…(More)”