Wenjie Wu Jianghao Wang & Tianshi Dai in Annals of the American Association of Geographers: “A largely unexplored big data application in urban contexts is how cultural ties affect human mobility patterns. This article explores China’s intercity human mobility patterns from social media data to contribute to our understanding of this question. Exposure to human mobility patterns is measured by big data computational strategy for identifying hundreds of millions of individuals’ space–time footprint trajectories. Linguistic data are coded as a proxy for cultural ties from a unique geographically coded atlas of dialect distributions. We find that cultural ties are associated with human mobility flows between city pairs, contingent on commuting costs and geographical distances. Such effects are not distributed evenly over time and space, however. These findings present useful insights in support of the cultural mechanism that can account for the rise, decline, and dynamics of human mobility between regions….(More)”
The city as platform
The report of the 2015 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology: “In the age of ubiquitous Internet connections, smartphones and data, the future vitality of cities is increasingly based on their ability to use digital networks in intelligent, strategic ways. While we are accustomed to thinking of cities as geophysical places governed by mayors, conventional political structures and bureaucracies, this template of city governance is under great pressure to evolve. Urban dwellers now live their lives in all sorts of hyper-connected virtual spaces, pulsating with real-time information, intelligent devices, remote-access databases and participatory crowdsourcing. Expertise is distributed, not centralized. Governance is not just a matter of winning elections and assigning tasks to bureaucracies; it is about the skillful collection and curation of information as a way to create new affordances for commerce and social life.
Except among a small class of vanguard cities, however, the far-reaching implications of the “networked city” for economic development, urban planning, social life and democracy, have not been explored in depth. The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program thus convened an eclectic group of thirty experts to explore how networking technologies are rapidly changing the urban landscape in nearly every dimension. The goal was to learn how open networks, onlinecooperation and open data can enhance urban planning and administration, and more broadly, how they might improve economic opportunity and civic engagement. The conference, the 24th Annual Aspen Roundtable on Information Technology, also addressed the implications of new digital technologies for urban transportation, public health and safety, and socio-economic inequality….(Download the InfoTech 2015 Report)”
Another Tale of Two Cities: Understanding Human Activity Space Using Actively Tracked Cellphone Location Data
Paper by Yang Xu et al: “Activity space is an important concept in geography. Recent advancements of location-aware technologies have generated many useful spatiotemporal data sets for studying human activity space for large populations. In this article, we use two actively tracked cellphone location data sets that cover a weekday to characterize people’s use of space in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. We introduce three mobility indicators (daily activity range, number of activity anchor points, and frequency of movements) to represent the major determinants of individual activity space. By applying association rules in data mining, we analyze how these indicators of an individual’s activity space can be combined with each other to gain insights of mobility patterns in these two cities. We further examine spatiotemporal variations of aggregate mobility patterns in these two cities. Our results reveal some distinctive characteristics of human activity space in these two cities: (1) A high percentage of people in Shenzhen have a relatively short daily activity range, whereas people in Shanghai exhibit a variety of daily activity ranges; (2) people with more than one activity anchor point tend to travel further but less frequently in Shanghai than in Shenzhen; (3) Shenzhen shows a significant north–south contrast of activity space that reflects its urban structure; and (4) travel distance in both cities is shorter around noon than in regular work hours, and a large percentage of movements around noon are associated with individual home locations. This study indicates the benefits of analyzing actively tracked cellphone location data for gaining insights of human activity space in different cities….(More)”
Designing for Cities: Technology and the Urban Experience
eBook byPaul McConnell and Michael Clare: “How can today’s growing cities use technology and design to improve their infrastructure, management, and quality of life? In this O’Reilly report, Paul McConnell and Mike Clare from Intersection review how connected services and platforms are redefining how cities function, and how people interact within them.
As the world becomes more urbanized and connected, design methods can be applied to some of the most critical challenges among three major groups: citizens, civic stakeholders, and commercial interests.
This report will provide you with background, examples, and approaches for citizen-centered experiences and civic innovation projects. The authors provide examples from projects including the MTA Subway System and LinkNYC—an ambitious program to replace New York’s aging pay phone infrastructure with the world’s largest and fastest free municipal Wi-Fi network….(More)”
The Smart City and its Citizens
Paper by Carlo Francesco Capra on “Governance and Citizen Participation in Amsterdam Smart City…Smart cities are associated almost exclusively with modern technology and infrastructure. However, smart cities have the possibility to enhance the involvement and contribution of citizens to urban development. This work explores the role of governance as one of the factors influencing the participation of citizens in smart cities projects. Governance characteristics play a major role in explaining different typologies of citizen participation. Through a focus on Amsterdam Smart City program as a specific case study, this research examines the characteristics of governance that are present in the overall program and within a selected sample of projects, and how they relate to different typologies of citizen participation. The analysis and comprehension of governance characteristics plays a crucial role both for a better understanding and management of citizen participation, especially in complex settings where multiple actors are interacting….(More)”
The Open (Data) Market
Sean McDonald at Medium: “Open licensing privatizes technology and data usability. How does that effect equality and accessibility?…The open licensing movement(open data, open source software, etc.) predicates its value on increasing accessibility and transparency by removing legal and ownership restrictions on use. The groups that advocate for open data and open sourcecode, especially in government and publicly subsidized industries, often come from transparency, accountability, and freedom of information backgrounds. These efforts, however, significantly underestimate the costs of refining, maintaining, targeting, defining a value proposition, marketing, and presenting both data and products in ways that are effective and useful for the average person. Recent research suggests the primary beneficiaries of civic technologies — those specifically built on government data or services — are privileged populations. The World Banks recent World Development Report goes further to point out that public digitization can be a driver of inequality.
The dynamic of self-replicating privilege in both technology and openmarkets is not a new phenomenon. Social science research refers to it as the Matthew Effect, which says that in open or unregulated spaces, theprivileged tend to become more privileged, while the poor become poorer.While there’s no question the advent of technology brings massive potential,it is already creating significant access and achievement divides. Accordingto the Federal Communication Commission’s annual Broadband Progressreport in 2015, 42% of students in the U.S. struggle to do their homeworkbecause of web access — and 39% of rural communities don’t even have abroadband option. Internet access skews toward urban, wealthycommunities, with income, geography, and demographics all playing a rolein adoption. Even further, research suggests that the rich and poor use technology differently. This runs counter to narrative of Interneteventualism, which insist that it’s simply a (small) matter of time beforethese access (and skills) gaps close. Evidence suggests that for upper andmiddle income groups access is almost universal, but the gaps for lowincome groups are growing…(More)”
A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system
“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.
The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.
The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.
After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.
The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.
Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”
Understanding Participatory Governance
An analysis of “Participants’ Motives for Participation” by Per Gustafson and Nils Hertting: “Despite the growing body of literature on participatory and collaborative governance, little is known about citizens’ motives for participation in such new governance arrangements. The present article argues that knowledge about these motives is essential for understanding the quality and nature of participatory governance and its potential contribution to the overall political and administrative system.
Survey data were used to explore participants’ motives for participating in a large-scale urban renewal program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was neighborhood-based, characterized by self-selected and repeated participation, and designed to influence local decisions on the use of public resources.
Three types of motives were identified among the participants: (a) Common good motives concerned improving the neighborhood in general and contributing knowledge and competence. (b) Self-interest motives reflected a desire to improve one’s own political efficacy and to promote the interest of one’s own group or family. (c) Professional competence motives represented a largely apolitical type of motive, often based on a professional role. Different motives were expressed by different categories of participants and were also associated with different perceptions concerning program outcomes.
Further analysis suggested that participatory governance may represent both an opportunity for marginalized groups to empower themselves and an opportunity for more privileged groups to act as local “citizen representatives” and articulate the interests of their neighborhoods. These findings call for a more complex understanding of the role and potential benefits of participatory governance…(More).”
Chicago Is Predicting Food Safety Violations. Why Aren’t Other Cities?
Julian Spector at CityLab: “The three dozen inspectors at the Chicago Department of Public Health scrutinize 16,000 eating establishments to protect diners from gut-bombing food sickness. Some of those pose more of a health risk than others; approximately 15 percent of inspections catch a critical violation.
For years, Chicago, like most every city in the U.S., scheduled these inspections by going down the complete list of food vendors and making sure they all had a visit in the mandated timeframe. That process ensured that everyone got inspected, but not that the most likely health code violators got inspected first. And speed matters in this case. Every day that unsanitary vendors serve food is a new chance for diners to get violently ill, paying in time, pain, and medical expenses.
That’s why, in 2014, Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology started sifting through publicly available city data and built an algorithm to predict which restaurants were most likely to be in violation of health codes, based on the characteristics of previously recorded violations. The program generated a ranked list of which establishments the inspectors should look at first. The project is notable not just because it worked—the algorithm identified violations significantly earlier than business as usual did—but because the team made it as easy as possible for other cities to replicate the approach.
And yet, more than a year after Chicago published its code, only one local government, in metro D.C., has tried to do the same thing. All cities face the challenge of keeping their food safe and therefore have much to gain from this data program. The challenge, then, isn’t just to design data solutions that work, but to do so in a way that facilitates sharing them with other cities. The Chicago example reveals the obstacles that might prevent a good urban solution from spreading to other cities, but also how to overcome them….(More)”
Hacking the streets: ‘Smart’ writing in the smart city
Spencer Jordan at FirstMonday: “Cities have always been intimately bound up with technology. As important nodes within commercial and communication networks, cities became centres of sweeping industrialisation that affected all facets of life (Mumford, 1973). Alienation and estrangement became key characteristics of modernity, Mumford famously noting the “destruction and disorder within great cities” during the long nineteenth century. The increasing use of digital technology is yet another chapter in this process, exemplified by the rise of the ‘smart city’. Although there is no agreed definition, smart cities are understood to be those in which digital technology helps regulate, run and manage the city (Caragliu,et al., 2009). This article argues that McQuire’s definition of ‘relational space’, what he understands as the reconfiguration of urban space by digital technology, is critical here. Although some see the impact of digital technology on the urban environment as deepening social exclusion and isolation (Virilio, 1991), others, such as de Waal perceive digital technology in a more positive light. What is certainly clear, however, is that the city is once again undergoing rapid change. As Varnelis and Friedberg note, “place … is in a process of a deep and contested transformation”.
If the potential benefits from digital technology are to be maximised it is necessary that the relationship between the individual and the city is understood. This paper examines how digital technology can support and augment what de Certeau calls spatial practice, specifically in terms of constructions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ (de Certeau, 1984). The very act of walking is itself an act of enunciation, a process by which the city is instantiated; yet, as de Certeau and Bachelard remind us, the city is also wrought from the stories we tell, the narratives we construct about that space (de Certeau, 1984; Bachelard, 1994). The city is thus envisioned both through physical exploration but also language. As Turchi has shown, the creative stories we make on these voyages can be understood as maps of that world and those we meet (Turchi, 2004). If, as the situationists Kotányi and Vaneigem stated, “Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology”, there needs to be a way by which the hegemony of the market, Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, can be challenged. This would wrestle control from the market forces that are seen to have overwhelmed the high street, and allow a refocusing on the needs of both the individual and the community.
This article argues that, though anachronistic, some of the situationists’ ideas persist within hacking, what Himanen (2001) identified as the ‘hacker ethic’. As Taylor argues, although hacking is intimately connected to the world of computers, it can refer to the unorthodox use of any ‘artefact’, including social ‘systems’ . In this way, de Certeau’s urban itineraries, the spatial practice of each citizen through the city, can be understood as a form of hacking. As Wark states, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” If the city itself is called into being through our physical journeys, in what de Certeau called ‘spaces of enunciation’, then new configurations and possibilities abound. The walker becomes hacker, Wark’s “abstractors of new worlds”, and the itinerary a deliberate subversion of an urban system, the dream houses of Benjamin’s arcades. This paper examines one small research project, Waterways and Walkways, in its investigation of a digitally mediated exploration across Cardiff, the Welsh capital. The article concludes by showing just one small way in which digital technology can play a role in facilitating the re-conceptualisation of our cities….(More)”