Co-Producing Tools for Participation and Action in Urban Environments

The chapter addresses the potential of co-production in relation to enhancing the participation of a city's inhabitants in its design, management and use. It does this by discussing a co-design process, which explored how participation might be extended to the design of digital platforms that could allow city inhabitants to be involved in the identification of needs, goals and actions for their everyday environments. The chapter outlines three spatial-technological experiments involved in the co-design process and the resulting web 2.0 platform prototype, which illustrates how collaborative technologies might stimulate collective actions. Acknowledging the importance of creating opportunities and spaces for reflection within technology-enabled participatory processes, the notion of co-production is extended to the iterative and collaborative production of knowledge and actions for the city. In this conceptualization, inhabitants' role shifts from that of ‘users' or ‘consumers' to active (and reflective) ‘co-producers' of a more resilient city together with the decision-makers.

Anonymous Pico-Payments for Internet of Things

In this Chapter a new way of payments for Internet of Things services is proposed, based on a stream of anonymous pico-payments realized by means of pico-coins. System architecture and information flow are presented, showing fully automated way of contextual payments which protect customers' privacy. With the proposed stream of pico-payments, two basic problems of efficient and widely acceptable payment method for the Internet of Things are solved: privacy protection, and toleration of frequent unexpected disconnections.

Effect of Urban Computing on the Public's Perception of Place, Community, and Infrastructure

The work presented in this chapter delineates the longitudinal experience of deploying an urban computing system that enables citizens to share and interact with digital content about the urban environment and experiences of people with it. It is part of an emerging and novel aspect of urban computing that expands research beyond simple optimisations of city functions towards a social and cultural approach that seeks to orchestrate complex socio-technical ensembles. Offering Collective City Memory as a service to citizens and enabling them to interact with it via diverse novel interfaces has uncovered the implications for city life that the introduction of urban computing brings such as the redefinition of spatial and temporal proximity and the effects on the perception of city space, fostering of social interactions, contribution to shared resources and participation in collective efforts.

Identifying the Temporal Characteristics of Intra-City Movement Using Taxi Geo-Location Data

In this chapter, the authors focus on temporal patterns of urban taxi trips and explore determinant factors in conjunction with geodatabase at aggregate level. Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model is proposed in light of count data nature and excessive number of O-D pairs with zero trip. Three typical time slots on weekdays, as well as weekends, are introduced as case study to check temporal variations of intra-city movement. The results indicate that trip distance, land use, socioeconomics, and built environment are significant variables that affect the number of taxi trips between two locations. In particular, longer travel and worse economy conditions, such as low employment and average annual income and more population under poverty, may prevent more movements, which have more impacts during peak hours. A better transit system may reduce the taxi trips, except for areas with more subway stations. Develpoed area for instance more commercial or residential area is more likely to attract more visits by taxis, as well as dense public facilities but with more temporal variations.

The Internet of Places at Community-Scale

The Internet of Things integrates entities of the physical world by making them addressable through the Internet, and making the Internet accessible through physical objects. We draw on our own previous design research in community informatics to explore a critical elaboration of the Internet of Things: The Internet of Places (IoP). IoP seeks to support awareness, engagement, and interaction pertaining to individual and collective human experiences, meaning making, activity, intentions, and values by computationally leveraging and integrating a wide range of human data with places to which those data refer. We describe design scenarios, prototypes, and user research at the scale of local community. We identify a critical alternative for humankind of hyperlocal community, enabling greater citizen awareness, engagement, participation, and power. We suggest that the Internet of Places at community-scale is the next generation infrastructure for community networks in the 40-year tradition of the Berkeley Community Memory.

Public Perception Spatial Data from the PPGIS Jaguarão Experiment

This chapter addresses PPGIS (Public Participation Geographic Information Systems), a participatory method through which the public can produce maps and spatial data that represent their perceptions of the urban space in question. Specifically, it analyzes the data collected from an experiment in Jaguarão, Brazil. The data represents the perceptions of a small group of inhabitants about the problems and potential of the city's urban area. The procedures include an exploratory analysis and data visualization in the form of maps that allow describing a variable's distribution and identifying patterns. Moreover, for some issues, the authors cross the perception collected data with infrastructure data, socioeconomic data, and cadastral data to study possible associations among these different types of information layers. The results show that public perception, collected through PPGIS, forms an additional information layer that could be analyzed together with other information layers commonly used in urban planning, and thus to be taken into account for designing better cities.

Urbanizing the Ambient

The purpose of this chapter is to develop and explore the ambient urbanizing concept as a way to shed light on what happens at the urban level when people become more aware and attuned to smartness and ambience in everyday city spaces. The research design for this work includes a case study approach and multiple methods of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. In parallel with this study, anecdotal evidence gathered from individuals across the city through informal individual and group discussions enabled further analysis, comparison, and triangulation of data. This chapter makes a contribution to the research literature across multiple domains; sheds light on the emerging relationships of awareness in the people – technologies – cities dynamic, highlighting the critical role of people, in their everyday urban activities, interactions, and experiences; and offers a proposed ambient urbanizing framework for enriching spaces, things, and designs in smart cities.

Assembly, Space, and Things

Each day as one notices more people walking along sidewalks, head down peering into smart phones, the fear is that social interaction in public space is dead. However, the integration of human and non-human processes may connect our communities now in more ways than ever before. New urban design theory suggests that “the city” may not be understood as a whole, rather as an assembly of dynamic urban processes. At many bike share systems around the world only static maps with limited interaction experience. Urban interaction design and the Internet of Things, is changing this experience. The interdisciplinary methodology describes a symbiosis of people, space and things. The significance is the integrated urban interaction design process of: urban design theory using classification of urban experience; geospatial analysis at the street-scale of point addresses, and fabrication of a test-bed kiosk to test ambient sensors and user interaction. Connectivity experienced in the virtual space of social media may now enter back into the physical realm of public space.

The Fermentation GutHub Project and the Internet of Microbes

The Fermentation GutHub is a local community of fermentation enthusiasts in Singapore formed around ‘smart' human-microbial interactions. The project is a critique of the common IoT utopia claiming efficient and transparent interactions between citizens and various stakeholders using smart sensors and monitoring devices in the cities of the future. Instead of relying on technology produced and supported by corporate actors or large government plans, the GutHub scenario uses existing fermentation groups and DIY tools as a model for designing resilient and symbiotic urban communities. Against the utopia of evidence-based decision making driven by policy and corporate actors, it emphasizes the importance of collective experience with risk and opportunities negotiated on a grassroots level. The project supports citizens' exchanges of various cultures, fermentation practices, and sometimes dangerous but also beneficial experiments with our guts as an interface, and proposes a model for messier IoT scenarios of future cities.

Design and Development of Sentient Collective Urban Spaces

This chapter aims to envision design approaches for creating ubiquitous interactive spaces which can empower the users to shape and reshape their living environments. It starts with the discussion of the affordances of networked sentient technologies to facilitate cycles of reflexivity through a comparative case study. Based on this analysis, the author distils key principles for future practices including: incomplete, dynamic architectural program, continuous representation of the user needs, incorporation of user variety and differences, embracing open-endedness, self-organization and spontaneity in use. Following these principles, the author reveals a conceptual design for a sentient space in Ghent as a means to demonstrate action possibilities latent in ubiquitous spaces. In conclusion, the author shares lessons learned and elaborates on future directions.