Extreme Informatics

What happens to urban space given a hypothetical future where all information loses its body, that is, when it is offloaded from the material substrate of the physical city1 to the personal, portable, or ambient displays of tomorrow’s urban information systems? This chapter explores the spatial, technological and social implications of an extreme urban informatics regime. It investigates the total virtualization of the marks, signage, signaling and display systems by which we locate, orient ourselves, and navigate through the city. Taking as a vehicle a series of digitally manipulated photographs of specific locations in New York, this study analyzes the environmental impact of a pervasive evacuation of information–at various sites and scales–from the sidewalks, buildings, streets, intersections, infrastructures and public spaces of a fictional future De-saturated City.

Cityware

In this paper, we describe a platform that enables us to systematically study online social networks alongside their real-world counterparts. Our system, entitled Cityware, merges users’ online social data, made available through Facebook, with mobility traces captured via Bluetooth scanning. Furthermore, our system enables users to contribute their own mobility traces, thus allowing users to form and participate in a community. In addition to describing Cityware’s architecture, we discuss the type of data we are collecting, and the analyses our platform enables, as well as users’ reactions and thoughts.

Place Making Through Participatory Planning

Community planning is facing many challenges around the world, such as the rapid growth of megacities as well as urban sprawl. The State of Michigan in the United States is attempting to re-invent itself through place making by using participatory planning supported by new information tools, models and online training. The Michigan State University Land Policy Institute framework for place making includes Picture Michigan Tomorrow, an informatics initiative to democratize data and incorporate it into scenario planning methodologies and tools, and Citizen Planner, an on-ground and online training program for local planning officials. Still in the early phases of implementation, these initiatives provide promising models for use in other regions of the world that seek consensus among citizens, developers and government on the vision and plan for their communities.

Urbane-ing the City

This chapter critically examines the notion of “the city” within urban informatics. Arguing that there is an overarching tendency to construe the city as an economically and spatially distinct social form, we review a series of system designs manifesting this assumption. Systematically characterizing the city as a dense ecology of impersonal social interactions occurring within recognizably public places, this construction can be traced to turn-of-the-century scholarship about the metropolis. The idealized dweller of these spaces, the flâneur, functions as the prototypical user for urban computing technologies. This assumption constrains the domain of application for emergent technologies by narrowing our conception of the urban experience. Drawing on contemporary urban scholarship, we advocate an alternative perspective which foregrounds the experience rather than the form of the metropolis. Users become actors embedded in global networks of mobile people, goods, and information, positioned in a fundamentally heterogeneous and splintered milieu. Grounding this approach in a preliminary study of mobility practices in Bangkok, Thailand, we illustrate how urban informatics might refine its subject, accounting for local particularities between cities as well as the broader global networks of connection between these sites.

Citizen Science

In this chapter, we present an important new shift in mobile phone usage—from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” We explore how these new “personal instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most to them. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a working hardware system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community—empowering people to become true change agents.

The Neogeography of Virtual Cities

Digital cities are moving well beyond their original conceptions as entities representing the way computers and communications are hard wired into the fabric of the city itself or as being embodied in software so the real city might be manipulated in silico for professional purposes. As cities have become more “computable,” capable of manipulation through their digital content, large areas of social life are migrating to the web, becoming online so-to-speak. Here, we focus on the virtual city in software, presenting our speculations about how such cities are moving beyond the desktop to the point where they are rapidly becoming the desktop itself. But what emerges is a desktop with a difference, a desktop that is part of the web, characterized by a new generation of interactivity between users located at any time in any place. We first outline the state of the art in virtual city building drawing on the concept of mirror worlds and then comment on the emergence of Web 2.0 and the interactivity that it presumes. We characterize these developments in terms of virtual cities through the virtual world of Second Life, showing how such worlds are moving to the point where serious scientific content and dialogue is characterizing their use often through the metaphor of the city itself.

Information Places

In our everyday lives, we are surrounded by information which weaves itself silently into the very fabric of our existence. Much of the time we act in the world based on recognising qualities of information which are relevant to us in the particular situation we are in. These qualities are very often spatial in nature, and in addition to information in the environment itself, we also access representations of space, such as maps and guides. Increasingly, such forms of spatial information are delivered on mobile devices, which enable a different relationship with our spatial world. We will discuss an empirical study which attempts to understand how people acquire and act on digital spatial information. In conclusion, we will draw on the outcomes of the study to discuss how we might better embed and integrate information in place so that it enables a more relational and shared experience in the interaction between people and their spatial setting.

Moments and Modes for Triggering Civic Participation at the Urban Level

After more than a decade of e-participation initiatives at the urban level, what remains obscure is the alchemy—i.e., the “arcane” combination of elements—that triggers and keeps citizens’ involvement in major decisions that affect the local community alive. The Community Informatics Lab’s experience with the Milan Community Network since 1994 and its two more recent spin-off initiatives enable us to provide a tentative answer to this question. This chapter presents these experiments and looks at election campaigns and protests as triggers for (e-)participation. It also discusses these events as opportunities to engender more sustained participation aided by appropriate technology tools such as software that is deliberately conceived and designed to support participation and managed with the required expertise.

Urban Informatics and Social Ontology

Is it still the case that one can symptomatically read the early work of the cyberpunk author William Gibson as a form of prefigurative urban theory (Burrows, 1997a; 1997b)? And why would one want to? Having read the various essays in this eclectic, engaging and exciting volume I turned to Gibson in the hope that I might again find buried in his stylistic prose some hint of an analytic insight that might provide a way of satisfactorily articulating the diverse concerns expressed within these pages. Gibson did not let me down. His most recent novel—Spook Country (Gibson, 2007)—is, as always, about many things, but at its core it is a novel of ideas about the social and cultural consequences of a whole assemblage of urban informatics technologies—locative technologies in particular. However, although the substantive concerns of this volume and his most recent novel are homologous, it was a passing exchange between two of the main characters about the changed nature of social ontology that made me realise why the study of urban informatics is as important as it is. The exchange occurs on page 103 of the novel

Urban Informatics in China

This chapter examines the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in urban China, focusing mainly on their impact on social life. The key question raised by this study is how the Internet and mobile technologies are affecting the way people make use of urban space. The chapter begins with some background to China’s emergence as a connected nation. It then looks at common use of web-based and mobile phone technologies, particularly bulletin boards, SMS and instant messaging. The chapter then presents findings of recent research that illustrates communitarian relationships that are enabled by mobility and the use of technologies. Finally, these findings are contextualized in the idea of the City 2.0 in China.