Tag Archives: Policy

CFP After the smart city? The state of critical scholarship ten years on

Leave a reply

CFP: AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, USA, April 10-14 2018: deadline October 6th.

 “After the smart city?: The state of critical scholarship ten years on”

Today, the smart city imaginary is a recurring theme within critical urban geography and implies a particular set of rationalities. While it tends to centre upon digital technologies as a means to solve complex urban problems, it is also an entrepreneurial branding and boosting technique for cities. The implementation of smart city strategies transforms how cities operate and has resulted in an array of well-documented critiques around control, privacy, and technological determinist or solutionist visions of the urban.  Furthermore, these data and software-driven solutions are often instrumental: merely treating symptoms, while failing to address the underlying problem. This has led to the idea that smart technologies are a solution looking for a problem.

This session seeks papers that explore approaches, policies, and practices that actively invoke and negotiate these issues, while also situating the smart city within wider, ongoing debates in and beyond urban geography. Thus, this session is not prescriptive and welcomes scholars interested in the smart city, data and digital transformations, digital infrastructure, technocratic and algorithmic governance, and the political economy of cities. In particular, we are interested in thinking through the ‘place’ of smart cities today: what have critical investigations of the topic achieved and where do we go from here?

Areas of potential interest for research papers may include, but are not limited to:

  • The nexus between governance, policy, technological innovation, and power;
  • How smart city initiatives are placed upon existing urban infrastructure and service provisions and the resulting consequences.
  • The role of the smart citizen.
  • The splintering effects of digital technologies.
  • The effects of technologies on everyday processes and environments.
  • Urban entrepreneurialism and the Smart City.

Please send titles and proposed abstracts (250 words max) to Aoife Delaney (Aoife.delaney@mu.ie) and Alan Wiig (alan.wiig@umb.edu) no later than Friday 6 October 2017.

 

Oxford Internet Institute Paper: Crowdsourcing: A Geographic Approach to Identifying Policy Opportunities and Challenges Toward Deeper Levels of Public Engagement

Leave a reply

Tracey Lauriault presented a paper co-authored with Peter Mooney at the Oxford Internet Institute last week and as promised to those in attendance here are the slides including the references.  The abstract can be read on the The Internet, Policy and Politics Conference website along with many of the other papers and abstracts.

References in order of appearance:
Definitions:
  1. Goodchild, Michael F., and Linna Li. 2012. “Assuring the Quality of Volunteered Geographic Information.” Spatial Statistics 1 (May): 110–20.  doi:10.1016/j.spasta.2012.03.002.
  2. Goodchild, Michael F., 2007, Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography, GeoJournal, 69 (4), pp. 211–221
  3. Conrad, Cathy C., and Krista G. Hilchey. 2011. “A Review of Citizen Science and Community-Based Environmental Monitoring: Issues and Opportunities.” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 176 (1-4): 273–91. doi:10.1007/s10661-010-1582-5.
  4. Browna, Greg  and Kyttäb, Marketta , 2014, Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research, Applied Geography, Volume 46, January 2014, Pages 122–136.
  5. Ogiek Peoples visualizing their traditional lands Nessuit, Kenya, Good practices in participatory Mapping (2009), International Fund for  Agricultural Development (IFAD)
  6. Brabham, Daren C., 2013, Using Crowdsourcing In Government. IBM Center for The Business of Government
  7. Google Flu Trends
  8. Mechanical Turk
  9. Notification Edit Service

Typology:

  1. Haklay, Muki. 2013. “Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation.” In Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, edited by Daniel Sui, Sarah Elwood, and Michael Goodchild, 105–22. Springer Netherlands.
  2. Hickling Arthurs Low (HAL), 2012, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) Primer, CANADIAN GEOSPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE INFORMATION PRODUCT 21e, Science & Technology Policy Research and Analysis Resource team, GeoConnections. Ottawa: Natural Resources Canada.
  3. Coleman, D., Georgiadou, Y., & Labonte, J. , 2009, Volunteered Geographic Information: the nature and motivation of produsers. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, Vol 4.

Assemblage:

  1. Kitchin, Rob and Lauriault,Tracey P., 2014, Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) – NIRSA National Institure for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA,
  2. Haklay, M.; Antoniou, V; Basiouka, S; Soden, R; Mooney, P; 2014, Crowdsourced Geographic Information Use in Government. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction & Recovery (GFDRR), World Bank: London, UK.

Examples:

  1. National Biodiversity Data Centre
  2. Coastwatch
  3. Nunaliit Cybercatographic Atlas Framework
  4. Engler, Nate ,Teresa Scassa, and Taylor, D. R. Fraser , 2014, Cybercartography and Volunteered Geographic Information, Chapter 4 in D.R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey P. Lauriault, Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography, 2nd Edition, Elsevier.
  5. Cybercartographic Atlases
  6. Canadian Geomatics Community Strategy “White Paper” and Scenarios, 2013, prepared for Natural Resources Canada by Hickling Arthurs Low Corporation (HAL).
  7. Programmable City Project