Computing and the Urban Experience: Exploring the Future of Places, Neighborhoods, and Communities

Опубликовано 22 июня 2016, 18:24

It is becoming increasingly clear that computing is rapidly changing the way we live in cities. Computation has enabled radical new transportation-based technologies such as Uber, Car2Go, and Citibike that in the span of just a few years have drastically changed the way we get around in cities. Rental services like AirBnB are impacting the economics of real-estate and are changing how we think about property ownership and hospitality. And civic hacking initiatives centered around open data are changing the way we think about public service and activism in a way that could revolutionize municipal services and operations. My own research in this area has looked at how computing is changing how we think about notions of place, neighborhood, and community in cities. In this talk I’ll present an overview of a some of my work on the subject. With Livehoods, I’ll demonstrate that traces the urban crowd leaves behind in geospatial social media data can be used to discover socially meaningful regions of a city akin to neighborhoods, depicting a snap-shot of the ever-changing activity patterns of its people. Curated City is a website that allows people to make their own personal guides to a city by providing short yet expressive textual descriptions of their favorite experiences. It is designed around the idea that although we each have our own individual views of it, the city is ultimately a place of collective experiences. Guides are fully remixable, allowing users to collaborate, reuse, and curate the contributions of others, creating social mechanisms that aggregate and highlight these common urban experiences. Journeys & Notes is social application that explores the idea that commonalities in urban transportation patterns can provide a new kind of social fabric to constitute an online community with the potential for broad offline social implications. Each work illustrates that the collective experiences of the urban populace can be leveraged both as an affordance in designing rich interactions in social urban applications, and as point of computational analysis capable of unlocking deep insights into the city and its people. Throughout I will touch on applications and extensions of these ideas that could impact urban design, city governance, community development, local search, and more.