Sometimes we forget to update our own personal website while preoccupied with other things.
During 2020 my academic publishing output slowed down a bit, while I have been focused on building some new projects, including STORYBOX as well as some work with Landcom in the Placemaking space. But still, we do have a bit to report!
The field of platform urbanism continues to grow and evolve. A new online special issue in the open access journal Frontiers was edited by Andy Karvonen, Bas Van Huer and James Evans, titled ‘Platform Urbanism and the Governance of Cities’.
My research paper was published in August 2020 and titled ‘Re-engineering the City: Platform Ecosystems and the Capture of Urban Big Data’.
In a nutshell:
The potentials of data-driven urban services are increasingly embraced by a broad cohort of urban decision-makers, sustainability scientists, technologists, researchers, and activists. Applications of urban data to accelerate transitions toward more sustainable futures are evident across a number of different fields. The capacity for cities to measure and benchmark their performance against emerging global sustainability standards, including UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and related international standards [ISO (n.d)], increasingly depends on the quality of their data reporting at a range of different scales (Creutzig et al., 2019; Hawken et al., 2020).
Framing cities as open systems, the field of “urban metabolism studies” sees the potential for urban big data to generate more sophisticated analyses of complex urban flows and resource intensities. This field envisions the city as a kind of dynamic metabolism of inputs and outputs, measured via advanced monitoring and remote sensing techniques that make use of real-time, location-aware platforms, and services that are increasingly entrenched into the fabric of everyday life.
As Creutzig et al. argue, advocating for the upscaling of urban data for global climate solutions: “Crowd-sourced and big data, such as the movement of people tracked by cell phones, offer manifold new possibilities for assessing the inner working of a city, and the availability, quality and quantity of data is rapidly evolving” (Creutzig et al., 2019, p. 6). Sustainability scientists cite city planning offices, utilities, tax offices, building sensors, and other internet of things (IoT) services as important sources of big data, used as a means to understanding climate impacts on urban systems and to measure the efficacy of climate solutions (Lin and Cromley, 2015; McPhearson et al., 2016).
Data-driven services have also been embraced as the basis for a new kind of urban engineering, a field in which data functions as a critical infrastructure for a more “systems-aware” approach to designing solutions to urban challenges [Batty, 2013; Thakuriah et al., 2017; CUSP (n.d.)]. Big data, resulting from the digitization of more and more urban infrastructures, services, and experiences, are recognized as improving not only information flows but with it also greater capacity for learning and coordination by heterogeneous individuals (Bettencourt, 2013; Bettencourt and Brelsford, 2015).
There is also, for many others, the potential for data-driven services to enable and encourage more participatory, citizen-centered decision-making, underpinned by a more “responsive” model of urban planning attuned to and engaged with local community sentiment (Kitchin, 2014a; Araya, 2015; Nonnecke et al., 2016; Thakuriah et al., 2017). The volume and veracity of big data are also widely acknowledged as central to the success of the circular economy, facilitating the tracking and monitoring of supply chain networks and consumer products (Perella, 2016; Gupta et al., 2019).
Across each of these examples, the digitization of urban flows and interactions is anticipated to create productive data that can be leveraged to support better decision-making and critical transformations in the design of cities. And yet, as attention toward platform business models, platform economy, and platform urbanism makes clear, many of today's digital platforms yield not just new data points or information flows that can enhance urban intelligence. They also raise complex new challenges to do with how data are used to capture and govern the informational landscapes of digitally mediated cities.