skip to main content
10.1145/1958824.1958826acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Urban informatics

Published:19 March 2011Publication History

Abstract

The increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and social media in our everyday lives allows for a seamless transitioning between the visible and the invisible infrastructure of cities: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology, and people networks create a buzzing environment that is alive and exciting. Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdisciplinary exchange, the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology. This paper seeks to define, for the first time, what we mean by 'urban informatics' and outline its significance as a field of study today. It describes the relevant background and trends in each of the areas of people, place and technology, and highlights the relevance of urban informatics to the concerns and evolving challenges of CSCW. We then position our work in academia juxtaposed with related research concentrations and labels, followed by a discussion of disciplinary influences. The paper concludes with an exposé of the three current research themes of the lab around augmented urban spaces, urban narratives, and environmental sustainability in order to illustrate specific cases and methods, and to draw out distinctions that our affiliation with the Creative Industries Faculty affords.

References

[1]
B&T. Earth Hour Analysis Reveals Social Media's Impact, B&T, Chatswood, NSW, 2010.
[2]
Beer, D. and Burrows, R. Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations. Sociological Research Online, 12 (5).
[3]
Bell, G. and Dourish, P. Yesterday's tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing's dominant vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (2). 133--143.
[4]
Bilandzic, M., Foth, M. and De Luca, A. CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems. in Marsden, G., Ladeira, I. and Kotzé, P. eds. Proc. DIS, Cape Town, 2008, 174--183.
[5]
Bruns, A. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang, NY, 2008.
[6]
Burgess, J., Foth, M. and Klaebe, H., Everyday Creativity as Civic Engagement: A Cultural Citizenship View of New Media. Proc. Communications Policy & Research Forum, (Sydney, NSW, 2006).
[7]
Calabrese, F., Kloeckl, K. and Ratti, C. WikiCity: Real-time Urban Environments. Pervasive Comp., 6 (3). 52.
[8]
Ciolfi, L., Fitzpatrick, G. and Bannon, L. Settings for Collaboration: The Role of Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 17 (2--3). 91--96.
[9]
Climate Risk. Towards a High-Bandwidth, Low-Carbon Future: Telecommunications-based Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Climate Risk Pty Limited (Australia), Fairlight, NSW, 2007.
[10]
Consolvo, S., Paulos, E. and Smith, I. Mobile Persuasion for Everyday Behavior Change. in Fogg, B.J. and Eckles, D. eds. Mobile Persuasion. Stanford Captology Media, Stanford, CA, 2007, 77--86.
[11]
Dave, B. (ed.), Space, sociality, and pervasive computing. Guest editor of a special issue of Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34(3). Pion, London, 2007.
[12]
de Souza e Silva, A. From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces. Space and Culture, 9 (3). 261--278.
[13]
Fitzpatrick, G. The Locales Framework: Understanding and Designing for Wicked Problems. Kluwer, Amsterdam, NL, 2003.
[14]
Foth, M. (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, 2009.
[15]
Foth, M., Bajracharya, B., Brown, R. and Hearn, G. The Second Life of Urban Planning? Using Neogeography Tools for Community Engagement. Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2). 97--117.
[16]
Foth, M., Choi, J.H.-j., Bilandzic, M. and Satchell, C., Collective and Network Sociality in an Urban Village. in MindTrek, (Tampere, Finland, 2008).
[17]
Foth, M. and Hearn, G. Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the Communicative Ecology in Inner-City Apartment building. Information, Communication & Society, 10 (5). 749--772.
[18]
Foth, M., Klaebe, H. and Hearn, G. The Role of New Media and Digital Narratives in Urban Planning. Body, Space & Technology, 7 (2).
[19]
Foth, M., Odendaal, N. and Hearn, G., The View from Everywhere: Towards an Epistemology for Urbanites. Proc. ICICKM, (Cape Town, South Africa, 2007).
[20]
Foth, M., Paulos, E., Satchell, C. and Dourish, P. Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability. Pervasive Computing, 8 (1). 78--81.
[21]
Foth, M., Satchell, C., Brereton, M. and Choi, J.H.-j., Internet Technology and Urban Sustainability. Proc. Internet Research 9.0, (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008).
[22]
Goggin, G. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. Routledge, New York, NY, 2006.
[23]
Greenfield, A. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. New Riders, Berkeley, 2006.
[24]
Gurstein, M. (ed.), Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communication Technologies. Idea Group, Hershey, PA, 2000.
[25]
Harrison, S. and Dourish, P. Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems Proc. CSCW, ACM, Boston, MA, 1996, 67--76.
[26]
Hearn, G. and Foth, M. (eds.). Communicative Ecologies. Special issue of the Electronic Journal of Communication, 17(1--2). Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, New York, 2007.
[27]
IFTF. Science & Technology Perspectives: 2005--2055, Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, CA, 2006.
[28]
Jenkins, H. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. NYU Press, New York, 2006.
[29]
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A.J. and Weigel, M. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Edu. for the 21C, 2006.
[30]
Kolbitsch, J. and Maurer, H. The Transformation of the Web. J of Universal Computer Science, 12(2). 187--213.
[31]
Kopomaa, T. Speaking Mobile. in Graham, S. ed. The Cybercities Reader, Routledge, London, 2004.
[32]
Leadbeater, C. We-think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production: The Power of Mass Creativity Profile, London, 2008.
[33]
Mallan, K., Foth, M., Greenaway, R. and Young, G.T. Serious Playground: Using Second Life to Engage High School Students in Urban Planning. Journal of Learning, Media and Technology, 35 (2), 203--225.
[34]
McKenzie-Mohr, D. Promoting Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. Journal of Social Issues, 56 (3). 543--554.
[35]
Mumford, L. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1934.
[36]
Nyiri, K. (ed.), A Sense of Place: The Global and Local in Mobile Communication. Passagen, Vienna, 2005.
[37]
Rheingold, H. Cities, Swarms, Cell Phones: The Birth of Urban Informatics, The Feature, 2003.
[38]
Sanusi, A. and Palen, L. Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi. CSCW, 17 (2--3). 257--273.
[39]
Satchell, C., Contextualising Mobile Presence w Digital Images. Workshop on Pervasive Image Capturing & Sharing. UbiComp, (Orange County, CA, 2006).
[40]
Satchell, C. Design, Mobile Phones and the Digital Generation. The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, 54 (3). 51.
[41]
Satchell, C., Foth, M., Hearn, G. and Schroeter, R., Suburban Nostalgia: The Community Building Potential of Urban Screens. OZCHI, (Cairns, 2008), 243--246.
[42]
Satchell, C. and Singh, S., The Mobile Phone as a Globalising Artefact. HCI International, (LV, 2005).
[43]
Scharl, A. and Tochtermann, K. (eds.). The Geospatial Web: How Geo-browsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society. Springer, 2007.
[44]
Schroeter, R. and Foth, M. Discussions in Space. in Kjeldskov, J., Paay, J. and Viller, S. eds. Proc. OZCHI 2009, CHISIG, Melbourne, VIC, 2009, 381--384.
[45]
Shirky, C. Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Penguin, NY, 2008.
[46]
Simmel, G. The Metropolis and Mental Life. in Miles, M., Hall, T. and Borden, I. eds. The city cultures reader, Routledge, London, 2004, 12--19.
[47]
Stern, N. The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review). Cambridge University Press, UK, 2007.
[48]
Sui, D.Z. The wikification of GIS and its consequences: Or Angelina Jolie's new tattoo and the future of GIS. Computers, Environment & Urban Systems, 32 (1). 1--5.
[49]
Townsend, A. Foreword. in Foth, M. ed. Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, IGI, Hershey, PA, 2009.
[50]
UNFPA. State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, United Nations Population Fund, New York, NY, 2007.
[51]
Wiesner, K. and Foth, M. Unleashing Creative Writers: Situated Engagement with Mobile Narratives. in Kjeldskov, J., Paay, J. and Viller, S. eds. Proc. OZCHI 2009, CHISIG, Melbourne, VIC, 2009, 373--376.
[52]
Williams, A., Robles, E. and Dourish, P. Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics. in Foth, M. ed. Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, IGI, Hershey, PA, 2009.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public SectorProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663407(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
  • (2023)“Need Black Joy?”The Black Geographic10.1215/9781478027249-010(213-245)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Postcards from the Future: Speculating the Future of Built Environments with CitizensProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593784(215-226)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Urban informatics

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    March 2011
    764 pages
    ISBN:9781450305563
    DOI:10.1145/1958824
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from[email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published:19 March 2011

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. creative industries
    2. digital augmentation
    3. digital cities
    4. environmental sustainability
    5. pervasive technology
    6. ubiquitous computing
    7. urban computing
    8. urban informatics

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CSCW '11
    Sponsor:
    CSCW '11: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    March 19 - 23, 2011
    Hangzhou, China

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CSCW '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)90
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
    Reflects downloads up to 06 Nov 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public SectorProceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3663384.3663407(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2024
    • (2023)“Need Black Joy?”The Black Geographic10.1215/9781478027249-010(213-245)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Postcards from the Future: Speculating the Future of Built Environments with CitizensProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593784(215-226)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
    • (2023)Municipalities’ digitalization and sustainability transformations: A network approach for designing a transdisciplinary knowledge communityProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593780(174-179)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
    • (2023)Human Centered Design for Virtual Reality and Design Science Research to Virtual Heritage – Palacio de Puruchuco2023 International Symposium on Accreditation of Engineering and Computing Education (ICACIT)10.1109/ICACIT59946.2023.10403677(1-5)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Roundtable discussion: progress of urban informatics in urban planningFrontiers of Urban and Rural Planning10.1007/s44243-023-00014-x1:1Online publication date: 11-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Experiencing Data on Location: A Case Study of Visualizing Air Quality for CitizensDaten vor Ort erleben: Eine Fallstudie zur Visualisierung der Luftqualität für Bürgerinnen und BürgerKN - Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information10.1007/s42489-023-00140-y73:2(97-108)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Looking with Machine Eyes: City Monitoring for Urban ResilienceResilience vs Pandemics10.1007/978-981-99-7996-7_4(51-65)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Urban Resilience to Future PandemicsResilience vs Pandemics10.1007/978-981-99-7996-7_1(1-12)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Big Data Analytics and the Future of Smart Transport and Healthcare SystemsBig Data Analytics for Smart Transport and Healthcare Systems10.1007/978-981-99-6620-2_10(175-184)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online witheReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media