Abstract: Dashboards which collect and display real-time streamed data from a variety of rudimentary sensors positioned in the built environment provide an immediate portal for decision-makers to get some sense of their city and environment. These devices are linked to previous renditions of control and management of real-time services in cities, particularly transport, in control-room like settings but they are more flexible and do not require massive investment in hardware. At one level they are simply screens linked to some sort of computational device whose displays are focused in web page like formats. Here we catalogue the experience of building such dashboards for large cities in Great Britain. In particular, we link these to the emergence of open data, particularly reflecting the experience of the London Datastore. We then show how such dashboards can be configured in many different ways: as data tables which give some sort of physical presence to such data delivery, to purpose-built dashboards for schools, and to various moveable displays that have artistic as well as informative merit. To an extent as real-time streamed data become less of a novelty, we expect these dashboards to merge into more generic portals but for the moment they represent one very public face of the smart city and its big data.

Abstract: Within the context of the smart city, data are an integral part of the digital economy and are used as input for decision making, policy formation, and to inform citizens, city managers and commercial organisations. Reflecting on our experience of developing real-world software applications which rely heavily on urban data, this article critically examines the veracity of such data (their authenticity and the extent to which they accurately (precision) and faithfully (fidelity, reliability) represent what they are meant to) and how they can be assessed in the absence of quality reports from data providers. While data quality needs to be considered at all aspects of the data lifecycle and in the development and use of applications, open data are often provided ‘as-is’ with no guarantees about their veracity, continuity or lineage (documentation that establishes provenance and fit for use). This allows data providers to share data with undocumented errors, absences, and biases. If left unchecked these data quality issues can propagate through multiple systems and lead to poor smart city applications and unreliable ‘evidence-based’ decisions. This leads to a danger that open government data portals will come to be seen as untrusted, unverified and uncurated data-dumps by users and critics. Drawing on our own experiences we highlight the process we used to detect and handle errors. This work highlights the necessary janitorial role carried out by data scientists and developers to ensure that data are cleaned, parsed, validated and transformed for use. This important process requires effort, knowledge, skill and time and is often hidden in the resulting application and is not shared with other data users. In this paper, we propose that rather than lose this knowledge, in the absence of data providers documenting them in metadata and user guides, data portals should provide a crowdsourcing mechanism to generate and record user observations and fixes for improving the quality of urban data and open government portals.

Abstract: Here the current discussion on urban-rural relationships is reviewed, including the key concepts and political context. The notion of changing urban-rural relationships is related to the need for structural changes to EU subsidy policies and the prospects related to EU enlargement. Then, focusing on the ESDP, the authors argue in favour of conceiving this document as the residt of colliding frames, and analyse how ideas and concepts such as urban-rural partnerships and polycentric urban and economic development are substantiated and rationalized. Finally, they discuss the results of the SPESP, indicating possible directions of future research. After discussing the residts of the SPESP, possible directions for furture research are identified.

Abstract: The increasing concentration of people in cities generates many problems of control in the management of resources and urban space. Urban sprawl, for example, generates serious environmental, social and economic challenges that pertain to congestion, increasing transport costs, and segregated urban environments. Making cities 'smarter' has the potential to provide a solution for handling more efficiently new sources of digital information, to gain a better understanding of urban dynamics and human mobility and last but not least, to search for more sustainable living conditions. In this context, the increasing availability of geolocated data generated by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) provides new tools to analyse activity and mobility patterns in urban environments. In this paper, we present an overview of recent findings in empirical applications of such 'big data' to the systematic study of cities and their problems of movement. The paper concludes with a discussion on the potential of this new source of data and on how the coupling of big data analysis and computer modelling can open new horizons for the analysis of urban systems.

Abstract: Having the ability to detect emerging patterns in cities is crucial for efficient management of urban resources. Patterns that are useful in identifying and addressing future resource consumption needs include spatial changes in urban form and structure as well as temporal changes in human concentrations and activity patterns during the course of a day. Other patterns of interest are characteristics of local populations in dynamically changing neighborhoods and social-functional spaces. In this paper, we use the Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) platform which brings together multiple strands of structured and unstructured data, to examine such trends in the Greater Glasgow region. We present an approach to, first, understand spatial and time-dependent changes that capture the flow of resources needed to meet demands of residents and businesses at different times and locations, and second, generate hypotheses regarding urban engagement, activity patterns and travel behaviour. We use social media data, GPS trajectories, and background data from the UK Population Census for this purpose. The approach identifies the “roughness” in activity patterns across the urban space that are indicative of different concentrations of social and functional activities. When the time dimension is added to the mix, we are able to uncover time-varying transitions from one type of use pattern into another in different parts of the region. Such transitions, particularly in mixed-use areas, allow early detection of points of excess urban metabolism, with implications for traffic congestion, waste production, energy and other resource consumption patterns. Finally, the ability to detect what citizens talk about socially may provide a way to understand whether or not the language patterns detected in different parts of the city reflect underlying uses and concerns. A preliminary step to evaluate this idea is explored by extracting context-awareness and semantic enrichment to socially-generated data.

Abstract: Identifying socio-spatial pa erns through geodemographic classification has provenutility over a range of disciplines. While most of these spatial classification systems include a plethora of socioeconomic attributes, there is arguably little to no input regarding attributes of the built environment or physical space, and their relationship to socioeconomic profiles within this context has not been evaluated in any systematic way. This research explores the generation of neighbourhood characteristics and other attributes using a geographic data science approach, taking advantage of the increasing availability of such spatial data from open data sources. We adopt a SOM (Self-Organizing Maps) methodology to create a classification of Multidimensional Open Data Urban Morphology (MODUM) and test the extent to which this output systematically follows conventional socioeconomic profiles. Such an analysis can also provide a simplified structure of the physical properties of geographic space that can be further used as input to more complex socioeconomic models.

Abstract: The concept of 'sustainable travel' has been well discussed for over three decades; yet the meaning of sustainability in travel remains interpreted in many different ways. A transition to more environmentally sustainable travel has proved difficult to achieve, particularly in suburban areas. For individuals in society there are many different aspirations for, and constraints on, travelling in an environmentally sustainable manner. Lack of modal choice, route options, the cost of using public transport, and wider cultural norms are a few of the barriers to realizing a more sustainable transport network. Compounding this is the 'last mile' problem, concerning the facilities linking the main mode to the home, workplace or wider destination, which are often poor. This paper explores both the perceptions and opinions of everyday commuters in Ealing, London, including consideration of their localized lastmile issues. An in-depth study is undertaken with thirty-five employees of Ealing Council, using Q methodology to investigate the participants' perceptions towards, and awareness of, their respective journeys. The Q method analysis undertaken highlighted four major discourses associated with travel and the last mile problem in Ealing: 'the public transport user', 'the committed cyclist', 'the multi-modal traveller' and 'the frustrated traveller'. Understanding these different discourses and their unique characteristics has significant potential for assisting policy-makers and planners in developing more targeted investment priorities, policies, and stakeholder engagement strategies.

Abstract: Most Australians live in the suburban areas of the nation's major cities and their interaction with major elements of public policy is suburban. Yet public policy seems inattentive to suburban conditions, and the spatial consequences of most policy settings across suburbs have only been sporadically appraised and addressed by national governments. Why does Australia continue to overlook suburbia in national policy? This paper examines past attempts to introduce suburban perspectives into national policy-making in Australia. It then suggests what national suburban policies might be like and sketches the steps necessary to begin putting them into effect.

Abstract: Despite recent resource booms, the Australian economy remains dominated by the urban. In the wake of the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and in the face of falling global commodity prices, the economic functioning of Australian cities is critical to maintaining the unprecedented levels of prosperity that have existed since the mid-1990s. Australian cities are increasingly identified as being vital to facilitating economic growth. Indeed, many of the direct interventions by the previous federal Labor government, aimed at insulating the Australian economy from the worst of the GFC, were urban in nature. At the state level, which has constitutional authority for planning, cities are routinely identified as the drivers of state economies - especially in states which have not been characterized by the export of resources. However, a public and policy discourse has emerged that sees planning policy as restricting and constraining economic performance. This discourse, propelled by peak business groups, the development industry and neoliberal ideologues, insists that urban planning is a barrier to economic growth. The need for greater efficiencies has become so widely accepted that state governments are now engaged in a seemingly endless round of system reviews and reform. Against this background, this paper reviews recent planning reforms initiated in the major Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales.

Abstract: It is well known that the layout and confi guration of urban space plugs directly into our sense of community wellbeing. The twemtieth-century city planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city’s dwellers create their own personal ‘mental maps’ of the city based on features such as the routes they use and the areas they visit. Maps that are easy to remember and navigate bring comfort and ultimately contribute to people’s wellbeing. Unfortunately, traditional social science experiments (including those used to capture mental maps) take time, are costly, and cannot be conducted at city scale. This paper describes how, starting in mid-2012, a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines set about tackling these issues. They were able to translate a few traditional experiments into 1-minute ‘web games with a purpose’. This article describes those games, the main insights they off er, their theoretical implications for urban planning, and their practical implications for improvements in navigation technologies.