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A conceptual framework for understanding neighbourhoods in the digital age
Abstract
Digital platforms are a central infrastructure that has dramatically changed our daily lives. Like any other urban infrastructure and amenity, the digital platform has a heterogeneous influence on social groups. Studies exploring the influence of the digital on the mundane tend to focus on users, their socioeconomic status and their digital skills. However, digitisation is not an exogenous force; rather, it relates to culture and place. The departure point of this article is to conceptualise the idea of neighbourhood in the digital age, which offers a path towards understanding the role of the digital in our daily lives in relation to places. The article starts by discussing the neighbourhood and digitisation, addressing gaps and links that connect these themes. This discussion is followed by presentation of a framework linking the material with the virtual in understanding neighbourhoods. This framework is based on gathering data on four key issues: spatial configuration, digital infrastructure, demographic profile and digital participation in a neighbourhood. Jointly, these four issues are viewed as the means to contextualise and expand the way we think about the interplay between infrastructures and the agency of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants.
... characteristics of the residents. Nevertheless, it is acknowledged that neighborhoods and locales hold significant relevance in urban informatics Cranshaw et al. (2012); Zhang (2019); Hatuka (2024) and that neighborhood-level factors influence the adoption of technologies such as home Internet access Mossberger et al. (2007). Therefore, this paper asks whether and how the adoption of innovative city initiatives is influenced by the neighborhoods in which residents reside. ...
... When analyzing heterogeneous urban experiences in different neighborhoods, the associated factors cannot be mapped just to demographic characteristics such as ethnicity or income (Sharkey and Faber, 2014). This is also true for digital experiences, shaped by people's neighborhoods (Hatuka, 2024). Neighborhoods are created through diverse and dynamic processes, in which particular groups are attracted to specific neighborhoods (Sampson and Sharkey, 2008) and develop specific norms and culture (Bader and Warkentien, 2016). ...
... Specifically, neighborhoods exhibit distinct patterns of technological proficiency, perceived utility, and privacy concerns, suggesting that the geographic and cultural context significantly shapes residents' engagement with smart city initiatives. These results align with urban informatics research, which emphasizes the localized nature of digital experiences in urban environments (Hatuka, 2024;Cranshaw et al., 2012). ...
While local governments have invested heavily in smart city infrastructure, significant disparities in adopting these services remain in urban areas. The success of many user-facing smart city technologies requires understanding barriers to adoption, including persistent inequalities in urban areas. An analysis of a random sample telephone survey (n=489) in four neighborhoods of Tel Aviv merged with digital municipal services usage data found that neighborhood residency influences the reasons why residents adopt resident-facing smart city services, as well as individual-level factors. Structured Equation Modeling shows that neighborhood residency is related to digital proficiency and privacy perceptions beyond demographic factors and that those influence the adoption of smart-city services. We summarize the paper by discussing why and how place effects must be considered in further research in smart cities and the study and mitigation of digital inequality.
Neighbourhoods are salient for many dimensions of individuals’ social and economic well-being, yet the impacts of rapidly emerging digital information and communication technologies (DICTs) on neighbourhoods and the social processes within them are understudied. This gap motivates this Special Issue, the themes of which we introduce here. We provide an overarching conceptual framework within which the topics, conceptualisations and empirical results of the 11 constituent research papers can be placed. Our framework posits multiple, mutually causal interrelationships between each element in the triad of neighbourhoods, individual residents’ characteristics and individual residents’ actions. In each element we focus on the role(s) of DICTs and their interplay with social processes. These technologies alter traditional housing search patterns, sometimes reinforcing existing segregation, but they also present opportunities for greater access to information and potential social integration. The issue’s 11 research papers, contributed by scholars from various global contexts, explore diverse aspects of these themes. They examine how DICTs mediate neighbourhood change by influencing local housing choices, amplifying or mitigating neighbourhood stigma and transforming social cohesion. By offering a rich empirical and conceptual exploration, this special issue aims to deepen our understanding of the transformative role that DICTs play in neighbourhoods, urging further research into their implications for neighbourhood change and urban social processes.
This study investigates the social networks between racially/ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the United States, and whether they differ from the average network in that they offer more ethnically and racially diverse connections. We use a novel data set from Facebook’s Data for Good program measuring network connections between ZIP-codes, linking it to the 2018 − 2014 American Community Survey. Ordinary least squares models indicate that most diverse neighborhoods, regardless of composition, have the potential to connect to other diverse neighborhoods. However, most of these relationships are not present in our spatial models. In these spatial models, the remaining connections are marked by a hierarchy by race/ethnicity: mixed-White-and-Black, Hispanic, or Asian neighborhoods are less likely to connect to other mixed neighborhoods. Also, mixed-Black neighborhoods are more likely to connect to predominantly Black neighborhoods instead of mixed neighborhoods. This suggests while desegregation leads to new possible connections, integration of social networks has been modest.
Neighbourhoods are complex places, at once familiar and foreign, easily found on a map or bounded by rules only insiders know. Although neighbourhood is a concept, one that we experience daily, it remains conceptually challenging for geographers and planners alike. Nevertheless, and despite its complexity, the importance of the understanding the neighbourhood should not be overlooked, especially in the post-pandemic world. Understanding the neighbourhood as a concept, place and context, poses opportunities for geographers to think-with and think laterally across the demographic information we may have on who lives in a neighbourhood, and towards the integration of lived experiences to our explorations of it. In this paper, we critically review key literature on the neighbourhood since 2015, and discuss recurrent themes from that scholarship: belonging, place attachment, everyday interactions, and spatial formations. We argue that the neighbourhood be considered as a multilayered locale and a site imbued with emotions and meanings located with, in and stemming from place-specific conceptual, temporal, and spatial contexts of the neighbourhood. Our (re)visit of the neighbourhood occasions, we think, an opportunity for geographers to keep in touch with the neighbourhood and shape new discussions around these important ‘lived in’ spaces and places.
This article introduces the ‘House Model’, an integrated framework consisting of four data governance modes, based on the urban and smart city vision, context, and big data technologies. The model stems from engaged scholarship, synthesizing and extending the academic debates and evidence from existing smart city initiatives. It provides a means for comparing cities in terms of their digitization efforts, helps the planning of more effective urban data infrastructures and guides future empirical research in this area. The article contributes to the literature examining the issue of big data and its governance in local government and smart cities.
Points for practitioners
Data is a vital part of smart city initiatives. Where the data comes from, who owns it and how it is used are all important questions. Data governance is therefore important and has consequences for the overall governance of the city. The House Model presented in this article provides a means for organizing data governance. It relates questions of data governance to the history and vision of smart city initiatives, and provides a typology organizing these initiatives.
To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the theoretical and methodological challenges that underlie recent calls for comparative relational approaches to city-making. The relational comparative analysis we develop highlights the multiscalar transformations of relations of power across time and space, which reconstitute urban life within changing historical conjunctures. The article offers a working vocabulary for a relational comparative approach, together with methodological illustrations drawn from our research on three seemingly very different disempowered cities located in Germany, the United States, and Turkey. This methodology includes identification of comparative parameters. These parameters enabled exploration of the similar and different dynamics and paradoxes of interrelated key processes in the three cities. Such comparative dimensions might prove useful in future work on disempowered cities. Our multiscalar approach enabled us to explore the ways in which migrants and non-migrants can be understood as actors reconstituting the city within the conjunctural transformations brought about by neoliberal urban regeneration.
Public health measures are curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic's spread but also impact individual and societal well-being. Altogether, they test the social resilience of communities, their collective ability to cope with crises. The pandemic highlights the significance of the immediate local community or neighborhood, be it for providing assistance to individuals in need, the sensible sharing of public spaces or a renewed conscience for supporting local businesses. We argue that online neighborhood social networks (ONSNs) represent a viable solution for improving social resilience as they enhance a community's resistance to disruptions, quicken recovery to a normal level of functioning and can become a platform for creative solutions to strengthening social resilience. We conduct a multiple case study to demonstrate how ONSNs foster social resilience in the focal crisis and beyond. Furthermore, we identify design dilemmas and highlight avenues for IS research with a high impact on local communities and their well-being.
This introduction to the second special collection of articles on the platformization of the cultural industries foregrounds research methods and practices. Drawing from the 12 articles included in this collection, as well as the 14 articles published in the first collection, we identify commonalities in approaches, consistencies in traditions, and uniform modes of analysis. We argue that approaches that have been deployed in media industry studies for decades—semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, content analysis, and participant observation—remain productive. At the same time, transformations in the temporalities and curation of cultural production require updated modes of investigation and analysis. As such, we spotlight contributors’ novel methods and innovative theoretical approaches, such as the walkthrough method and multi-sided market theory.
By developing cities and increasing population, smart transportation becomes an essential component of modern societies. Extensive research activities using machine learning techniques and several industrial needs have paved the way for the emerging field of smart transportation. This paper presents data, methods, and models that are essential for intelligent planning of transportation. In particular, the current data sources for gathering information to control or forecast traffic are described, connected Vehicles (CVs) that bring smart and green transportation to modern life is also discussed. Clustering Analysis as an effective unsupervised machine learning method in trip distribution and generation and traffic zone division is discussed in the paper. Various machine learning techniques and models that use time series prediction are introduced in this paper including ARIMA, Kalman filtering, Holt winters'Exponential smoothing, Random walk, KNN Algorithm, and Deep Learning. Finally, a discussion on the main advantages and drawbacks of these models, as well as the business adoption of the forecasting models are presented.
The social connectedness of a community, characterized by aspects such as social support, social trust and civic engagement, plays an important role in determining the well-being of its inhabitants. Neighborhood activism and volunteering through community initiatives can improve this social connected-ness. Online neighborhood social networks (ONSNs) afford users functionality for social interaction, information sharing as well as peer-support and aim to improve community connectedness with platforms such as Nextdoor exhibiting rapid growth in recent years. However, as of yet, ONSNs do not provide specific tool support for implementing community initiatives beyond generic communication capabilities. We propose crowdsourcing as a suitable approach for mobilizing neighbors to ideate, participate in and collaboratively implement community initiatives on ONSNs. Using a design science research approach, we develop design goals and design principles for crowd-sourced community initiatives based on literature and empirical data from two case neighborhoods. We instantiate these design principles into a proof-of-concept artifact in the context of an existing ONSN. Based on our evaluation, we derive implications for establishing crowd-sourced community initiatives on ONSNs. We contribute to research on crowdsourcing and ONSNs with nascent design knowledge which guides researchers and practitioners in designing crowd-based artifacts in the context of local communities.
This paper is centred on the levels of participation in digital municipal platforms, and its goals are threefold: (1) to assess the normative aspirations and limitations of policy makers and key actors in the municipality with regard to the smart resident idea, with a focus on participation and privacy; (2) to assess and categorise levels of participation in varied social and geographic contexts in the city; and (3) to assess the possible link between participation and privacy practices among users. Empirically, this paper studies the practices of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv-Yafo City, with a focus on the use of digitised services provided by the municipality and the use of the celebrated project ‘Digi-Tel’ – a digital card that offers to the inhabitants of the city services, discounts, targeted information and benefits around the city. The assessment of the inhabitants’ practices is based on a survey that was conducted in four neighbourhoods with different socio-economic, ethnic and geographical characteristics. The survey is supplemented with interviews of prominent figures in the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality to understand their views on participation and privacy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the varied profiles of the users and non-users of digital platforms in the city, revealing their complex approach to participation in the digital age.
Civic crowdfunding, or recruiting participants and collecting financial donations online for local development projects with public benefits, is an increasingly popular method for participatory e-Planning at the neighborhood scale. However, little is known about the donors' backgrounds, project involvement, or social capital outcomes. This article reports on a survey of 154 donors to ten such projects that finds that they are geographically diverse, are older and whiter than the project tracts, report some volunteering activities, and experience modest changes to social capital outcomes. The article discusses implications of the findings, such as how practitioners can ensure inclusion of diverse people and encourages participation among donors, and what future research is needed.
The wide use of social media has facilitated new social practices that influence place meaning. This paper uses a double case study of two neighborhood blogs in gentrifying communities, to explore the role of social media in sharing place associations and community formation. Drawing on Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chains, this research project investigates how the intertwining of online and offline interaction around the blogs creates interaction chains whereby the place associations of participants in the blog become more aligned, creating an alternative place narrative. Analyses of the dynamics of involvement with the blogs show how social interactions spurred by the blogs generate emotional energy, group solidarity, feelings of morality, meaningful symbols, and feelings of place attachment among the participants. This article illuminates how the emerging process of place (re)making spurred by interaction with the blog emerges from both everyday unplanned behavior and strategic aims of the actors.
For a long time, a common opinion among policy-makers was that the digital divide problem would be solved when a country’s Internet connection rate reaches saturation. However, scholars of the second-level digital divide have concluded that the divides in Internet skills and type of use continue to expand even after physical access is universal. This study—based on an online survey among a representative sample of the Dutch population—indicates that the first-level digital divide remains a problem in one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world. By extending basic physical access combined with material access, the study finds that a diversity in access to devices and peripherals, device-related opportunities, and the ongoing expenses required to maintain the hardware, software, and subscriptions affect existing inequalities related to Internet skills, uses, and outcomes.
This article develops and mobilises the concept of ‘mundane data’ as an analytical entry point for understanding Big Data. We call for in-depth investigation of the human experiences, routines, improvisations and accomplishments which implicate digital data in the flow of the everyday. We demonstrate the value of this approach through a discussion of our ethnographic research with self-tracking cycling commuters. We argue that such investigations are crucial in informing our understandings of how digital data become meaningful in mundane contexts of everyday life for two reasons: first because there is a gap in our understanding of the contingencies and specificities through which big digital data sets are produced, and second because designers and policy makers often seek to make interventions for change in everyday contexts through the presentation of mundane data to consumers but with little understanding of how people produce, experience and engage with these data.
As visions of smart urbanism gain traction around the world, it is crucial that we question the benefits that an increasingly technologised urbanity promise. It is not about the technology, but bettering peoples’ lives, insist smart city advocates. In this paper, I question the progressive potential of the smart city drawing on the case of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. Using the case studies of the smart home and ‘learning to code’ movement, I highlight the limits of such ‘smart’ interventions as they are stunted by the neoliberal-developmental logics of the state, thereby facilitating authoritarian consolidation in Singapore. As such, this paper distinguishes itself from previous works on the neoliberal smart city by situated smart urbanism within the socio-political dynamics of neoliberalism-as-developmental strategy. For smart urbanism to better peoples’ everyday lives, technological ‘solutionism’ needs to be replaced with more human-centric framings and understandings of urban challenges.
This study examines the role of social media in the lives of youth living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Feminist Standpoint Theory, which privileges the voices of marginalized communities in understanding social phenomena, suggests that youth at the margins have specific knowledge that helps us understand social media more broadly. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 females and 30 males aged 13–24 years about their social worlds and neighborhoods, both online and offline. The findings reveal a dynamic and somewhat concerning interplay between the geographic neighborhood and the digital neighborhood, whereby negative social interactions in the geographic neighborhood are reproduced and amplified on social media.
This literature review examines how scholars approached issues around the digital divide and moves on to analyzing initiatives to use digital technology to decrease the inequalities that exist between groups of different socioeconomic backgrounds. The intention is to highlight some useful references that are relevant in addressing how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are used in different socioeconomic contexts. It presents references that follow several ideologies when approaching digital divide and digital inclusion. These ideologies go from providing physical access to a multifaceted approach of access that involves cognitive, economic, cultural and social factors, as well as differentiated uses of the internet.
This paper explores the subtle notion of unplugging to critically analyze the technological determinism of the Smart City. This exploration suggests that being digitally connected should not be perceived as gaining social capital. This article critiques the assumptions of the Smart City and proposes a ten-dimension conceptual framework. The first section of this article explores hyper-connected societies and how unplugging could be beneficial. The main subjects, Digital Natives, are discussed in the second section of this article. The third section is a decalogue on deconstructing the Smart City, and the final section presents key ideas and questions for future analysis.
The collective empowerment imagined in the government rhetoric of localism bears little resemblance to the market model of aggregative democracy that characterizes much of the practice of participation in spatial planning. This paper explores one of the rare statutory strategies to engage collective participation and to mobilize the neighbourhood as an institution of spatial planning. In a study of neighbourhood planning in England, it investigates the new political identities that emerged and the conflicts and antagonism that accompanied them. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, the paper explores the significance of the political practices that resulted for the state strategy of localism.
While the field of digital inequality continues to expand in many directions, the relationship between digital inequalities and other forms of inequality has yet to be fully appreciated. This article invites social scientists in and outside the field of digital media studies to attend to digital inequality, both as a substantive problem and as a methodological concern. The authors present current research on multiple aspects of digital inequality, defined expansively in terms of access, usage, skills, and self-perceptions, as well as future lines of research. Each of the contributions makes the case that digital inequality deserves a place alongside more traditional forms of inequality in the twenty-first century pantheon of inequalities. Digital inequality should not be only the preserve of specialists but should make its way into the work of social scientists concerned with a broad range of outcomes connected to life chances and life trajectories. As we argue, the significance of digital inequalities is clear across a broad range of individual-level and macro-level domains, including life course, gender, race, and class, as well as health care, politics, economic activity, and social capital.
Two dominant theoretical models for privacy – individual privacy preferences and context-dependent definitions of privacy – are often studied separately in information systems research. This paper unites these theories by examining how individual privacy preferences impact context-dependent privacy expectations. The paper theorizes that experience provides a bridge between individuals’ general privacy attitudes and nuanced contextual factors. This leads to the hypothesis that, when making judgments about privacy expectations, individuals with less experience in a context rely more on individual preferences such as their generalized privacy beliefs, whereas individuals with more experience in a context are influenced by contextual factors and norms. To test this hypothesis, 1,925 American users of mobile applications made judgments about whether varied real-world scenarios involving data collection and use met their privacy expectations. Analysis of the data suggests that experience using mobile applications did moderate the effect of individual preferences and contextual factors on privacy judgments. Experience changed the equation respondents used to assess whether data collection and use scenarios met their privacy expectations. Discovering the bridge between two dominant theoretical models enables future privacy research to consider both personal and contextual variables by taking differences in experience into account.
The organization of modern city planning into “neighborhood units” – most commonly associated with the Clarence Perry proposal of 1929 – has been enormously influential in the evolution of modern city form, and at the same time has also been the subject of intense controversy and debate that continues to the present day. New issues under debate include social and economic diversity, maintenance of viable pedestrian and public transit modes, viability of internalized community service hubs, and efficient use of energy and natural resources, including greenhouse gas emissions. We trace the history of this controversy up to the present day, and we discuss new developments that may point the way to needed reforms of best practice.
Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security, the paper approaches these questions on three broad levels, namely: how contemporary ‘governing through code’ relates to its referent object (referentiality axis), to normalisation (normativity axis), and to space (spatiality axis). Empirically, the paper investigates two high-profile pilot projects in Switzerland in the field of smart electricity management, aimed at (1) the assessment of customer needs and behaviours with regard to novel smart metering solutions (iSMART), and (2) the elaboration of novel IT solutions in the field of smart electricity grids for optimised load management (Flexlast).
Digital divide research is now focused on the so-called second-level divide, which concerns Internet “usage” divides. This article suggests that while the first-level divide was associated with sociodemographic factors, the second-level divide is associated with factors such as motivations and Internet skills. It then illustrates an example of the second-level digital divide—the democratic divide. The democratic divide concerns the differences between those who actively use the Web for politics and those who do not. Analysis of General Social Survey data shows there is a democratic divide where political Internet users are individuals with high Internet skills and political interest.
In this paper the author proposes a new qualitative method for building conceptual frameworks for phenomena that are linked to multidisciplinary bodies of knowledge. First, he redefines the key terms of concept, conceptual framework, and conceptual framework analysis. Concept has some components that define it. A conceptual framework is defined as a network or a "plane" of linked concepts. Conceptual framework analysis offers a procedure of theorization for building conceptual frameworks based on grounded theory method. The advantages of conceptual framework analysis are its flexibility, its capacity for modification, and its emphasis on understanding instead of prediction.
The world is experiencing an evolution of Smart Cities. These emerge from innovations in information technology that, while they create new economic and social opportunities, pose challenges to our security and expectations of privacy.
Humans are already interconnected via smart phones and gadgets. Smart energy meters, security devices and smart appliances are being used in many cities. Homes, cars, public venues and other social systems are now on their path to the full connectivity known as the “Internet of Things.” Standards are evolving for all of these potentially connected systems. They will lead to unprecedented improvements in the quality of life. To benefit from them, city infrastructures and services are changing with new interconnected systems for monitoring, control and automation. Intelligent transportation, public and private, will access a web of interconnected data from GPS location to weather and traffic updates. Integrated systems will aid public safety, emergency responders and in disaster recovery.
We examine two important and entangled challenges: security and privacy. Security includes illegal access to information and attacks causing physical disruptions in service availability. As digital citizens are more and more instrumented with data available about their location and activities, privacy seems to disappear.
Privacy protecting systems that gather data and trigger emergency response when needed are technological challenges that go hand-in-hand with the continuous security challenges. Their implementation is essential for a Smart City in which we would wish to live.
We also present a model representing the interactions among person, servers and things. Those are the major element in the smart city and their interactions are what we need to protect.
This paper argues that the alleged process of globalisation should be recast as a process of ‘glocalisation’. ‘Glocalisation’ refers to the twin process whereby, firstly, institutional/regulatory arrangements shift from the national scale both upwards to supra‐national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban or regional configurations and, secondly, economic activities and inter‐firm networks are becoming simultaneously more localised/regionalised and transnational. In particular, attention will be paid to the political and economic dynamics of this geographical rescaling and its implications. The scales of economic networks and institutional arrangements are recast in ways that alter social power geometries in important ways. This contribution, therefore, argues, first, that an important discursive shift took place over the last decade or so which is an integral part of an intensifying ideological, political, socioeconomic and cultural struggle over the organisation of society and the position of the citizen. Secondly, the pre‐eminence of the ‘global’ in much of the literature and political rhetoric obfuscates, marginalizes and silences an intense and ongoing socio‐spatial struggle in which the reconfiguration of spatial scale is a key arena. Third, both the scales of economic flows and networks and those of territorial governance are rescaled through a process of ‘glocalisation’, and, finally, the proliferation of new modes and forms of resistance to the restless process of de‐territorialisation/re‐territorialisation of capital requires greater attention to engaging a ‘politics of scale’. In the final part, attention will be paid to the potentially empowering possibilities of a politics that is sensitive to these scale issues.
This article deals with ICT availability among ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands and Flanders. The rapid spread of ICT applications has affected various aspects of digital citizenship. The study results suggest that the world of ethnic minority youths in the Netherlands and Flanders, as with other western countries, is being digitized gradually. This is an irreversible evolution with tangible effects in new trends in communication and consumption. Ethnic minority youths orient themselves to the country where they live (bridging between cultures) as well as to their parents' country of origin (bonding of social capital). This article examines whether differences in information and communication technology access and use can be explained by culture-specific characteristics such as ethnocultural position, religion and language proficiency, apart from the usual sociodemographic characteristics (age, sex and socio-economic status). Examining the online activities of ethnic minority
This article introduces critical perspective into the discussion of the digital divide, which is commonly defined as the gap separating those individuals who have access to new forms of information technology from those who do not. The analysis is distinguished from other undertakings addressing this matter, insofar as it does not document the empirical problems of unequal access but considers the terminology, logical structure, and form that define and direct work on this important social and ethical issue. The investigation employs the tools of critical theory and targets extant texts, reports, and studies. In this way, the analysis does not dispute the basic facts gathered in recent empirical studies of computer usage and internet access. On the contrary, its purpose is to assist these and other endeavors by making evident their common starting point, stakes, and consequences.
The paper advances the conceptualisation of neighbourhood by specifying it as a bundle of spatially based attributes associated with clusters of residences, sometimes in conjunction with other land uses. There follows a discussion of how this 'composite commodity' definition relates to the planning challenge of spatially bounding neighbourhood. The paper then probes the myriad idiosyncrasies associated with the concept of neighbourhood: cross-attribute variation in durability and ability to be priced, relativistic evaluations of attributes and consumption impacts on attributes. It discusses how, within this new paradigmatic context, neighbourhoods are produced by the same actors that consume them: households, property owners, business people and local government. Finally, consideration is given to various aspects of the origins and nature of neighbourhood change and it is argued that neighbourhood dynamics are rife with social inefficiencies.
While people's social backgrounds clearly shape their adoption of digital technology and the Internet, their urban lifestyles and place of residence better explain their digital activities when they are online, and how they use technology. Most studies investigating individuals' use of digitization have neglected the effects of the physical built environment and the daily life of the community. Addressing this gap, this paper places digital practices in the socio-spatial world, and conceptualizes the term "urban digital lifestyle," which refers to the dynamic relationships among three dimensions: (1) the user's socioeconomic status, (2) the user's residency, with a focus on the locale's socio-spatial characteristics, and (3) the user's digital practices. Empirically, this paper uses a mixture of methods to analyze the digital usage of residents in four neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. The methods used are neighborhood prototype analysis, digital practices survey (n = 490), and spatial and GIS analyses. Although the results may at first glance support the argument that education and socioeconomic status have significant influence on digital practices, these practices also reflect many other factors associated with the urban lifestyle. Thus, locales, places and neighborhoods remain crucial socio-spatial categories that have a major influence on daily life in the digital age. Studies on smart cities and digitization are often based on the idea that the digital involvement of individuals and their digital capital are central components that determine academic achievement, employment opportunities, and the quality of services and education (Robinson et al., 2015). This assumption regarding the role of digital capital in individuals' achievements has resulted in ongoing research investigating users and the concept of the digital divide (Gunkel,
While the association of social media to neighborhood community connection (belongingness, cooperation, and trust with neighbors) has been explored, the influence of neighborhoods in this association has been left out of the inquiry. It is not clear whether the association of social media participation and community connection is independent from neighborhood context. To explore the influence of neighborhoods in this relationship, we utilized hierarchical linear models with individual data from the 2014/2015 Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Health Survey and neighborhood data from the 2010–2014 American Community Survey. Measuring social media participation based upon people’s usage of social networking sites to seek out services, we find social media is related to neighborhood community connection, regardless of where one lives. In other words, social media usage does not necessarily diminish one’s sense of neighborhood community. Neighborhood residential stability slightly moderates this relationship, demonstrating neighborhoods matter in social media’s relation to neighborhood community.
Advocated mostly by technology companies, the smart city concept promises participation, democratization and innovative urbanism. Tracking these promises and ideas, this paper explores “smart urbanism” in ten cities from all over Israel. Based on interviews with leading figures in municipalities, smart city consultants and key figures in technological companies (n=40), the aims of this paper are to assess the efforts of cities to become smart by responding to the following questions: 1. What is guiding the decision-making process in developing technological initiatives? 2. Does context play a role in implementing technological initiatives? 3. How are the residents perceived, and what tools are being used to address residents' digital differences? The key argument of this paper is threefold: first, in the process of becoming a smart city, the roles of public and private actors are blurred, influencing the process of decision making. Second, despite contextual differences, cities adopt similar digital initiatives. Third, technological initiatives that focus on social needs and address inequality in the digital age are still at the margins. The final discussion suggests that most municipalities are still at an early stage of digitization implementation and have the ability to shape and form a vision for the cities as socio-technological ecosystems in a way that will serve their publics as a whole. The paper ends with a call for shifting the focus from the city to society in developing digital initiatives and cultivating smart social urbanism.
The “smart city” is a set of policies and programs that aim to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal services, encourage urban (re)development, facilitate private investment, and improve quality of life through investing in information and communication technologies. Yet critics contend that the benefits of investment and (re)development programs are not shared equally and there is need for better understanding diverse lived experiences of community members. This paper highlights local voices and lived experiences amid physical and social change in downtown Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, a city that is actively pursuing a smart city agenda. Drawing on data collected from a community workshop that included representatives from local government, technology and start-up sectors, community service providers, and community activists, we adopt a Creative Analytic Practice (CAP) approach and present a set of hybrid vignettes centered on the experiences of these stakeholder groups. The vignettes highlight differing expectations for the role of technology in promoting quality of life and illustrate a struggle to translate aspirations for collaboration and equity into on-the-ground action. We argue that CAP is an effective tool for presenting and enhancing the inclusiveness and accessibility of smart city discussions and debates.
This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects that participate in the internet of things, everyday spaces of the smart home, banal landscapes of data and digital infrastructures, and quotidian quantifications/datafications of the self. The proliferation of these methods also informs feminist scholarly praxes of digital iteration.
Greater integration of advanced vehicle technologies is commonly discussed as a component of developing smart cities, potentially leading to a host of benefits. Final impacts of such benefits are uncertain, though, given research that illustrates induced travel by initial adopters of emerging vehicle technologies and services and mixed effects in transit use and active transportation. The locations within cities where interventions of advanced vehicle technologies are envisioned, geographic scope and extent of integration, and the characteristics of these areas are all likely to influence these effects, and these relationships have received limited investigative attention. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive review of proposals submitted by 78 midsized cities in the United States to create a typology that considers (1) the geographic scope of intervention and (2) the degree of integration of connected and automated vehicles, generating five distinct types of projects. Characteristics of the areas within cities identified for intervention are compared to those of their U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). We identified indicators of comprehensive planning efforts as they relate to sustainability and resilience outcomes in each city. Results show that areas identified by cities for advanced vehicle technology interventions differ in important ways from each city’s broader population that warrant attention relative to known demographic characteristics and behavior of early adopters of transportation technologies. There is also variation in project motivation and municipal planning indicators across typology classifications. These are essential considerations as smart city–aligned transportation interventions continue to develop.
The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.
This study investigates how various smartphone applications are used, and how that use leads to changes in various aspects of urban life. Different types of applications and the scope of their impacts on urban life are captured based on a life-oriented approach. Data were collected via an online survey of 1000 residents living in different cities of Japan in December 2017. It was found that 75.1% of respondents owned a smartphone and used 3.5 applications on average. Among the users of smartphone application(s), 45.4% experienced at least one life change. Applying a random forest approach, this study examined the relative influence of application usage on urban life as compared to built-environment, individual, and household attributes, as well as interdependencies across life changes, by building 37 forests with 37000 trees. It was revealed that applications of “game”, “photo, video”, “utility, tool, efficiency”, “shopping”, “healthcare, sports, beauty”, “touring”, “education”, “book, comic”, and “navigation, and map” induce changes in work, study, daily trip making, talks between family members, time use, sleeping, expenditure, physical exercise, and shopping in a complicated manner, even though the built environment attributes are the most important predictors to the life changes as a whole.
This book is written in support of those who believe that neighborhoods should be genuinely relevant in our lives, not as casual descriptors of geographic location but as places that provide an essential context for daily life. “Neighborhood” in its traditional sense—as a localized, place-based, delimited urban area that has some level of personal influence—seems a vanished part of the urban experience. This book explores whether 21st-century neighborhoods can once again provide a sense of caring and local participation and not devolve into enclaves seeking social insularity and separation. That the localized, diverse neighborhood has often failed to materialize requires thorough exploration. While many factors leading to the decline of the traditional neighborhood—e-commerce, suburban exclusivity, internet-based social contact—seem to be beyond anyone’s control, other factors seem more a product of neglect and confusion about neighborhood definition and its place in American society. Debates about the neighborhood have involved questions about social mix, serviceability, self-containment, centeredness, and connectivity within and without. This book works through these debates and proposes their resolution. The historical and global record shows that there are durable, time-tested regularities about neighborhoods. Many places outside of the West were built with neighborhood structure in evidence—long before professionalized, Western urban planning came on the scene. This book explores the compelling case that the American neighborhood can be connected to these traditions, anchored in human nature and regularities of form, and reinstated as something relevant and empowering in 21st-century urban experience.
E-participation is often flagged for its potential to stimulate greater citizen participation. Yet, whether e-participation contributes to more widespread offline citizen participation or reinforces existing patterns of offline citizen participation remains unclear. Drawing upon a representative sample of US citizens, the results of our analysis demonstrate that greater e-participation, operationalized using different forms of online expression and interaction, is associated with greater offline citizen participation. We also find that this relationship is strongest among those who are less affluent. These results suggest e-participation may play an important role in mobilizing a broader spectrum of citizens to engage in public affairs.
This book delves into the street-level experience of a set of African American and Latino teenagers and adults worried about or after them. It argues that the risks and opportunities associated with a poor urban neighborhood get filtered through smartphones and popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The book shows that street life in Harlem plays out on and across the physical street and the digital street among youth, neighborhood adults, and the authorities. Each chapter examines the parallels, differences, and crossovers between these two layers of social life that bear out the “effects” of a neighborhood. From roughly five years of firsthand research as an outreach worker and in other roles in the community, the author illustrates the online and offline experiences of girls and boys of color coming of age in the shadow of the Harlem Children’s Zone and sweeping gentrification when social media came to permeate all aspects of life. The Digital Street addresses the role of communication and technology in the transformation of an urban neighborhood.
The rapid proliferation of smart city (SC) projects is a response to the challenges posed by rapid urbanization such as energy shortage, economic reconstruction (the drive towards higher productivity and efficiency) and demographic increase. Ubiquitous information communication technologies (ICTs) in SCs enable people to understand and manage cities more efficiently and sustainably, thus improving their life quality. However, a number of potential pitfalls have been noted in the development of SC. This study aims at identifying potential pitfalls in the development of SCs and filling a knowledge gap in this domain. Based on an extensive literature review, four major pitfalls are categorized as system information insecurity, personal privacy leakage, information islands, and digital divide. Possible causes and adverse effects of these pitfalls are discussed with the aid of three international case reviews. In addition, this study looks into existing assessment schemes of SC performance that are mainly focused on the positive and functional capability, but sparingly evaluate the possible downsides. It is argued that a SC cannot claim to be successful by solely measuring how much it has done or what it aims to achieve. While most studies focus on the benefits of SCs, this research reveals the challenges facing city planners. It contributes to the body of knowledge in this regard and also provides an insight into the subject matter. A framework for conducting further research on mitigating potential SC pitfalls has been laid. It is intended to inform practitioners, researchers and policymakers to develop proactive solutions concerning both technological and non-technological aspects at an early stage of SC developments.
At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.
The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society explains why the digital divide is still widening and, in advanced high-tech societies, deepening. Taken from an international perspective, the book offers full coverage of the literature and research and a theoretical framework from which to analyze and approach the issue. Where most books on the digital divide only describe and analyze the issue, Jan van Dijk presents 26 policy perspectives and instruments designed to close the divide itself.
A growing body of literature has emerged that examines cities as key sites for socio-technical experimentation with a variety of initiatives and interventions to reduce carbon emissions, upgrade ageing infrastructure networks and stimulate economic development. Yet while there has been a wide survey of global initiatives and attempts to explain the wider processes driving such experimentation (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013) there remains a lack of empirical case study analysis to bring the concepts into context. In this paper we use the concept of urban experimentation as a lens to discuss the political and social ramifications of one such intervention in a city’s energy infrastructure network, with an examination of the Pecan Street smart grid project in Austin, Texas. The ability for cities to manage socio-technical transitions and their inflections by specific locales has been largely neglected in social science research, yet cities around the world are facing similar problems of ageing infrastructures, pressures of resource consumption and demanding shifts towards intermittent renewable technologies. We argue that cities are key arenas for the trialling, testing and development of smart products that can help transition towards a low-carbon economy, however the ‘opening up’ of cities as experimental nodes is contributing to a restructuring in socio-technical urban governance, creating new spaces for private investment while delegating responsibilities for carbon control down to urban citizens.
抄録
The Smart City project is currently being promoted in various countries around the world. That is to take advantage of personal information and utilization of energy more appropriately. Therefore, it is said that when there are privacy issues. However, it specifically discuss the privacy risks in the specific project of Smart City is premature. We discuss the privacy risks around the smart grid standardization advances which technology is the core of the Smart City. In this paper, we have verified the effectiveness of the Privacy Impact Assessment, such as privacy risks in Smart City.
Mobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates - and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today. In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza E. Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces - that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relationships and the environment in which social interaction takes place. Yet rather than detaching people from their surroundings, the authors suggest that location-aware technologies may ultimately strengthen our connections to locations.
Cities are growing steadily, and the process of urbanization is a common trend in the world. Although cities are getting bigger, they are not necessarily getting better. With the aim to provide citizens with a better place to live, a new concept of a city was born: the smart city. The real meaning of smart city is not strictly defined, but it has gained much attention, and many cities are taking action in order to be considered 'smart'. These smart cities, founded on the use of information and communication technologies, aim at tackling many local problems, from local economy and transportation to quality of life and e-governance. Although technology helps to solve many of these local problems, their ability to gather unprecedented amounts of information could endanger the privacy of citizens. In this article we identify a number of privacy breaches that can appear within the context of smart cities and their services. We leverage some concepts of previously defined privacy models and define the concept of citizens' privacy as a model with five dimensions: identity privacy, query privacy, location privacy, footprint privacy and owner privacy. By means of several examples of smart city services, we define each privacy dimension and show how existing privacy enhancing technologies could be used to preserve citizens' privacy.
Research on digital divide phenomena has produced opposing theoretical frameworks. This study pits the disappearing digital divide approach against the emerging digital differentiation approach and empirically tests the validity of their predictions regarding adolescents’ internet use and their tendency towards ubiquitous internetting. Multivariate analyses of a survey of 749 Dutch adolescents aged 13–18 showed that adolescents’ unequal access to socio-economic and cognitive resources shaped their use of the internet as an information and an entertainment medium. Adolescents with greater socio-economic and cognitive resources used the internet more frequently for information and less often for entertainment than their peers with fewer socio-economic and cognitive resources. We found a similar pattern regarding adolescents’ tendency towards ubiquitous internetting. The findings tentatively suggest that the emerging digital differentiation approach describes current digital divide phenomena more adequately than the disappearing digital divide approach.