The Personal City

Andy Hudson-Smith Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) published a new working paper out entitled ‘Digital Urban – The Visual City‘ in which he depicts the recent revolution in the production and distribution of digital artifacts which represent the visual city. Indeed, In the decrease in knowledge required to create and present geographical information is leading to a direct increase in the amount of information available. The emergence of georeferenced user-generarated data streams can by built into one Visual City with a personal flavor (i.e. Personal City):

In essence, we are but at the beginning of what will be a revolution in social, visual and informational data plotted geographically by general users. The rise of social networks provides us with the ability to look down on the city and view the activities that its citizens are involved in. This ability provides unique social data and an insight into how the citizens are thinking, working, and socialising.

Relation to my thesis: follow-up on Representing Spatio-Temporal Traces. What I find compelling about the emergence of the “personal city” is that the data do not come from the explicit annotation of the space, but rather from the residues of activities involving space (e.g. categorizing or sharing photos, communicating with a “subtle” location-awareness (twitter with a location attribute).