Grâce à Internet, des scientifiques peuvent établir les circuits des touristes dans les villes

In the swiss popular daily free newspaper Le Matin Bleu, squeezed between an article on youth violence and another acknowledging the emergence of bear communities in London…

Grâce à Internet, des scientifiques peuvent établir les circuits des touristes dans les villes
Les monuments les plus visités de Barce­lone, de Rome ou de Florence? Les trajets pris pour les voir? Et à quelle heure? Tout cela n’a plus de secrets pour le Groupe de technologie de l’Université Pompeu Fabra, à Barcelone, qui a dressé un plan détaillé des chemins préférés des touristes. Comment? En analysant plus de 150 000 photos postées par environ 6000 personnes sur le site de Flickr. Des infos qui intéressent bien sûr déjà les institutions des villes et qui pourront suggérer d’autres trajets à ceux qui veu­lent éviter l’afflux de touristes!

In the Spanish Media

Some of the work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, Bicing and at SENSEable has been mentioned these past days in the Spanish media. In the free daily newspaper ADN Juan Freire describes in very accurate terms the Huellas digitales en las ciudades.

El objetivo inicial de este proyecto es evaluar el potencial de la información georreferenciada generada por usuarios para el análisis y la comprensión de los procesos urbanos, lo que permitirá en el futuro convertir las herramientas de visualización y las bases de datos púiblicos procedentes de la web 2.0 en excelentes instrumentos para los responsables de la gestión urbana (desde los planificadores a las empresas de transporte) y para los propios ciudadanos.[...] Un simple vistazo a los videos que resumen este proyecto muestran claramente los patrones de extrema agregación de los turistas y sus movimientos diarios entre los diferentes hitos turísticos de la ciudad. [...] Uno de los elementos más sofisticados de este proyecto es que tiene en cuenta la cobertura espacial de las imágenes, que estiman a partir del grado de zoom registrado como parte de los metadatos de las fotografías.

In Internet revela los movimientos de los turistas en las ciudades (catalan: Internet revela els moviments que fan els turistes a les ciutats), published in the catalan daily newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya, Michele Catanzaro focuses more on the potential implication on urban tourism.

Que el Camp Nou o la Sagrada Família están entre los monumentos más visitados de Barcelona no es ninguna novedad, pero los caminos que los turistas recorren para desplazarse entre las atracciones de la ciudad no son tan fáciles de prever. De hecho, oficinas y empresas de turismo gastan abultados presupuestos para predecir los caprichosos deseos de los viajeros. [...] Los mapas de Blat y Girardin pueden ayudar a programar mejor los horarios de apertura al público de los espacios ciudadanos, sugerir dónde es mejor colocar las oficinas turísticas e incluso qué áreas urbanas requieren manutención. Pero también pueden ser útiles para los propios turistas.

To which, the daily Catalonia Today requests in “Barcelona tourists stick to well-beaten paths” that

The city needs to promote other worthy destinations, which would also relieve the congestion seen above.

Additonaly. El Periódico briefly reports in Visualizar el uso del Bicing (catalan: Visualitzar l’ús del Bicing) on the idea of implementing a stronger feeback loop in new urban systems supporting mobility, such as Barcelona’s Bicing.

“Si mapas de este tipo estuvieran a disposición de los ciudadanos, quizá se podrían autorregular en sus desplazamientos por la ciudad, optimizándolos en función de las condiciones”, comenta Girardin. Uno de los objetivos principales de la investigación, coinciden los dos investigadores de la UPF, es poner información compleja al alcance de los ciudadanos de la forma más clara posible.

Finally, the magazine on innovation “If… Revista de innovación” interviewed me on digital traces and Bicing: Conocer la ciudad siguiendo nuestras huellas digitales.

Un reportaje sobre las huellas digitales que dejamos inconscientemente en nuestro día a día por la ciudad, a través del Bicing en Barcelona. Un fenómeno estudiado por el ingeniero Fabien Girardin.

Les Audiences dans la Ville

2 years after Mobilités, la Clé des Villes, JCDecaux released Les Audiences dans la Ville the second opus of their trendbook serie “cahier des tendances” that collects visions on the world of media, new technologies, urbanism and design from an eclectic crowd of practitioners and researchers. I contributed with a text on the digital traces we leave behind us from our daily frictions with urban infrastructures and services and some implications when they are processed and made public. The concept of traces Nicolas later analyzes as a support for social navigation. Other short essays include Maurice Levy predicting the emergence of the “urban media”, Adam Greenfield on Everyware, Daniel Kaplan on the city as a platform for innovation open to the co-creation between the actors of the city and the citizens, Peter Fleischer on the new opportunities the web and in the city offer people to handle their identities and topic also discussed by Frédéric Kaplan with a spin on traceability, Nathan Stern on hyperlocality, Bruno Marzloff on “ambient sociability” and the citizens appropriation of their time and space.

The content of Les Audences dans la Ville can be accessed online in its entirety.

Upcoming Events on Pervasive Geoinformation, Location and the Web, Space and Embodied Interaction and Geo-Sensor Web

In addition to a first list, here is list of events I won’t attend but should keep an eye upon.

First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation
Workshop @ the GIScience conference, September 2008, Park City, Utah, USA

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields to discuss trends in pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation and their impact on the day-to-day application of geography by consumers and geo-friendly industries such as tourism and education. [...] In this workshop, we will discuss the issues (both human factors and engineering challenges) surrounding these context-aware systems. While we will include any research topic that relates either to geotechnology or geoinformation, we will focus on the theory behind and application of systems that successfully and rigorously combine the two. Furthermore, we will particularly highlight research that is able to combine the two in a manner that creates a value to the end user that is greater than the sum of the parts. Finally, we will also discuss broader questions related to pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation. For instance, how will these new capabilities transform the way we experience the world around us? More importantly, how will they alter our interaction with geography?

The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008)
In Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. April 22

This main objective of this workshop is to look into the fields of how to extract, index, mine, find, exploit, mashup, and visualize Web content with respect to its location semantics.

Space = Interaction = Discourse
Aalborg, Denmark from 12th – 14th November 2008

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body.

Summer Institute of the The Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science
With a 1-week session in Tuscany, Italy on the Geo-Sensor Web with the presence of YDream’s Antonio Camara and UCSB’ Michael F. Goodchild

Geospatial information increasingly is being produced not only by central mapping agencies but by diverse and dispersed collections of sensors. How does this new data collection and dissemination paradigm affect the geospatial community, and vice versa? Sensor Web and citizen participatioon: what happens when citizens are able to deploy and exploit their own sensors? If the Sensor Web becomes as ubiquitous and successful (within its realm of influence) as the WWW, in what ways might it change the way we do things? What areas of high-inertia might be reduced? What as-of-yet unforeseen applications might emerge?

A Pure Sliding Friction Moment

Relation to my thesis: I now ditched the argumentation on messiness, but keep enjoying observing and recording moments of sliding friction. In that sense, this week’s T5 meltdown is fascinating to follow the design, (political, physical, economical) constraints and technological failures that make this £4 billion project collapse and reconstruct the path of events/decisions that lead to this moment of messiness. Later it will be interesting to see how the overall issues get fixed and how passenger adapted and got around the failures. But that should be the content of another thesis.

Alternatively, this photo describes metaphorically the state of my current work on my thesis.

The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for Geospatial Simulation

In The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for. Geospatial Simulation, CASA’s Andrew Crooks (blog) introduces Repast and its ability to incorporate geospatial data to build an environment and to create agents to explore different types of phenomena. He shortly introduces some geosptatial simulation constructed from minimalist academic models based upon ideal assumptions, to large scale decision support systems based upon real-world data. These include:

• disaster management such as a Sarin attack in Manhattan, the spread of infectious diseases and a food poisoning outbreak
• pedestrian modelling both in retail and emergency evacuation
• urban dynamics (see Barros, J. (2004), Urban Growth in Latin American Cities: exploring urban dynamics through agent-based simulation), segregation, residential and business location
• models in which mobile agents travel and interact on rugged terrain or on network landscapes at any scale from rooms within buildings to urban neighbourhoods to large geographic networks of cities. (see GeoGraph)
• study land use change
• geographic conflict research(see GROWLab)

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the possible use of “census data” generated by digital footprints (user-generated data, cellphone data) to model urban tourism (some profiles of tourists) dynamism both in time and space. It would be one way to validate the data (compare the simulation with survey data) and test different scenarios over several cities, thus aiding planning tourism. Appetizer before reading Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals.

Manuel Castells Talk on the Implications of Networks on Urban Planning

In a talk at the Responsive City meeting, Manuel Castells discussed the practices of urban management and design in this current historic moment when 50% of the planet population now lives in cities (South America reaching 80%!). Unlike what futoroligsts predicted communication networks did not kill distances the cities have not disappeared. It lead to new form of urbanism – some call it megacities (Casstells has another word about that) or what Peter Hall and Kathryn Pain refer as Polycentric Metropolis, a cluster of cities and towns, physically separate but intensively networked in a complex spatial division of labor. These new places are represented by networks (like new england, southern california) and they do not have official names. In fact the name are defined by the news and media. For instance local news refer to the “Bay Area” in San Francisco (a region where San Jose is even bigger) and “South Land” in Los Angeles. In these cases, the television market (and how it attracts advertisement) actually defined the place.

Globalization is made of these networks. Each network has a different geographies (movie industry, knowledge production, finance). In some metropolitian areas these networks overlay (e.g. London) and synergies happen at the nodes where theses different networks connect. They form “micro-milieux” where decision making takes place. For instance, the city of Saragossa is currently being integrated to Madrid and Barceona in the same time. As Barcelona made less efforts in interconnecting, apparently Saragossa is becoming absorbed as a spatial node of Madrid.

There is not political authority over these new places (megacities). The expression of people on their major metropolitan areas (see Un point de vue unique sur la ville) reveals that they feel betrayed by their local governments because they favor the management of the flows over the management of the place. It means that the strategy to first get rich by privileging connections to the outside world (investiement in airport, optic networks, convention centers) and then we redistribute the wealth is not well perceived. Saragossa is an excellet example of these tensions between existing in the world and providing basic or good services to citizens.

Castells gives some key pointers that now must be considered in urban planning:

• connectivity is critical (multi-modal, local and global connectivity)
• speed and scale create huge environment problems. Technologies make cities grow and do not make them disappear (as also stated by Richard Florida, “the World is Spiky“. On some city maps the freeways are now drawn in green. Therefore, environmental planning should the at the foundation of planning.
• crisis of political legitimacy. citizen are more distrustful from local governament than the central authorities.
• the public physical space is really hard to maintain. Some of them, like La Rambla became a theme park where locals are not present anymore (even the mimes and entertainers are foreigners).

and a few implications in the management of these spaces:

• strengthen of the public space in each of the nucleus
• aim at congregating people with no specific purposes (serendipty) shopping centers are not public spaces. merchants streets are public spaces
• metropolitan cities are about building “stations”. For instance, the most innovative places are close to railway stations. We have to think that we must build cities around these nucleuses.
• density of population creates possibility for stores, business and life emerges (following here the Barcelona Ecologia’s concept of compact mediteranean city)
• maintain a vibrant immigrant life (letting them to be open the whole night). Like stores owned by Chinese immigrants in Spain.
• nurture the notion of distributed monumentality. Build spatial signs of recognition, otherwise people don’t know where they are. It can take the form of monumental architecture (whit the same usual suspects designing the monuments (Nouvel, Gehry, Foster, …- cities are divided by serveral architectural agencies). These monuments become signs of indifications are more important than their actual settings.

Relation to my thesis: Even though I do not focus on macro/global issues of the development of networks, I was curious to hear how a leading urban sociologist describes the hybridization of the physical and digital in the city and the type of signals he analysis and how they are transformed in implications for planning and management. From Castells’ talk, it seems that the interface with technologies and networks is still not taught in land use planning and urban design. It once again comforts my feeling that urban space will need researchers with mixed competences in engineering, HCI (call it user experience or interaction design) and urban planning, validating this year’s move to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

In relation to the notion of “distributed monumentality” and their necessity as spatial signs of recognition, I believe that the analysis of pervasive user-generated content could reveal the monuments of the city that people use to anchor their data in the space.

“Who’s Your City?,” the world is spiky

Mapping Urban Flux

In the book of the New York Talk Exchange project, William Mitchell addresses in “Mapping Urban Flux” the ethical issue of analyzing digital traces to reveal the urban dynamics:

There is little doubt that the capacity to track, analyze, and map urban activity in fine-grained, real time detail will open up powerful new ways of providing services to urban inhabitants, of managing urban systems efficiently, of enhancing safety and security, and of making well-informed planning decisions.
[...]
But the crucial questions that loom here are not ones of technological feasibility. They are questions of how we will want to make some difficult social tradeoffs, how we will debate these tradeoffs, and how much power we still may have to affect them anyway.
[...]
But if this explanation does not take place within a framework of vigilant, carefully debated, vigorously formulated and executed public policy – with careful attention to issues of data aggregation and individual privacy – we will soon find that have unwittingly allowed the stealthy, piecemeal emergence of an irreversible condition of electronic hyper-visiblity.

Relation to my thesis: In my thesis I will need to discuss the ethical issues and social tradeoffs in analyzing individual and aggregated digital traces.

Overall Innovation Process in my Research Work

A brainstorm meeting at the SENSEable inspired me to draw a simplified innovation process of my research work.

It start at a design level by developing systems that senses the hybridization of the digital and the physical in the city (currently digital traces in the form of photos, interaction with bike sharing system). Then, a fast prototype visualizations to provide a quick support for visual synthesis and preliminary investigation of digital traces. This phase also contributes in stretching the limits of the data with a creative “what if” exploration that leads me to generate research questions. I address these question through methodologies that imply observation methods (mainly data-mining), modeling techniques and the validation of the data and models through second order analysis with types of data and simulation. Finally these assessed results completes a feedback loop that should inform the design of future hybrid (digital/physical) systems in city.

Everyday Engineering

In Everyday Engineering, Andrew Burroughs takes an engineer’s eye toward the inherent but unheralded presence of technologies., In this pamphlet made from collection of photos and texts he describes on how ordinary objects and environments behave over time, from humble streetlights to tread-worn floors. It share a same approach as Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities.