CFP: Digital Cities 6: Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics

> Last Call for Papers
> Submission deadline extended to 30 April 2009
>
> Digital Cities 6: Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics
> Workshop at the 4th International Conference on Communities and
> Technologies
> Penn State, USA, 24th June 2009
>
> April 30th, 2009 Workshop position papers due
> May 18th, 2009 Author notifications sent
> June 24th, 2009 Workshop
>
> http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/workshops.cfm
>
>
> Keynote speaker
>
> We are happy to announce that Professor Carlo Ratti, Director of the
> SENSEable City Lab at MIT (senseable.mit.edu), will deliver the
> keynote presentation at Digital Cities 6.
>
> The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors
> and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach
> to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and
> understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the
> tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.
> Studying these changes from a critical point of view and
> anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a
> new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
>
>
> 1 Theme
>
> Transport grids, building complexes, information and communication
> technology, social networks and people form the bones, organs,
> muscles, nerves and cell tissue of a city. Studying the organisation
> and structure of these systems may seem straightforward at first,
> since there are visible artifacts and tangible objects that we can
> observe and examine. We can count the number of cars on the road,
> the number of apartments in a building, the number of emails on our
> computer screens and the number of profiles on social networking
> sites. We could also qualify these observations by recording the
> make and model of cars, the size and price of apartments, the sender
> and recipient of emails and the content and popularity of online
> profiles. This approach would potentially produce a large amount of
> data and render a detailed map of various levels of a city's infrast
> ructure, but a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result
> in a great quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this
> data to better understand the 'city' as an organism? How do the
> cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do vari
> ous systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognisi
> ng that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, ho
> w do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes w
> e observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?
>
> A macroscopic perspective of urban anatomy does not easily reveal
> those meticulous details which are necessary to help us understand
> and appreciate what Anthony Townsend calls the urban metabolism
> (Townsend, 2000), that is, the nutrients, capacities, processes and
> pace which nurture the city to keep it alive. Some of the
> fascination with human anatomy stems from the fact that a living
> body is more than the sum of its parts. Similarly, the city is more
> than the sum of its physical elements. Trying to get to the bottom
> of a city's existence, urban anatomists have to become dissectors of
> urban infrastructure by trying to microscopically uncover the conne
> ctions and interrelationships of city elements. Yet, this is anythin
> g but trivial for at least three reasons. First, time is a crucial f
> actor. Many events that trigger urban processes involving multiple s
> ystems result in a timely interrelated response. A dissection by iso
> lating one system from another, would cut the communication link bet
> ween them and jeopardise the study of the wider process. The city co
> mprises many of these real-time systems and requires approaches and
> tools to conduct real-time examinations. Second, the physical city i
> s increasingly complemented with a virtual layer that digitally augm
> ents and enhances urban infrastructures by means of information and
> communication technology including mobile and wireless networks. Thi
> s world, which Mitchell (1995) called the 'city of bits,' is
> invisible to the human eye, and we require instruments for live surg
> ery to render the invisible visible. Third and most importantly, the
> 'cells' of the urban body, the lifeblood of cities, are the city
> dwellers who have a life of their own and who introduce human fuzzin
> ess and socio-cultural variables to the study of the city. The toolb
> ox of what could be termed anthropological urban anatomy thus calls
> for research approaches that can differentiate (and break apart) a u
> niversally applicable model of 'The City' by being sensitive to
> individual circumstances, local characteristics and socio-cultural c
> ontexts.
> Exploring these three challenges, this workshop looks at concepts,
> research methods and instruments that become the microscope of urban
> anatomy. We want to discuss urban informatics systems that provide
> real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the
> invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban
> environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban
> metabolism processes at work.
>
>
> 2 Topics
>
> Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to the following:
>
> • Civic and community engagement strategies to support urban plan
> ning
> • Public sphere, participation and online deliberation systems
> • Urban e-government, e-governance, e-participation, e-democracy
> approaches
> • u-City: Ubiquitous computing, pervasive technology, wireless in
> ternet and mobile applications
> • Locative media, navigation and space
> • Urban informatics design and development methods and epistemolo
> gies
> • Multi-format user-generated content (narratives, photos, videos
> , multimedia)
> • Neogeography and 3D virtual environments for urban design and p
> lanning
> • Simulations to reproduce and analyse complex social phenomena a
> nd city systems
> • Social networking, collective intelligence and crowd sourcing i
> n the urban context
> • Environmental, economic and social sustainability
> • Citizen science
> • Access, trust, privacy, safety and surveillance
> • Implications for residential architecture and the design of cit
> ies and public spaces
> • Ethical considerations scrutinizing the assumptions behind urba
> n informatics
>
>
> 3 Organisation and Submission Details
>
> This is a full day workshop. We will start off with a keynote
> address by an eminent speaker. Rather than formal conference-style
> paper presentations, we will follow the successful peer interview
> format and ask each participant to interview another contributing
> author. Pairs will be assigned in advance to prepare questions and
> engage with the paper. After lunch, there will be a range of group
> activities and a closing plenary discussion at the end. The workshop
> can accommodate a maximum number of between 25 to 30 participants
> including presenters in order to provide an environment that is
> conducive to debate and interaction.
> We are interested in three types of contributions:
>
> Concepts: Essay style papers discussing theoretical and conceptual
> ideas and innovation within a cross-disciplinary framework.
>
> Methods: Papers reporting on novel approaches in the area of urban
> informatics, e.g. network action research, shared visual
> ethnography, urban probes, cross-disciplinary methods, etc.
>
> Systems: Reports of systems and case studies that ground findings in
> practice and experience.
>
> Prospective participants are asked to submit a position paper (2-4
> pages total, in English, ACM SIGCHI 2-column format, same as for the
> C&T full papers) related to one of the workshop topics. Each
> submission should also include a short biography stating the author'
> s background and motivation for attending the workshop. Workshop pos
> ition papers are due on April 30th, 2009 and will be reviewed and se
> lected by the organisers with the support from an international prog
> ram committee. Accepted authors will be notified by May 18th, 2009 –
> to leave enough time to qualify for the early bird conference regis
> tration. The acceptance of a workshop position paper implies that at
> least one of the authors will register for both the workshop and th
> e Communities & Technologies 2009 conference. The workshop takes pla
> ce on June 24th, 2009. After the workshop, selected contributors are
> invited to submit a full paper by October 1st, 2009. Full papers wi
> ll undergo double blind peer review before being published. Arrangem
> ents for an edited book or a special issue of a relevant internation
> al journal are currently underway.
>
> Template:
> http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
>
>
> 4 Bibliography
>
> Each Digital Cities workshop has produced an edited volume
> containing selected workshop papers and other invited contributions
> as follows:
>
> Digital Cities 5 -- Foth, M. (Ed.) (2009). Handbook of Research on
> Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City.
> Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.
>
> Digital Cities 4 -- Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (Eds.). (2008).
> Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic
> City. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
>
> Digital Cities 3 -- van den Besselaar, P., & Koizumi, S. (Eds.).
> (2005). Digital Cities 3: Information Technologies for Social
> Capital (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 3081). Heidelberg,
> Germany: Springer.
>
> Digital Cities 2 -- Tanabe, M., van den Besselaar, P., & Ishida, T.
> (Eds.). (2002). Digital Cities 2: Computational and Sociological
> Approaches (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2362). Heidelberg,
> Germany: Springer.
>
> Digital Cities 1 -- Ishida, T., & Isbister, K. (Eds.). (2000).
> Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives
> (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1765). Heidelberg, Germany:
> Springer.
>
>
> 5 Organisers
>
> Marcus Foth
> Senior Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology,
> Brisbane, Australia
> m.foth@qut.edu.au
>
> Laura Forlano
> Kauffman Fellow in Law, Yale Law School, New Haven, USA
> laura.forlano@yale.edu
>
> Hiromitsu Hattori
> Assistant Professor, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto
> University, Japan
> hatto@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
>
>
>
>
> --
> Dr Marcus Foth
> Senior Research Fellow
>
> Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation
> Queensland University of Technology (CRICOS No. 00213J)
> Victoria Park Rd, Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia
> Phone +61 7 313 x88772 - Fax x88238 - Office K506, KG
> m.foth@qut.edu.au - http://www.urbaninformatics.net/
>
>
>
>