Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches

Modern information and communication technologies are leaving the company and the work place, and are entering everyday life in a fast pace [1, 2, 4]. As a consequence, new research fields emerge focusing on the design, evaluation, and implications of ICT based systems for social and urban life, the field of digital cities research being one of those. This volume gives a broad and up to date overview of the research done in this field.

Much thinking about digital cities is in terms of community groups. Yet, the world is composed of social networks and not of groups. This paper traces how communities have changed from densely-knit “Little Boxes” (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to “Glocalized” networks (sparsely-knit but with clusters, linking households both locally and globally) to “Networked Individualism” (sparsely-knit, linking individuals with little regard to space). The transformation affects design considerations for computer systems that would support digital cities.

In the real world, cities exist because of external economies associated with the geographic concentration of firms within a city. Of course, such a geographic proximity with input providers and consumers, would at first reduce transportation costs. But why cities, information cities, i.e. large agglomerations of people and economic activity emerge in the virtual world? In the Internet, transportation costs are zero. Web sites can easily be reached from anybody and everywhere with no particular cost. In these conditions of equal access distance, one would rather expect a smooth web geography with a relatively even distribution of visitors per site. However, the web economy illustrates strong agglomeration trends with a very small number of web sites capturing a large segment of the web population and the most of virtual economic activity. This paper attempts to provide a sound basis for the dynamics of population concentration in the web under increasing returns.

This paper investigates the concept of digital city. First, a functional analysis of a digital city is made in the light of the modern study of urbanism; similarities between the virtual and urban constructions are pointed out. Next, a semiotic perspective on the subject matter is elaborated, and a terminological basis is introduced to treat a digital city as a self-organizing meaning-producing system intended to support social or spatial navigation. An explicit definition of a digital city is formulated. Finally, the proposed approach is discussed, conclusions are given, and future work is outlined.

Cities are providing the physical environment for an increasing number of the world’s citizens. They are also becoming the locus for a variety of “virtual”, networked digitally-based economic, political, and cultural activities. Digital cities represent a new manifestation of this phenomenon. Digital cities, like their physical analogies, geographical or “real” cities, are only so much infrastructure unless animated with human social presence. This paper focuses on this social presence, particularly the type of social presence typified by the idea of “citizen,” for it is primarily through the work of this social entity that social problems get addressed and social “progress” is furthered. Several socio-technical innovations such as community networks are explored as are possible roles for the computer professional.

Outlining issues of significance from investigations of a range of community ICT initiatives in the UK and Scandinavia, this paper presents a normative framework of democratic design criteria of relevance to community networks. Community networking or community informatics as it is increasingly called, provides the platform for a more participatory and democratic vision of the network society. However, before the opportunities presented by this vision can be embraced, the challenges of embedding such initiatives in community practice to stimulate community ownership and identity must first be addressed. Additionally, the enthusiasm of emergent community informatics practitioners should be informed by the experiences of early community ICT initiative pioneers. The issues presented in this paper provide salutary lessons for community networkers, researchers and policymakers alike.

The TeleCities telematics network consists of more than 120 European cities with key business partners participating as associated members. Telecities, which is currently under the presidency of the City of Vienna, acts as a Europe wide network for urban policy issues relevant to the information society. Many of the member cities whose administration is based on a long and successful EDP tradition have come to call themselves “Digital Cities”. They all increasingly rely on the new information and communication technologies (ICT) as well. The following article provides a comprehensive outline of TeleCities, along with its strategic goals and projects; the City of Vienna is used as an example of a “Digital City” which places great significance on the implementation of eGovernment.

This paper shares the early results of a study that is investigating strategies to bridge the “digital divide” [15, 16, 17, 18] — the gap between those who benefit from new technology and those who do not — by examining the role of community technology for the purpose of community building and economic development in a low-to moderate-income housing development. Since January 2000, the Camfield Estates-MIT Creating Community Connections Project, a partnership between the Camfield Tenants Association and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has taken place at Camfield Estates, a 102-unit, low-to moderate-income housing development in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and its surrounding environs. With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, RCN Telecom Services, Microsoft, and others, every family at Camfield has been offered a state-of-the-art desktop computer, software, high-speed Internet connection via cable-modem, and eight weeks of comprehensive courses — free of charge. Camfield residents are also supported by the Creating Community Connections (C3) System, a web-based, community building system designed at the MIT Media Laboratory, to establish and strengthen relationships between community residents, local businesses, and neighborhood institutions (e.g., libraries, schools, etc.) and organizations. Of the 102 units at Camfield, approximately 80 are presently occupied, while approximately 60 units have elected to participate in the project in some capacity, from among two rounds of sign-ups in September 2000 and January 2001. This paper is a case study of the Camfield Estates-MIT project to-date, including the history and background of the project, the theoretical frameworks guiding the initiative, the project methodology that has been employed to foster resident engagement and integrate community technology and community building, early results, and a set of recommendations and lessons learned for other initiatives.

A small crisis occurred in the town of Westfield, New Jersey (NJ) in 1999 when NJ Transit (the local commuter railway), citing safety problems, changed their policy of allowing organizations to drape signs for town events and celebrations along the Raritan Valley railway trestles that form a gateway to the downtown area. Newspaper articles, window postings, even mailings to the homes are far more onerous and expensive, and much less effective than a couple of huge banners proclaiming “Jazz Week”, or the Community Players latest show over the two major arteries into town. Even in the age of seemingly ubiquitous information, the loss of a sign across a railroad trestle was cause for uproar. The crisis reflected the recognition by townspeople that communications form the core of the community, and they had just lost an important node in their local social network.

This paper describes the progress of Ennis, Ireland’s Information Age Town, in its bid to become ‘The Largest Community Technology Project in the World’. An overview of the project outlines the goals, organization, participation and evaluation of the Information Age Town project - confirming the town’s ‘digital’ status. Four key initiatives are examined in detail: the creation of the town’s ICT infrastructure; investment in education and training; the development of public sector projects aimed at increasing civic participation and the evolution of the Ennis website as the community’s premier communication medium. In conclusion, the paper highlights the potential of a virtual community to enhance social cohesion within a community which has an existing, strong physical community and a collective pride in its history, culture and technology.

A Digital Community emerges from a virtually created network community and is expected to change according to the needs of real human community. An ideal digital community is built on harmonized relations between virtual and real communities, and should be a common place for which its participants feel both ownership and liability.

Japan Network of Virtual Companies (JNVC) is a simulated business training program. JNVC provides its members with an enterprise community in which educational institutions of all levels can participate, under the precondition that people from businesses in the local region are involved in the virtual company’s operations.

This paper outlines the result of a feasibility experiment on how interaction between real and virtual communities is affected by the virtual enterprise network. How does this contribute to a strengthening of the local community network? We argue how a digital community like JNVC can make participants aware of the resources they have, how it may promote their ownership and liabilities toward their local community, and whether it has an impact on the development of the social infrastructure in the local community.

Successful knowledge-based strategies for organizations require to build digital experiments which combine the power of networked information technologies like the Internet and the Web with the creativity and competencies of their own staff. This paper presents such an experiment which refers to the services of German economic development agencies. The presented work is carried out within a German project supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (bmb+f). The development of required economic, social and technical competencies of the agencies staff by using Web-based qualification processes and virtual learning communities has a key role within the digital experiment.

Drawing on an ongoing longitudinal research study, we discuss problems in the development of Urban-net, a next generation community network in a city in central New York. The project was funded under a state program to diffuse broadband technologies in economically depressed areas of the state. The network is technologically complex and entails high costs for subscribers. The political economy of the development process has biased the subscriber base toward the resource rich and away from the resource poor, and toward uses like intra-organizational connectivity and Internet access and away from community-oriented uses as originally envisaged. These trends raise troubling questions about network ontology and function, and about the relation between the network and its physical host community.

This article deals with the tension between commercial aims and activities and more democratic and idealistic ones in projects that are pursued to counteract the ‘digital divide’. The article focuses on a project; ‘Access Kumla’ initiated by the TUC of Sweden. The project is characterized as a very ambitious initiative to counteract the digital divide. Its four aims can be summarized as follows: providing citizens with high quality, low cost computers, creating a Community Network, providing knowledge about IT and improving local democracy with the help of IT. In our project the complex role of commercial activities and forces is emphasized. Firstly, they emphasize the importance of financial autonomy from a short-time as well as a long-time perspective. A further result is the surprisingly high degree of harmony or absence of conflict as regards the various aims and activities in the project. The most noticeable exception concerned the role of the TUC, especially in connection with the commercial activities in the project.

With the goal of studying online community, we created two multi-user virtual environment products [1], Microsoft V-Chat [2] in 1996, and the Virtual Worlds Platform [3] in 1998. We analyzed the social interaction that developed in these virtual environments and were particularly interested in better understanding what factors contribute to sustaining online community. Drawing from the design and evolution of physical cities [4] we believed an online community must be able to change over time and evolve the space within a flexible infrastructure. Over the past six years we have learned a number of lessons about the design of community and the effects of design.

More and more interfaces are designed for ‘everybody’, instead of with a specific user-group in mind. In practice, most of them are still used by the ‘typical Internet-user’, the highly educated, white young male with extensive computer and Internet-experience. Amsterdam-based digital city DDS is no exception to this rule. In this article, the interface of DDS is studied with the help of ten first-time users with a more diverse background. Did they face any barriers in using DDS? And what kind of work did they need to perform to use the interface? This study shows that the most serious problems the first-time users faced were not caused by a lack of skill, but by the different technological frame they had. Thus, a script-analysis with the help of ‘outsiders’ seems to be an effective way to uncover some exclusion-processes of a digital city.

This paper analyzes how people use map-based user interfaces of regional information systems on the Internet. The analysis is based on the log data of InfoMap, which is supplied on the Web site of the Digital City Kyoto prototype. InfoMap provides a map-based user interface that has useful functions enabling users to choose links to Web pages using digital maps. The log data of InfoMap was recorded automatically on the Web server and enabled us to analyze access frequencies, function usages, and content selections. In this paper, the characteristics of the map-based user interface compared with the characteristics of traditional text-based search engines are explained.

As a platform for community networks, public information spaces that mirror the city metaphor are being developed around the world. The aim of digital cities is to pursue a future information space for everyday urban life, unlike the creation of new businesses which is the current obsession of the Internet. We started the basic research project called “Universal Design of Digital City,” a five year project established in 2000, a part of the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) run by the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST). The objective of this project is to construct digital cities as the infrastructure that encourages the participation of all people, including the disabled and the aged. We will develop basic technologies for the universal design, focusing on ‘sending information,’ ‘receiving information,’ and ‘participation.’ This paper introduces some of various experiments such as crisis management, environmental learning, and shopping street navigation. Digital cities are not imaginary since they correspond to the physical urban spaces in which we live. Basic technologies including perceptual information infrastructure and social agents are being developed for connecting digital and physical cities.

New approaches and tools are required to inform the design and implementation of 3-dimensional (3-D) digital cities and to steer the growth of their virtual communities. This paper argues to apply information visualization techniques and to utilize Twin Worlds — pairs of virtual worlds in which one world is devoted to visualize user interaction data collected in the other world — to augment, evaluate, and research the digital cities of tomorrow. The approach is exemplified by means of an abstract scholarly digital city: A 3-D collaborative Memory Palace — a shared resource of online documents (web pages, papers, images, videos, software demos) for faculty and students at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University — and its twin, Mirror Garden — a second 3-D world that visualizes user interaction data collected in the Memory Palace.

People moving into cities have trouble acquiring informal information because it is not easy for them to join discussions of the people already living there. We therefore developed an automatic community broadcasting system helping city residents share informal information. This Public Opinion Channel (POC) collects opinions from city residents and broadcasts them continuously. Here we describe the conceptual framework of the POC, a prototype POC system, and the evaluation of that prototype system. The results from a social psychological experiment show that the prototype system helps newcomers express their opinions to a community easily.

The important key to success of environmental education is to realize space and situation where people of diverse backgrounds can universally participate in environmental education and can mutually exchange their candid opinions and practical experiences. Our system, DigitalEE, is designed and implemented to pursue universality of participation in environmental education with the concepts of digital cities. Learners in real forest, environmental specialists in laboratories, and virtual tourists at homes or hospitals can make interactive real-time communication via online 3D virtual nature generated by DigitalEE. Information available via the 3D virtual nature is continuously updated at participants’ own free will, and is used as communication contexts at participants’ discussion on environmental issues. DigitalEE creates an original form of public participation in digital cities such as collaborative interaction between real and virtual worlds, and makes realization of digital environmental education: a future style of environmental education in dynamically changing virtual environment.

This paper proposes a new style tool, a 3-D photo collage system, to manage new style of digital cities. This system allows ordinary people to create, publish, share and navigate pseudo 3-D spaces using perspective photos on the Web. We present a framework of the 3-D photo collage system and characteristics of a prototype system based on it. Finally, some experiments using it are shown.

We have been developing mobile passenger support systems for the public transportation. In this application field, various kinds of data must be handled and integrated. Examples of such data are route information, fare information, area map, station map, planned operation schedule, real-time operation schedule, vehicle facilities and so on. Depending on the user situation, different information should be supplied and personalized. In this paper we propose the human support system used in the multi-channel data dissemination environments. On the other hand, the transportation systems can gather information about situations and demands of users and modify their services for users. In this paper we will discuss efficient methods to handle dynamic integration, personalization and filtering using multiple data dissemination channels and on-demand data channels. Current prototype system developed to be used visually handicapped passengers is also shown.

We presented an environment for spatial information sharing in the previous notes. The basic concept is that contents holders can submit up-to-date information on their under-sheet map and others can view them on their favorite map. In Japan, more than 63 million mobile phones are in use and most of them called KEITAI. Many such phones have internet access capabilities. Then, there are chances to get up-to-date information by KEITAI. This paper describes the concept of the spatial information sharing for mobile phones, and discusses its potential applications.

Agents, as well as many other technologies around the semantic web, have shown an increased maturity through standards and open-source. These improvements have been very self-centered and led to the creation of silos. Time has come to integrate these improvements into an ecosystem, bringing a larger picture towards active web-services, that is capable of serving each individual user personally. This article presents these evolutions, positions agents, and introduces the open testbed of this ecosystem currently in construction under the auspices of Agentcities.

This paper proposes a town digitizing for building an image-based cyber space. The cyber space consists of omnidirectional cameras and a large number of omnidirectional images connecting them. We discuss on details of the town digitizing technique and possibilities of the cyber space in this paper. The technique is divided into three steps: omnidirectional image acquisition, parameter estimation among omnidirectional images, and smooth interpolation among them. The omnidirectional images are taken using the powerwheel or the tripod with the omnidirectional camera. Then the parameters among omnidirectional images are estimated by Hough transform and template matching. Based on the estimated parameters, the system smoothly interpolates the omnidirectional images and generates continuous virtual views. That is, the system allows users to move in the virtual space like a previous 3-D graphics system. This paper also shows the validity of the town digitizing by building a model of Kyoto city.

We are proposing a model of communication and a specification of a language for civilian agents in RoboCup Rescue Simulation System.

Robust information systems are critical infrastructures for rescue activities in huge disasters. In order to simulate (and evaluate) a certain rescue information system, we need to design abstract model of agents’ communication, which is an important factor to affect the performance of the rescue activities. Especially communication among civilians, who are the majority in damaged area, will be the primary information source for rescue agents.

In order to build the abstract model, we design “four layers model of communication”, which consists of knowledge, attention, device, and transmission layers. Using the model, we can discuss and implement uncertainty and effectiveness of various communication method including mobile phones, broadcasts, blackboards and so on.

Then, we design specification languages for civilian agents behave in the simulated disaster world, which can reflect natural language features like uncertainty and lack of words.

This paper investigates the use of handheld mobile devices as personalized tools for city navigation that go beyond cartographic limitations and directory services. The volatile, unpredictable randomness of the city life and its ever-changing patterns need dynamic navigational means. Unfortunately, existing devices and their applications do not fully address the impelling potential of real-time interactivity generated by Wireless and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). This study proposes a tool, which encourages personal perceptions and collective experience of cities by providing a dynamic information space that overlaps the city with individual users. The tool is characterized by a three-tier structure of Personal Filtering, Social Networking and Information Layering. It filters the information through personalization, shares the personal perception through social networks and layers the information with collective experience. Hence it is designed as a regenerative information system based on social networks that allows for the creation of new patterns and interpretations.