Digital Cities

The forms that cities take, the ways they function, and the mixes and distributions of activities within them have always been influenced very strongly by the capabilities of their underlying network infrastructures. Furthermore, cities have often been transformed by the introduction of new infrastructures. It is impossible to imagine Rotterdam without its canals and connection to the North Sea, Chicago without its railroads, Los Angeles without its freeways, or any large modern city without water supply, sewage, electrical, and telephone networks. Today, a new type of network infrastructure — high speed digital telecommunications — is being overlaid on cities everywhere. Its effects will be at least as revolutionary as those of the new network infrastructures of the past. It is already causing traditional building types and neighborhood patterns to fragment, recombine, and form startling new arrangements. This process will continue and accelerate. In this paper I describe the new digital infrastructure, analyze its major spatial effects, consider some illustrative examples of the resulting fragmentation and recombination, and discuss possible design responses with particular attention to social equity and long-term sustainability.

As a platform for community networks, information spaces using the city metaphor are being developed in worldwide. This paper compares the trials of digital cities. Four digital cities, those of America Online, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Kyoto, are introduced. It is interesting to note that each digital city has a different goal: to explore a vertical market, a public communication space, a next generation metropolitan network, and a social information infrastructure for the 21st century, respectively. Their different services, system architectures, and organizations result from the different goals. Digital cities will change together with the advance of computer and network technologies. No digital city can remain at its current status. This paper reviews those digital cities to have a better understanding of their current status and future.

Digital cities are developing on many places, and settings, aims, design, organization, and functionality differ among the various systems. Do differences in content influence use and users? In this paper we compare two relatively successful but dramatically different digital cities. The study is based on quantitative and qualitative research, using various data. Although digital cities are generally conceived as local information infrastructures, and as a means for enhancing democratic participation, users primarily appreciate it as a tool for communication. We also observed, among others, how cyberspace reproduces the dynamics of ‘established and outsiders’, which inclines us to think that ‘virtual public space’ is not as open as is often claimed.

Much has been said in Europe about the ‘digital city ’phenomenon. However, we should question about the actual progress that these sites have made in these five years, as well as about the direction and trend of this progress.New powerful functionality is available to the digital city that could facilitate the establishment of collaborative, communicative and inclusive virtual environments. But can we really recognise a trend towards increased public participation in European cities, as a direct consequence of digital city development?This paper argues that this is not the case at the moment. To build more effective urban information systems we need to involve a plurality of actors in the design of virtual cities, and link digital developments to more traditional activities and initiatives that aim at enhancing public participation.

Based in the results of the EPITELIO project (1996–98), an European founded research project on Telematics against Social Exclusion, this paper describes the possibilities of a new generation of community networking. The world is becoming digital and urban. For the first time, a global network society (M.Castells) is emerging. In parallel, an increasing gap between the connected populations and the unconnected ones are deepening. Next generation community networking is a possible solution for bridging such gap. As the Internet is now a convergent information infrastructure technology, community networking can works as a kind of convergent information society technology. Digital cities and community networks organizations can work together towards this new social platform of the digital era.

This paper presents the current developments of Digital Cities in the European Union. Starting from the point of view of local authorities and their specific role in the development of the Information Society, three applications clusters are proposed: i) Economic development or regeneration; ii) Social cohesion and quality of life; and iii) better management of the city administration and its infrastructures. The paper also reviews the limits of current pilot projects and gives an outline of the enabling technologies in use or planned in a near future. Finally, strategic success factors for the development of Digital Cities projects are presented on the basis of ten case studies carried-out in small and large cities.

In Antwerp the dream of an information highway became reality a long time ago. Antwerp has its electronic highway and every day it grows new side-roads and exits. The main aim is to bring the inhabitants, authorities, companies and services of Antwerp closer together. Naturally the city government plays an important part in providing the best ways to serve its community. The project “Antwerp an Intelligent City?” anticipates on the information society by inventing, creating and implementing telematics solutions for citizens and civil servants. And thus it supports a constant dialogue between the local government, the business community and the population.

Helsinki Arena 2000 is a large consortium project headed by Helsinki Telephone Corporation. It has been running since early 1996. The main goal of the project is to provide the citizens of Helsinki an enabling platform through an affordable high bandwidth multimedia network in the year 2000. The project consists of three simultaneous development processes. The first process develops and tests services and user interfaces to them integrating the results of many national and international multimedia research projects. The second process creates an easy user interface to the services through a real 3D model of the city of Helsinki. This gives us many possibilities in augmenting the real city and provides a totally new viewpoint to the large web information systems. Finally, the multimedia network which already works in some areas of the city is being extended to other areas. Unlike other networks that provide high bandwidth from the service provider into the homes, this multimedia network is the first commercial network which is capable of transmitting guaranteed good quality video between any two homes. This gives the citizens many new possibilities for communicating with each other as well as with the local communities and businesses. Furthermore, homes connected to multimedia network are able to transmit video up to thousands of other homes.

The essay bids a framing of the remarkable telematic services of the City of Torino. Core of the document is the description of the local Geographic Information System (GIS): the aim of the GIS on the Internet is to allow a shared use of data concerning land use and management, cartography, building rules, environment conditions. The system puts together information coming from different Departments of the Municipality. Access to the system is made possible through a series of subsystems, some already operative and some still under construction, all briefly described in the paper. Finally, an empiric example of the work procedures of the GIS structure is given with the description of the Digital Town Planning Scheme.

Digital City Bristol (DCB) aims to stimulate the provision of a sustainable and visually appealing Internet resource. Users of DCB can access public information about the city of Bristol, its organisations and its inhabitants. The web site is based around a graphical interface of piers in a harbour, each of which represents a different theme such as leisure, business, education or community groups. Initiated by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, the project was developed with help of Bristol City Council, the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol Evening Post and City NetGates Ltd. The pilot site was launched in March 1997.

This paper aims to describe Digital City Shanghai (DCSH), which was designed to be an integrated information & service environment for everyday life. Section 1 provides a background of Shanghai. Section 2 discusses the motivation and guidelines of DCSH: service-oriented, intelligent, participant-encouraged, and government-guided & commercialized. Section 3 gives a rough skeleton of DCSH, which includes virtual government, virtual bank, virtual enterprises, virtual markets, digital library, digital hospital, digital community, and virtual school. The reality of DCSH is presented in section 4 based on the description of the current backbone of “InfoPort Shanghai.” A comparison between DCSH and other digital cities is given in section 5. Section 6 is a detailed description of Shanghai Tourist Information & Services, which is a pilot project of DCSH.

The paper outlines results of feasibility experiments with new functions for a local version of the digital city, performed under a collective name ‘Engineering City Oulu’ (ECO). We investigated design and implementation options supporting engineering services in the digital city. The options were oriented towards local needs and potentials of the Oulu economic area. Many technologies can be used to support user interaction in digital city systems, such as 3-d imaging, on-line sensory data, culture-sensitive instruction, etc. We focused on supporting engineering - a fundamental activity of real city users. In the experiments we emphasised conditions for active participation of users (‘digital citizens’) in the community decision making. A broad classification of engineering support in digital cities is introduced followed by motivation of the feasibility studies. Then the requirements for an innovative digital city are discussed. The main feasibility results are then presented including a selection of basic engineering models and an outline of the experiments new software, applicable in digital cities.

The advent of the Web has renewed interest in the use of information and communication technologies to support not only virtual communities but also traditional communities. This paper observes that the majority of successful applications to date tend to use technologies to substitute for and/or enlarge existing community interactions and transactions. We argue that this trend, unfortunately, deepens the digital divide between those who have social and knowledge capital and those who don’t. In order to improve the conditions of low-income residents, there is a need to deploy tools that help to reconfigure rather than simply substitute or enlarge existing community interactions. This paper describes the methodology of asset mapping and the development and deployment of a tool called PrairieKNOW (Prairie Knowledge Networks On the Web) in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois’ Prairienet community network. While Champaign-Urbana was ranked by Newsweek magazine as one of the ten most wired cities in the world, it also has a substantial low-income population that has traditionally been under-represented in their use of Prairienet.

Communities on the Internet have developed to the stage where they are no longer a mere “virtual existence”. Though these network communities have little to do with “real society”, they are nonetheless a very real existence as they have a substantial and firm effect on society. To enhance the activities of network communities, utilization of IT tools is indispensable. However, design and development of community-oriented tools is not an easy task because tools should reflect the characteristics shared in the communities, which never cease to change. In this paper, we propose three aspects to characterize network communities: role, rule and tool. We will also introduce the interpenetration of these three aspects through the activities of the VCOM project, which is driven by Keio University. Finally, we discuss the indispensable characteristics of IT tools for network communities, which are regarded as having an important role to play as a real existence in the future society.

Davis Community Network (DCN) is one of several hundred community networking initiatives now being spawned in the U. S. and throughout the world. Community networks are local responses to the needs of urban, rural and ever growing edge communities in a globally evolving information society. They are taking a variety of forms and fulfilling various functions in response to their social, economic and technical context. DCN is a notable example of the community networks that were jump-started with government or corporate funds in the early to mid-1990s. Broad based community partnerships, a sound economic foundation, an educated and participatory public, and clearly understood goals and benefits, are the still rare combination of factors that result in successful community networking ventures. Non-local factors, such as government policies and private sector telecommunication infrastructure deployment timeframes, also weigh heavily into the equation. The information society is in the early stages of an evolutionary development. Community networks must frequently reassess and reinvent themselves in response to greater local-global changes. Davis Community Network hopes to continue to learn lessons and to demonstrate possibilities, as all communities, homes and people eventually become nodes in a ubiquitously networked society.

Can supportive, sociable and meaningful relations be maintained online? Will life online replace, complement, or supplant life in the flesh? Netville is a residential development located in suburban Toronto equipped with a high-speed network as part of its design. The clustering of homes within this area allowed us to study the social networks, civic involvement, Internet use, and attitudes of residents. We are interested in how living in a residential community equipped with no cost, very high speed access to the Internet affects the kinds of interpersonal relations people have with coworkers, friends, relatives, and neighbors. This paper explores the research goals and methods used in the Netville project and introduces preliminary results on the effect of living in a new residential development equipped with no-cost, very high-speed access to the Internet on neighborhood social relations.

This text describes experiences of four on-line discussion forums that are used in a Swedish local government context. More precisely, these experiences come from a special kind of Digital Cities that are implemented and run by local government. The main issue that is treated in the following is how aspects such as the implementation of the forums, functional features of the forums, and activities to increase access to Internet affect the on-line debate. Lastly, three strategies for how the amount of debate in the on-line forums might be increased are outlined.

In this paper, we describe a system that integrates physical worlds (physical cities) and virtual worlds (digital cities), and its applications to supporting group learning. We have so far constructed several systems for supporting collaborative learning. One of the aims of CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) is to promote mutual learning through interactions and discussions among learners. Our previous experiments, however, have shown that these systems may not be so effective for supporting interactions and discussions at times. In order to enhance interactions further, a system should support externalization of each learner in an easily recognizable manner. Through such externalization, learners can actively collaborate or conflict with each other through discussions.The proposed system integrates a board game and a computer simulation, is used for studying urban planning and environmental problems. Each learner externalizes and represents his/her own ideas on a board game, which allows him/her to actively participate in a learning situation and to share the representations with other learners. The computer simulation calculates and visualizes the status of the city being constructed on the board game, in terms of air pollution, water pollution, etc..Thirty fifth-grade pupils who had studied environmental problems in school participated in the experiments. The experiments showed that our system is effective for enhancing interactions, activating discussions, and raises learners’ engagement.

The purpose of this study is to apply digital city concept for the development of a pictogram system for natural disaster reduction. Long lasting and tangible achievement of IDNDR is needed which may be used in all over the world for many coming generations. As Neurath said “Words divide, pictures unite”, pictograms could be a powerful communication tool as well as an educational tool to improve global disaster awareness. In this project, we formed a multi-disciplinary team to compile “A Database of Pictograms for Natural Disaster Reduction”, which we intend to release our copyrights to be used widely and freely as an achievement of IDNDR through internet. We developed the lexicon and grammar of the pictograms for natural disaster reduction. Over 700 pictograms in use were collected for evaluation, and new designs were also added to complete the list of concepts related to natural hazards and their disaster management. Home page will be introduced for worldwide participation in this project as a first step towards the digital city for disaster reduction.

Libraries are hubs for social and intellectual interactions in communities and organizations. Virtual libraries should serve the same purpose. In this paper an online library is described that places knowledge sharing and community building at the core of its design. The library system supports personal web sites that are visible to the entire community. Personal topic profiles for library research services, information services choices, and collaborative research requests provide people with views of each others’ activities and interests. Collaboration and interest-matching tools help people to share knowledge and to form special interest communities. The paper also discusses design features necessary for building community in virtual situations: semantically-rich places, perspective and identity, interaction opportunities, and facilitators.

We propose an agent community model for investigating workers and jobs on open computer networks. We call it the LOJ/LOT model, and it is a multi-agent model that provides a knowledge-intensive community like a market for human resources. This model also includes social interactions for getting jobs. LOJ and LOT stand for “look for jobs” and “look for talent (worker)”, respectively. The LOJ/LOT model has three characteristics as follows. (1) Agents recruit workers or jobs on an open space on the Internet. All users who want workers or jobs can use these agents that have several recruiting tactics and specific requirements for workers or jobs. (2) Agents can ask other agents for information about job contract partners. The information is gathered through social interactions, and is safely kept. (3) If matchmaking fails, agents introduce other candidates using social links created from e-mail, Web page links, chat logs and so on. There are two major problems in providing the service of worker and job hunting with this model. These are legal issue and a privacy issue. If we settle these problems, Digital City will grow with the business and regional community. In the future, Digital City will be able to connect the real world to the virtual world on the Internet.

In the digital city, creating and displaying human animation is a significant problem. This paper describes two applications of human walking animation: pedestrian as avatars and pedestrians as crowds of people. Animating controlled avatars which start, stop, and turn interactively makes it possible to realize the digital city, we describe how to build a walking motion generation module to create plane walking animation. Animating a large number of avatars or virtual bodies is expensive and is a serious barrier to enhancing the digital city. We describe a method that offers cost-effective animation. This method divides the figures in the scene into far and near groups. The movements of the former are updated less often. The proposed methods can produce computer animation scenes rapidly that still offer good animation quality.

The conventional approaches for constructing real-space-based 3D space on WWW are costly much in initial modeling and in network access in its operation. The recent trend in such construction, i.e., the image-based rendering (IBR) approach, focuses on more convenient handling of the real space, but the obtained space is usually constrained by the difficulty in image analysis. In this paper, aiming at relaxing the modeling cost of the real space and the accessing cost on WWW, we propose a simple approach where we use scenic images such as those taken by a digital camera or a video camera without distorting them. By enlarging or shrinking an avatar image and pasting it on a background scenic image according to the user’s input, we can visualize the depth of the scene as pseudo 3D space. We call the method the image-based non-rendering (IBNR), intended as an antithesis to IBR. In our system, we emphasize on two points: the scene independency, i.e., each scene is more independent of other scenes, and the platform independency, i.e., usual WWW browsers can be used in the walk-through of the space without extra plug-ins.

In this paper, we will introduce a method of dynamically retrieving zones containing clustered objects satisfying the conditions given by the user and computing objects with the most distinct characteristics which we call landmarks. These operations would help the user retrieve and browse the spatial data dynamically in the following ways. Determining the zones would provide one with a general information of the spatial distribution of the objects one wishes to see, thus freeing one from unnecessary browsing. Computing the landmarks would provide one with descriptive information on the zones which were dynamically retrieved. We will discuss algebraic operations for zone retrieval and computational expressions for describing landmarks.

This paper concerns Web-based spatial and local information sharing for digital cities. There are various kinds of spatial information such as geographical maps, illustrated maps, railroad maps and so on around us. Our system provides an environment in which the general users can submit such contents on their favorite map and in which they can view contents submitted from more than two providers on their favorite map. In our system, all spatial information submitted by citizens is linked in special index tables. This paper also shows digital city applications of the presented environments.

This paper describes an integration of geographic information systems (GIS) and multimedia technologies to create opportunities for people to explore the history of their cities. We have augmented a digital camera with a global positioning system (GPS) and a digital compass to record its position and orientation when ordinary photographs are taken. The metadata are used to retrieve and present historical images of the photographed locations to photographers. Another set of tools allows students to annotate and compare these historical images to develop explanations of how and why their communities have changed over time. We describe the hardware and software architectures and learning outcomes that we expect to see in classroom use.

Digital cities make a wide variety of city metaphors possible. City metaphors can be used as information resources for real city users. To use resources easily, it is essential that digital cities have simple and intuitive interfaces. We are working towards a new interface focused on supporting navigation services in a real city. This paper proposes an approach to improve the interface of digital cities. Proposed approach is realized by dynamically generating intelligible representation of route guide information using city metaphors. Our developed system can generate the pictorial and linguistic representation by selecting truly required information and re-arranging it for easy understanding. Using our system, route guides are available for very small display of a cellular phone. In experiments we verified the effectiveness of proposed interface for navigation support in a real city. Using proposed interface, we can easy browse route information in digital city even with mobile terminals.

SpaceTag is an object that can be accessed only from limited locations and time period. SpaceTags are served and distributed from a central server which should be managed by a service provider. Users of the SpaceTag system can access SpaceTags with portable terminals equipped with location sensors and wireless communication device such as mobile phones. Users walk around in a city and find SpaceTags that can be only found at the location. SpaceTag is thus an inconvenient media, but suitable for gaming, advertising, city guide information, etc. A user can also put a SpaceTag at the location where (s)he is, which can be found by other people nearby. This feature also enables local public communication applications. In this paper, we will argue why this inconvenient but simple virtual platform can support various applications for a digital city. We will also argue social impacts of these applications.

Information on the Internet is becoming more attractive and useful for our daily life. It provides things on the town, happenings on the city, and learning of the real world. If we can utilize such information for the interaction between the human and the city, it can enhance the value and the function of the city. In this paper we introduce the research project “Mobile Info Search” in which we study the method of integrating heterogeneous information in a location-oriented way for providing it in a handy form with mobile computing. We have a prototype of Mobile Info Search at http://www.kokono.net/, a location-based “search engine”. Local information such as yellow pages, maps, and relevant Web pages at any location of Japan are provided with a simple interface. From the analysis of test services, we will discuss the user issues and information source issues; What kind of local information is welcomed? What can we learn from collected documents? Through the experience of handling various contents related to the real-world, we describe the potential of the Internet information for the digital city efforts.

The performance of recent smart IC cards is equal to the one of micro-computers about twenty years ago. Using the functions of smart IC cards, this paper proposes Fairy-Wing: yet another mobile computing system for community computing in a digital city. The system aims at supporting personal information management, information services, and dynamic collaborative filtering in order to interface the people, towns, and digital cities. The main features of the system are that (1) the agents or fairies are small, cheap, and easy-to-use; (2) they are fully distributed among ubiquitous computing environments with and/or without computer networks; and (3) holder-centered information controlling mechanisms. The application candidates in digital cities include travel navigation, collaborative education, and electronic commerce. This paper discusses the system architecture, feasibility of applications, Group Trip Advisor: a prototype of Fairy-Wing, and future issues.

Like thriving physical cities, successful digital cities will provide many opportunities and approach points for building local social connections and context. This project focuses on bringing cultural outsiders into the Kyoto Digital City community, using a tactic that is well understood in the physical world of travel: the guided group tour. We are creating an interface agent to perform the tour guide role. With careful design of this agent’s narration strategies, we can accomplish two goals: providing preliminary cultural and historical context for foreigners who want to learn more about Kyoto, and providing a shared experience, so that they can form relationships that build upon their common interest in Kyoto.

Community networks are community-oriented information and communication systems that are generally patterned after the public library’s model of free, inclusive service and commitment to universal access. To serve the community network objectives it is therefore important to have easy and widespread information access. In this paper we present the Campiello system that proposes both enhanced information services and complementary user interfaces to better serve the community network objectives. Enhancement of the services is obtained by introducing collaborative filtering functions to support easier navigation in the information space of the community. To extend access to the community network, a paper-based interface is used, that supports exchange of information with the network, from physical locations spread in town. A large screen based interface is also used, which provides collective easy entry points to the most recent and relevant community information.

A new paradigm is proposed for a network-based community called the “creative contents community”. Typical examples of network based communities are bulletin boards and mailing lists, which have a “free talk” communications style but are not always productive. In the creative contents community, open and flexible human groups are formed with members having different skills, knowledge, viewpoints, etc, enabling them to create multimedia contents with a certain value. One of the models of such a community has many creators providing small pieces of a final output and a producer who gathers and edits these pieces into one artifact. A feasibility study was conducted at an elementary school where groups with creators and a producer were easily formed (i.e. students and a teacher). From the study, a newly developed authoring environment consisting of a Kids editor and a Producer tool was implemented in an experiment to create multi-media contents. The concept of the community model, the authoring environment and the results of the experiment are discussed in detail.

A novel communication medium is described for sharing and exchanging information and opinions in a community, the “Public Opinion Channel (POC).” The POC collects information and opinions from members of a community and broadcasts them as edited stories. Rather than simply building a passive medium, we are developing an active medium that can provide a means for forming public opinion based on mutual understanding through the information circulation. The POC will enable community members to easily obtain information about the other members of the community and to learn how they can contribute to the community. People using POC will be able to easily get information about the community and thus join into it more smoothly. Building the POC is thus a worthwhile challenge in information and communication technology and it will contribute to the study of digital cities as a city community communication medium.