Effect of Urban Computing on the Public's Perception of Place, Community, and Infrastructure

Abstract

The work presented in this chapter delineates the longitudinal experience of deploying an urban computing system that enables citizens to share and interact with digital content about the urban environment and experiences of people with it. It is part of an emerging and novel aspect of urban computing that expands research beyond simple optimisations of city functions towards a social and cultural approach that seeks to orchestrate complex socio-technical ensembles. Offering Collective City Memory as a service to citizens and enabling them to interact with it via diverse novel interfaces has uncovered the implications for city life that the introduction of urban computing brings such as the redefinition of spatial and temporal proximity and the effects on the perception of city space, fostering of social interactions, contribution to shared resources and participation in collective efforts.