Lucy Van Kleunen
Stephen Voida
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
We use a sociotechnical perspective to expand upon prior characterizations of deploying end-to-end urban sensor networks that focus primarily on the technical aspects of such systems. Via exploratory, semi-structured interviews with those deploying a number of urban sensor networks in a single American city, we identify ways that human decision-making and collaborative processes influence how these infrastructures are built. We synthesize these findings into a framework in which sociotechnical factors show up across the phases of data collection, management, analysis, and impacts within smart city projects. Each phase can display variability in immediacy, automation, geographic scope, and ownership. Finally, we use our situated work to discuss a generalizable tension within smart city projects between cross-domain data integration and fragmentation and provide implications for CSCW research, the design of smart city data platforms, and municipal policy.
- Paul Aoki, Allison Woodruff, Baladitya Yellapragada, and Wesley Willett. 2017. Environmental protection and agency: Motivations, capacity, and goals in participatory sensing. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3138--3150. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025667Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Julio Aráuz. 2018. Smart cities and the dire need for a course correction. In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2018). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 1--6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISC2.2018.8656829Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mariam Asad, Christopher A. Le Dantec, Becky Nielsen, and Kate Diedrick. 2017. Creating a sociotechnical API: Designing city-scale community engagement. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2295--2306. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025963Google ScholarDigital Library
- Örjan Bodin. 2017. Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems. Science 357, 6352 (2017), eaan1114. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan1114Google ScholarCross Ref
- danah boyd and Kate Crawford. 2012. Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society 15, 5 (2012), 662--679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jeffrey A. Burke, Deborah Estrin, Mark Hansen, Andrew Parker, Nithya Ramanathan, Sasank Reddy, and Mani B. Srivastava. 2006. Participatory sensing. Position paper for the 2006 Workshop on World-Sensor-Web (WSW): Mobile Device Centric Sensor Networks and Applications, co-located with the ACM SenSys 2006 Conference, Boulder, CO. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.122.3024&rep=rep1&type=pdfGoogle Scholar
- Luís Carvalho. 2014. Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, 1 (06 2014), 43--60. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu010Google ScholarCross Ref
- Everton Cavalcante, Nélio Cacho, Frederico Lopes, and Thais Batista. 2017. Challenges to the development of smart city systems: A system-of-systems view. In Proceedings of the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES ?17). ACM, New York, 244--249. https://doi.org/10.1145/3131151.3131189Google ScholarDigital Library
- City and County of Denver. 2020. Denver Smart City. https://www.denvergov.org/content/denvergov/en/denver-smart-city.html.Google Scholar
- City and County of Denver. 2020. Love My Air. https://www.denvergov.org/content/denvergov/en/environmental-health/our-divisions/environmental-quality/air-quality/love-my-air.html.Google Scholar
- Sandy Claes, Jorgos Coenen, and Andrew Vande Moere. 2018. Conveying a civic issue through data via spatially distributed public visualization and polling displays. In Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 597--608. https://doi.org/10.1145/3240167.3240206Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stephen J. Clement, David Wesley McKee, and Jie Xu. 2017. Service-oriented reference architecture for smart cities. In 2017 IEEE symposium on service-oriented system engineering (SOSE). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 81--85. https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.29Google ScholarCross Ref
- Colorado Smart Cities Alliance. 2019. Colorado Smart Cities Alliance. https://coloradosmart.city. Accessed: 2020-05-15.Google Scholar
- Eric Corbett and Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2018. Exploring trust in digital civics. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9--20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196715Google ScholarDigital Library
- Saskia Coulson, Mel Woods, Michelle Scott, Drew Hemment, and Mara Balestrini. 2018. Stop the noise! Enhancing meaningfulness in participatory sensing with community level indicators. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1183--1192. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196762Google ScholarDigital Library
- Carl DiSalvo, Tom Jenkins, and Thomas Lodato. 2016. Designing speculative civics. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4979--4990. https: //doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858505Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rong Du, Paolo Santi, Ming Xiao, Athanasios V. Vasilakos, and Carlo Fischione. 2019. The sensable city: A survey on the deployment and management for smart city monitoring. IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials 21, 2 (Secondquarter 2019), 1533--1560. https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2018.2881008Google ScholarCross Ref
- W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman, and Erika Shehan Poole. 2010. The infrastructure problem in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, 423--432. https: //doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753390Google ScholarDigital Library
- Laura Forlano. 2016. Decentering the human in the design of collaborative cities. Design Issues 32, 3 (2016), 42--54. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI{_}a{_}00398 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00398Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marcus Foth, Irina Anastasiu, Monique Mann, and Peta Mitchell. 2020. From automation to autonomy: Technological sovereignty for better data care in smart cities. In Automating Cities: Design, Construction, Operation and Future Impact, Brydon T. Wang and C. M. Wang (Eds.). Springer, Singapore, 319--343.Google Scholar
- Guo Freeman, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Szu-Yu (Cyn) Liu, Xi Lu, and Diandian Cao. 2019. Smart and fermented cities: An approach to placemaking in urban informatics. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 44, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300274Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Gooch, Matthew Barker, Lorraine Hudson, Ryan Kelly, Gerd Kortuem, Janet Van Der Linden, Marian Petre, Rebecca Brown, Anna Klis-Davies, Hannah Forbes, Jessica Mackinnon, Robbie Macpherson, and Clare Walton. 2018. Amplifying quiet voices: Challenges and opportunities for participatory design at an urban scale. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) 25, 1, Article 2 (Jan. 2018), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3139398Google ScholarDigital Library
- Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly. 2011. A theory of smart cities. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the ISSS. International Society for the Systems Sciences, Pocklington, UK, 521--535. http://journals.isss.org/index.php/ proceedings55th/article/view/1703Google Scholar
- Sara Heitlinger, Nick Bryan-Kinns, and Rob Comber. 2019. The right to the sustainable smart city. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 287, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300517Google ScholarDigital Library
- IEEE. 2020. IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2019). https://ieee-isc2.org/.Google Scholar
- Rob Kitchin. 2014. The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal 79, 1 (2014), 1--14. https://doi.org/10. 2139/ssrn.2289141Google ScholarCross Ref
- Rob Kitchin and Niamh Moore-Cherry. 2020. Fragmented governance, the urban data ecosystem and smart city-regions: The case of Metropolitan Boston. Regional Studies (2020), 11. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1735627Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stacey Kuznetsov, George Davis, Jian Cheung, and Eric Paulos. 2011. Ceci n'est pas une pipe bombe: Authoring urban landscapes with air quality sensors. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2375--2384. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979290Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stacey Kuznetsov and Eric Paulos. 2010. Participatory sensing in public spaces: Activating urban surfaces with sensor probes. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21--30. https://doi.org/10.1145/1858171.1858175Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christopher A. Le Dantec and W. Keith Edwards. 2010. Across boundaries of influence and accountability: The multiple scales of public sector information systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113--122. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753345Google ScholarDigital Library
- John Lee and Neville Moray. 1992. Trust, control strategies and allocation of function in human-machine systems. Ergonomics 35, 10 (1992), 1243--1270. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139208967392Google ScholarCross Ref
- Monique Mann, Peta Mitchell, Marcus Foth, and Irina Anastasiu. 2020. #BlockSidewalk to Barcelona: Technological sovereignty and the social license to operate smart cities. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 71, 9 (2020), 1103--1115. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24387Google ScholarDigital Library
- Donald McMillan, Arvid Engström, Airi Lampinen, and Barry Brown. 2016. Data and the city. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2933--2944. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858434Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alfredo Mela. 2014. Urban public space between fragmentation, control and conflict. City, Territory and Architecture 1, 1 (2014), 1--7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-014-0015-0Google ScholarCross Ref
- Microsoft. 2019. Denver's pioneering Smart City program improves public safety, mobility, and health. https: //customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/city-and-county-denver-government-azure.Google Scholar
- Mile High Flood District. 2020. Mile High Flood District. https://mhfd.org/.Google Scholar
- Matthew B.. Miles and A Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.Google Scholar
- Milind Naphade, Guruduth Banavar, Colin Harrison, Jurij Paraszczak, and Robert Morris. 2011. Smarter cities and their innovation challenges. Computer 44, 6 (June 2011), 32--39. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2011.187Google ScholarDigital Library
- National Science Foundation. 2019. Smart and Connected Communities. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ. jsp?pims_id=505364.Google Scholar
- Paolo Neirotti, Alberto De Marco, Anna Corinna Cagliano, Giulio Mangano, and Francesco Scorrano. 2014. Current trends in Smart City initiatives: Some stylised facts. Cities 38 (2014), 25--36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.12.010Google ScholarCross Ref
- Safiya Umoja Noble. 2018. Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press, New York.Google Scholar
- Patrick Olivier and Peter Wright. 2015. Digital civics: Taking a local turn. interactions 22, 4 (July-August 2015), 61--63. https://doi.org/10.1145/2776885Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cathy O'Neil. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books, New York.Google Scholar
- Open Mobility Foundation. 2020. Mobility Data Specification. https://github.com/openmobilityfoundation/mobility-data-specification.Google Scholar
- Open Mobility Foundation. 2020. Open Mobility Foundation. https://www.openmobilityfoundation.org/.Google Scholar
- Krassimira Paskaleva, James Evans, Christopher Martin, Trond Linjordet, Dujuan Yang, and Andrew Karvonen. 2017. Data governance in the sustainable smart city. Informatics. 4, 4 (November 2017), 41. http://dro.dur.ac.uk/24121/Google ScholarCross Ref
- Peña Station NEXT. 2020. Peña Station NEXT. https://penastationnext.com/.Google Scholar
- Riccardo Petrolo, Valeria Loscri, and Nathalie Mitton. 2017. Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 28, 1 (2017), e2931. https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.2931Google ScholarCross Ref
- Joseph Pierce, Deborah G. Martin, and James T. Murphy. 2011. Relational place-making: The networked politics of place. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, 1 (2011), 54--70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00411.xGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- Aare Puussaar, Ian G. Johnson, Kyle Montague, Philip James, and Peter Wright. 2018. Making open data work for civic advocacy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) 2, CSCW, Article 143 (Nov. 2018), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274412Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ricky Robinson, Markus Rittenbruch, Marcus Foth, Daniel Filonik, and Stephen Viller. 2012. Street computing: Towards an integrated open data application programming interface (API) for cities. Journal of Urban Technology 19, 2 (2012), 1--23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2012.698064Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jathan Sadowski. 2020. Too smart: How digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
- Johnny Saldaña. 2015. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.Google Scholar
- Steve Sawyer and Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi. 2014. The sociotechnical perspective. In CRC Handbook of Computing (Vol. 5(1)), A. Tucker and H. Topi (Eds.). Chapman and Hall, New York, 5--27.Google Scholar
- Taylor Shelton, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig. 2014. The ?actually existing smart city'. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, 1 (10 2014), 13--25. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu026Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bhagya Nathali Silva, Murad Khan, and Kijun Han. 2018. Towards sustainable smart cities: A review of trends, architectures, components, and open challenges in smart cities. Sustainable Cities and Society 38 (2018), 697--713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.01.053Google ScholarCross Ref
- Susan Leigh Star. 1999. The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43, 3 (Nov. 1999), 377--391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326Google ScholarCross Ref
- Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional ecology, "translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907--39. Social Studies of Science 19, 3 (Aug. 1989), 387--420. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin. 1990. Basics of qualitative research. SAGE publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.Google Scholar
- Alex S. Taylor, Siân Lindley, Tim Regan, David Sweeney, Vasillis Vlachokyriakos, Lillie Grainger, and Jessica Lingel. 2015. Data-in-place: Thinking through the relations between data and community. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2863--2872. https: //doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702558Google ScholarDigital Library
- U.S. Department of Transportation. 2016. Smart City Challenge. https://www.transportation.gov/smartcity.Google Scholar
- Nitya Verma and Lynn Dombrowski. 2018. Confronting social criticisms: Challenges when adopting data-driven policing strategies. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 469, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174043Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, and Ban Al-ani. 2011. Homebrew databases: Complexities of everyday information management in nonprofit organizations. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ?11). ACM Press, New York, 915--924. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979078Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alan Wiig. 2016. The empty rhetoric of the smart city: From digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia. Urban Geography 37, 4 (2016), 535--553. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1065686Google ScholarCross Ref
- Langdon Winner. 1980. Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109, 1 (1980), 121--136. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 20024652Google Scholar
- Tan Yigitcanlar, Marcus Foth, and Md. Kamruzzaman. 2019. Towards post-anthropocentric cities: Reconceptualizing smart cities to evade urban ecocide. Journal of Urban Technology 26, 2 (2019), 147--152. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10630732.2018.1524249Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs, New York.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- "Wiring a City": A Sociotechnical Perspective on Deploying Urban Sensor Networks
Recommendations
Can a small city be considered a smart city?
The term smart cities has been widely used over the last years. The main goal of the smart cities initiative is to enable cities to manage their assets efficiently, investing in innovation and creativity as a way to promote sustainable and inclusive ...
Lessons from Urban Guerrilla Placemaking for Smart City Commons
C&T '17: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and TechnologiesThe combination of digital technology and urban design provides a potent mix full of opportunities and challenges for increasing the wellbeing of citizens and the environment. Under the general rubrics of 'smart cities' and 'placemaking' various ...
Designing for a city of lies: how to rethink belgiums smartest city through engaging the imaginaries of its local citizens
PDC '18: Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial - Volume 2In order to meaningfully speculate on what a city could become, we need to first understand what a city currently is. Designing for a City of Lies is a project that sets out to answer this question, not through mapping what the city is, but what it is ...
Comments