Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The design challenge of pervasive computing demands new emphasis on ambient, embodied, and habitual experiences. This emphasis connects the younger field of interaction design with the more venerable disciplines of the built environment. In terms of knowledge representation its central problem becomes location modeling. This turn from the universal aspects of computing to its situated practices becomes both a defense of architecture and an agenda in urbanism. To complement more particular research compiled in this journal issue, this paper offers a connective overview of that position.

Following half a century of breakneck urbanization, the capital of South Korea emerged in the late 1990s as the most digitally networked city in the world. With nearly 80% household broadband penetration in 2004, Seoul surpassed global cities and ‘technopoles' in speed and comprehensiveness in embracing broadband technology. In this paper I describe the physical development of Seoul's broadband infrastructure and its frequent intersections with daily urban life. As the fourth largest urban agglomeration in the world, Seoul offers a unique case for investigating the intersection of telecommunications policy, development, and culture in large metropolitan regions, as well as the everyday implications of pervasive computing. It also highlights emerging challenges and opportunities presented by the rapid and widespread deployment of digital network infrastructure.

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation ‘off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embedded in the environment around us or carried or worn on our bodies, suggests that computation is beginning to manifest itself in new ways as an aspect of the everyday environment. One particularly interesting issue in this transformation is the move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical ones. Basically, once computation moves off the desktop, computer science suddenly has to be concerned with where it might have gone. Whereas computer science and human-computer interaction have previously been concerned with disembodied cognition, they must now look more directly at embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology. In this paper, we explore some of the implications of the development of ubiquitous computing for encounters with space. We look on space here as infrastructure—not just a technological infrastructure, but an infrastructure through which we experience the world. Drawing on studies of both the practical organization of space and the cultural organization of space, we begin to explore the ways in which ubiquitous computing may condition, and be conditioned by, the social organization of everyday space.

In this paper we examine the potential of pervasive computing to create widespread sousveillance, which will complement surveillance, through the development of life-logs—sociospatial archives that document every action, every event, every conversation, and every material expression of an individual's life. Reflecting on emerging technologies, life-log projects, and artistic critiques of sousveillance, we explore the potential social, political, and ethical implications of machines that never forget. We suggest, given that life-logs have the potential to convert exterior generated oligopticons to an interior panopticon, that an ethics of forgetting needs to be developed and built into the development of life-logging technologies. Rather than seeing forgetting as a weakness or a fallibility, we argue that it is an emancipatory process that will free pervasive computing from burdensome and pernicious disciplinary effects.

As built environments become increasingly hybrid physical, social, and digital spaces, the intersecting issues of spatial context, sociality, and pervasive digital technologies need to be understood when designing for interactions in these hybrid spaces. Architectural and interaction designers need a mechanism that provides them with an understanding of the ‘sociality-places-bits' nexus. Using a specific urban setting as an analytical case study, we present a methodology to capture this nexus in a form that designers of hybrid spaces can effectively apply as a tool to augment digitally sociality in a built environment.

The recent development of web-based services that combine spatial coordinates and indexes of online material allows any web user to conduct geographically referenced Internet searches. In this paper we characterize the resulting hybrid space as DigiPlace—that is, the use of information ranked and mapped in cyberspace to navigate and understand physical places. We review relevant theories of hybrid combinations of physical and virtual space, how software (code) automatically produces space, and how the politics of code (particularly map generating code) shape the representation of places. The paper concludes with a case study of the DigiPlace created by GoogleMaps that utilizes the same code which powers Google's index of cyberspace. A central argument advanced by the case study concerns how the interactions between culture, code, information, and place construct DigiPlace and shade perceptions of the places that are mapped.

This study reports on a survey of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in the USA to collect information about spatial data transformation, a geographic procedure used to convert data from one set of zones (system A) to a different set of zones (system B), where systems A and B have incompatible zone boundaries. The survey reveals that 60% of MPOs perform spatial data transformation more than once per year, usually using the simplest, most error-prone methods. Given a lag in application of new GIS techniques among planners, it is perhaps not surprising that practising planners tend to favor simpler methods of spatial data transformation, despite the widely documented shortcomings of such techniques in the literature. These findings suggest that the gap between research and application in the utilization of GIS in planning practice will require both more advanced training of planners using GIS, and, perhaps more importantly, greater sophistication among the ‘consumers' of GIS planning analyses—non-GIS planners, public officials, and the general public.

This paper presents new mathematical programming-based planning models for the provision of affordable housing to low-income and moderate-income families by government and nongovernmental entities. These models address two key policy concerns of housing providers: setting priorities for investments among a variety of affordable housing programs, and choosing locations and configurations for particular affordable housing initiatives. This paper also incorporates elements of location-design models to address various programmatic and physical attributes associated with affordable housing. Computational results based on a case study demonstrate the potential of these models to generate affordable housing strategies that are flexible, meet affordable housing ‘gaps’, and address social benefits and fairness concerns concurrently.

Statutory zoning, as a regulatory tool, is generally considered as a means to introduce and maximize positive externalities and to preempt and internalize negative externalities; thence the land value of the regulated land and its immediate neighbourhood is enhanced. Yet, empirical evidence of the effects of zoning on land values has been conflicting. This paper empirically evaluates the panel data for a district in which two large-scale commercial properties have been developed in a comprehensive development area (CDA) statutorily rezoned from commercial/residential status on land taken by compulsory purchase by a public urban renewal agency in Hong Kong. A price gradient analysis is used to test the effects of such rezoning. The results show that the effect of the new CDA zoning on the prices of housing surrounding the CDA is uncertain. The Pigovian argument for the positive effect of zoning is therefore refuted as a justification for the zone under investigation, and the meaning of the finding for urban renewal planning is discussed. Some urban design factors that may have contributed to the failure of the projects are also discussed.

Axial analysis is one of the fundamental components of space syntax. The space syntax community has suggested that it picks up qualities of configurational relationships between spaces not illuminated by other representations. However, critics have questioned the absolute necessity of axial lines to space syntax, as well as the exact definition of axial lines. Why not another representation? In particular, why not road-centre lines, which are easily available in many countries for use within geographical information systems? Here I propose that a recently introduced method of analysis, angular segment analysis, can marry axial and road-centre line representations, and in doing so reflect a cognitive model of how route choice decisions may be made. I show that angular segment analysis can be applied generally to road-centre line segments or axial segments, through a simple length-weighted normalisation procedure that makes values between the two maps comparable. I make comparative quantitative assessments for a real urban system, not just investigating angular analysis between axial and road-centre line networks, but also including more intuitive measures based on metric (or block) distances between locations. I show that the new angular segment analysis algorithm produces better correlation with observed vehicular flow than both standard axial analysis and metric distance measures. The results imply that there is no reason why space syntax inspired measures cannot be combined with transportation network analysis representations in order to create a new, cognitively coherent, model of movement in the city.

Quantifying the landscape pattern and its dynamics is essential for the monitoring and assessment of the ecological consequences of urbanization. As one of the Special Economic Zones, Haikou is one of the fastest growing regions among all Chinese cities, owing to rapid real estate development. Using a GIS-based land-use dataset from 1986, 1996, and 2000, in combination with a lacunarity index, we attempt to quantify the spatial pattern in the Haikou metropolitan area. After the landscape structure changes over the periods 1986–96 and 1996–2000 are analyzed, a Markov conversion matrix is applied in order to study the sources and destinations of landscape dynamic changes. The lacunarity index is calculated in order to measure the landscape dynamics, with respect to several major land-use types, at a range of spatial scales. The findings indicate that the leapfrog development of real estate and the rapid economic growth of Haikou City have had a great impact on the dynamic landscape patterns. From 1986 to 1996 urban land expanded dramatically and clustered, while cropland was encroached upon and fragmented. From 1996 to 2000, after the government had implemented the strict cropland protection measures, urban expansion and cropland misuse were controlled to a large degree, and a lot of cropland was reclaimed in certain areas. We investigate the dynamic landscape pattern and process, and their implications in policy and economic development.