The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities: the ethics of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization of urban society

Batel Yossef Ravid Meirav Aharon-Gutman

11 November 2022

Complexity theory has become a conceptual framework and a source of inspiration for Smart City initiatives. In addition to many other conceptions, the Urban Digital Twin (UDT) became both a concept and a tool for generating the revolutionary act of data-driven 3D city modeling. Indeed, the UDT has increased the ability of planners to make decisions vis-à-vis data-driven city models; at the same time, however, it has attracted criticism because of its focus on the physical dimensions of cities. In facing these challenges, we seek to join the conceptual and practical efforts to generate a social turn in the field of Smart Cities and urban innovation. Creating a UDT with a social focus, we maintain, is not only a 1:1 translation of the built environment into the social realm, but also demands interdisciplinary knowledge from the fields of sociology, anthropology, planning, and ethics studies. This article makes theoretical and methodological contributions. Theoretically, it discusses the potential contribution of the Social Urban Digital Twin (SUDT) to the theory of urbanism, enabling us to represent the physical and the social environments as a single fabric. Methodologically, it enhances the know-how of the City Analytics research community by advancing a six-phase protocol for developing SUDTs, each phase of which integrates technological conceptions and social-theoretical content. The phases of the SUDT protocol are demonstrated using a specific case study: the experience of elderly residents of the Haifa neighborhood of Hadar—a low-income neighborhood in Israel characterized by ethnic and national diversity—during the Coronavirus pandemic. We conclude by discussing the contributions and limitations of the SUDT.

Benjamin Hewitt M. Taddeo M. Ziosi + 2 lainnya

30 September 2022

This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition.

Pardis Emami-Naeini Franziska Roesner Tadayoshi Kohno + 4 lainnya

19 April 2023

Designing privacy-respecting and human-centric smart cities requires a careful investigation of people’s attitudes and concerns toward city-wide data collection scenarios. To capture a holistic view, we carried out this investigation in two phases. We first surfaced people’s understanding, concerns, and expectations toward smart city scenarios by conducting 21 semi-structured interviews with people in underserved communities. We complemented this in-depth qualitative study with a 348-participant online survey of the general population to quantify the significance of smart city factors (e.g., type of collected data) on attitudes and concerns. Depending on demographics, privacy and ethics were the two most common types of concerns among participants. We found the type of collected data to have the most and the retention time to have the least impact on participants’ perceptions and concerns about smart cities. We highlight key takeaways and recommendations for city stakeholders to consider when designing inclusive and protective smart cities.

Niels Netten M. Bargh Sunil Choenni + 1 lainnya

7 Februari 2022

Today, our environment and the objects therein are equipped with an increasing number of devices such as cameras, sensors, and actuators, which all together produce a huge amount of data. Furthermore, we observe that citizens generate data via social media applications running on their personal devices. Smart cities and societies are seeking for ways to exploit these vast amounts of data. In this paper, we argue that to take full advantage of these data, it is necessary to set up data governance properly, which includes defining, assigning, and allocating responsibilities. A proper setting up of data governance appears to be a challenging task since the data may be used irresponsibly, thoughtlessly and maliciously, resulting in many (un)wanted side effects such as violation of rules and regulations, human rights, ethical principles as well as privacy and security requirements. We elaborate on the key functionalities that should be included in the governance of a data ecosystem within smart cites, namely provisioning the required data quality and establishing trust, as well as a few organizational aspects that are necessary to support such a data governance. Realizing these data governance functionalities, among others, asks for making trade-offs among contending values. We provide a few solution directions for realizing these data governance functionalities and making trade-offs among them.

Fabian Dembski Michael Ruddat Claudia Yamu + 2 lainnya

16 Maret 2020

Cities are complex systems connected to economic, ecological, and demographic conditions and change. They are also characterized by diverging perceptions and interests of citizens and stakeholders. Thus, in the arena of urban planning, we are in need of approaches that are able to cope not only with urban complexity but also allow for participatory and collaborative processes to empower citizens. This to create democratic cities. Connected to the field of smart cities and citizens, we present in this paper, the prototype of an urban digital twin for the 30,000-people town of Herrenberg in Germany. Urban digital twins are sophisticated data models allowing for collaborative processes. The herein presented prototype comprises (1) a 3D model of the built environment, (2) a street network model using the theory and method of space syntax, (3) an urban mobility simulation, (4) a wind flow simulation, and (5) a number of empirical quantitative and qualitative data using volunteered geographic information (VGI). In addition, the urban digital twin was implemented in a visualization platform for virtual reality and was presented to the general public during diverse public participatory processes, as well as in the framework of the “Morgenstadt Werkstatt” (Tomorrow’s Cities Workshop). The results of a survey indicated that this method and technology could significantly aid in participatory and collaborative processes. Further understanding of how urban digital twins support urban planners, urban designers, and the general public as a collaboration and communication tool and for decision support allows us to be more intentional when creating smart cities and sustainable cities with the help of digital twins. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the presented results and further research directions.