Urbanflow Helsinki

A joint project between Urbanscale.org and Nordkapp, Urbanflow Helsinki envisions an operating system for cities. What does an operating system for cities mean?

From the Urbanscale.org website:

Over the past ten years, dozens of cities around the world have installed expensive, nominally “interactive” informational kiosks in their sidewalks, plazas and public places. Our research suggests that the overwhelming majority of these remain woefully underutilized, resulting in virtually no return on the significant investment involved in installing and maintaining them. We set about trying to understand why this is, and how we might go about designing something that would see real use.
We started with this simple, even obvious question: what might cities do with situated screens that would be generate value for itself, its citizens and visitors, given the wealth of information it has available?

For more information on Urbanflow check out their website or Nordkapp.

Case study: Events, Social Media, and urban information modeling

My case study  mainly focused on three main events that happened during 2011, which were the Egyptian revolution, Japan’s Tsunami, and Occupy movement in New York. Those events could be like any events happened in the world, except that regular people started to publish and make news within the big headlines.Users of social media websites, mainly twitter, where the news publishers,reading the whole picture of the event and through them,where able to understand the social context of the events.

Besides, I was focusing on the news feeds, which are instant tweets coming from the users at that certain place of event. The collection of tweeps (people who tweet) in the certain geographical location starts a hotspot or a hub of information production. Without understanding where this information is coming from ,geographically, the information will not be complete and could be misleading.

This fluid of information coming from people through social media could be a valuable source in understanding human landscape, the social complex structures and relationships between people and how they interact with each other. It is far more vibrant and interactive than other information sources such as the census since it shows how people with similar opinions interact together and “geographically” presents the human terrain of ideas. Specialists in campaigns, marketing, advertising, and socio cultural analysts could benefit from such information.

Harvesting social media feeds is through three operations:

-Extracting Data from social media servers using API (Parsing, integrating) and storing this data in a resident data base.

-Analyze the data

Twitter content revealed emergence of socio-cultural hot sports ,and provides advanced warning of forth coming events, as was the case with Tahrir square reference in Arab spring events of spring 2011.It also offers a mechanism to obtain a rapid assessment of the impact area of natural disasters as demonstrates by data collected during Japan’s Tsunami .It provides unparalled situational awareness by supporting the monitoring of evolving events, as was the case with the Occupy Brooklyn bridge experiment.