The fitness platform Strava gathers data from its users that the company repackages and shares through its Strava Metro platform. Municipalities have been using these data to inform their active transportation planning efforts, but less is known about how they use these data and account for their limits. Through interviews with municipal staff who are long-standing Metro users, this paper examines how decision-makers use these data and mitigate for their limitations. It concludes with reflections on the role of third-party data in urban planning efforts and their impact on planning outcomes.

The fitness platform Strava gathers data from its users that the company repackages and shares through its Strava Metro platform. Municipalities have been using these data to inform their active transportation planning efforts, but less is known about how they use these data and account for their limits. Through interviews with municipal staff who are long-standing Metro users, this paper examines how decision-makers use these data and mitigate for their limitations. It concludes with reflections on the role of third-party data in urban planning efforts and their impact on planning outcomes.

Earth observation data, largely derived from satellites, provides a window into understanding human activities and impacts. Despite the vast amount of data collected, there are limited ways in which this can be leveraged to support urban planning issues and decision-making. One underlying reason for this is that traditional earth observation business and distribution models focus on meeting the needs of large institutional and corporate users, particularly defence industry and nation-state or global-issue data needs. Increasingly, third-party companies are intervening in this space, acting as infomediaries between earth observation data collectors (i.e., companies that launch satellites to collect data) and potential end-users. This chapter describes the current state of earth observation data providers, developing a classification of the different platforms available. The authors structure a discussion around how planners can leverage these resources to support urban e-planning activities, offering recommendations to the data providers about how to better partner with local governments.

The widespread adoption of mobile phone and other location-tracking devices, and the enormous amounts of data they produce, has provided municipalities with the opportunity to automate previously time-consuming and labour-intensive data collection processes. Municipal planners, in particular, have begun to integrate the aggregated data sets of private urban technology platforms into active transportation and broader infrastructure planning initiatives. To date, however, there has been limited research on the implications of this integration for municipal decision-making and governance processes. Using the Strava Metro data stream and its free-access model as a case study, this paper explores both the motivations behind municipal adoption of the Strava platform and the benefits that accrue from its usage. Through the application of a mixed methods approach, including the building of a use case database via a search of internet and academic literature sources and qualitative interviews with municipal planning staff, our research examines how Strava data is used to support the work of municipal planners and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of that use. Our study finds that Strava Metro data aided municipal staff in the planning of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, complementing available in-house data sets; helped spur new active transportation initiatives; and enabled innovation and professional curiosity on the part of planners. The paper concludes by exploring the ramifications of Strava data for community wellness and broader public realm improvements, as well as extending a discussion with respect to the platform’s sociodemographic representativeness and related limitations.

Professional urban planners have an ethical obligation to work in the public interestPublic interest. Public input and critique gathered at public meetings and other channels are used to inform planning recommendations to elected officials. Pre-pandemic, the planning profession worked with digital tools, but in-person meetings were the dominant form of public participationPublic participation. The pandemic imposed a shift to digital channels and tools, with the result that planners' use of technology risks unitizing public participation. As the use of new platforms for public participationPublic participation expands, we argue it has the potential to fundamentally change participation, a process we call platformizationPlatformization. We frame this as a subset of the broader emergence of platform urbanismPlatform urbanism. This chapter evaluates six public participation platforms, identifying how the tools they provide map onto key participation frameworksParticipation frameworks (or frameworks of participation) from ArnsteinArnstein, Sherry (1969), FungFung, Archon (2006), and IAP2IAP2 (2018). Through this analysis, we examine how the platformization of public participationPublic participation poses ethical and scholarly challenges to the work of professional planners.

The authors present an approach to conceptualising and predicting environmental conflicts in which conflicts are analysed as a continuum of disagreement over values and options. They also operationalise this approach using an online values-centred survey tool, the 'public-to-public decision support system' (P2P-DSS). The authors put values and conflict in environmental management into perspective. Next, they review how values are defined in scholarship and operationalised for decision support. The relevance of values research to conflict management is presented. With reference to a real-world aggregate-mining conflict, the authors demonstrate how P2P-DSS can be used to collect data and categorise conflicts to enhance environmental management decision-making. The authors argue that P2P-DSS has potential to support values-sensitive thinking for environmental conflict management. They then set out research priorities to investigate the theoretical and practical implications of this approach. This work contributes to advancing values research in environmental conflict management and expanding values-based decision-making.

Maps, created through the collection, assembly, and analysis of spatial data are used to support government planning and decision‐making. Traditionally, spatial data used to create maps are collected, controlled, and disseminated by government, although over time, this role has shifted. This shift has been driven by the availability of alternate sources of data collected by private sector companies, and data contributed by volunteers to open mapping platforms, such as OpenStreetMap. In theorizing this shift, we provide examples of how governments use data sovereignty as a tool to shape spatial data collection, use, and sharing. We frame four models of how governments may navigate shifting spatial data sovereignty regimes; first, with government retaining complete control over data collection; second, with government contracting a third party to provide specific data collection services, but with data ownership and dissemination responsibilities resting with government; third, with government purchasing data under terms of access set by third party data collectors, who disseminate data to several parties, and finally, with government retreating from or relinquishing data sovereignty altogether. Within this rapidly changing landscape of data providers, we propose that governments must consider how to address data sovereignty concerns to retain their ability to control data use in the public interest.

A values-informed modeling software program is proposed and developed for enhancing online surveys. The authors explore a method to prompt users to examine the interactions between their preferences over a set of alternatives and their values in an online survey. The authors first present the underlying theories, design parameters, and features used to prompt values-informed thinking in participants. We then describe our exploratory test of an early version of P2P-DSS. In this test, fifteen participants used the system to provide their input on a decision about aggregate mining and then completed a post-task questionnaire. The authors integrated realistic problem constraints and end user feedback early in the design of P2P-DSS by addressing a real-world decision. Some participants indicate that P2P-DSS helped them to express their own preferences. P2P-DSS may also have encouraged some people to consider preferences they disagreed with. Participants also identified opportunities to improve the user experience. While focused on a real decision, the goal was to elicit feedback on an early design of P2P-DSS, not to conduct a case study. This work will inform redesigns and examinations of P2P-DSS specifically and sets the stage for further studies into a role for values activation in online surveys and decision support.

Recent government initiatives like e-government and open government have led to broader adoption of geospatial tools including mapping platforms to access, use, and analyze open data. These advancements open channels for coproduction in the form of sharing information, change notifications, opinions, or requests to government, based on citizen observation and local knowledge. Though current government initiatives have substantial potentials for coproduction, the practical adoption and implementation of such practices vary reflecting the purposes, contexts, and motivations of those involved. This paper aims to understand how local governments are following different approaches to coproduce information with citizens and what motivates local governments in this process. We report findings based on interviews with 11 cities from the USA and Canada, which reveal four main approaches: the collection of new data, observation of changes, collection of opinions, and observation of preferences involving both explicit and implicit processes. Although these four approaches result from interactions between citizens and government, our findings also indicate a key role to be played by technology and partner organizations.

During the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, around the world, evidence is mounting as to the unenveness of impacts across communities. There are disproportionately more impacts on people who are elderly, economically marginalized, immunologically compromised, and members of racialized and equity-seeking communities. As part of the COVID-19 response, virus transmission mitigation efforts including the use of new technology tools like contract tracing apps are being explored. There are significant implications to the use of these tools, including how they impact different community members and exacerbate digital divide, exclusion, and surveillance issues. This article brings forward a citizen participation framework that is instructive for decision-makers charged with pandemic-driven technology adoption.

With the recent rise of open government and open data initiatives, governments are increasingly adopting new approaches of citizen participation to support a more democratic, transparent, and inclusive government system. Among other forms of citizen participation, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is one approach to connecting citizens and government. Accepting VGI as a way to update government data or collect near-real-time information from citizens can create a partner-like relationship where citizens voluntarily contribute time and effort to support government actions. However, as a relatively new approach to citizen participation and data collection, VGI requires evaluation from the perspective of governments. This research investigates the challenges and opportunities that governments have found through the implementation of VGI projects. Results are drawn from interviews conducted with 19 government organizations, revealing organizational and technical challenges that limit the adoption of VGI. Organizational challenges are associated with government mindset, implementation, and project management, while technical challenges involve development of the system and quality of data. Given these challenges, we derive recommendations within the phases of project initiation, implementation, and expansion that can foster VGI adoption in government.

Governments around the world are developing smart city projects, with the aim to realize diverse goals of increased efficiency, sustainability, citizen engagement, and improved delivery of services. The processes through which these projects are conceptualized vary dramatically, with potential implications for how citizens are involved or engaged. This research examines the 20 finalists in the Canadian Smart Cities Challenge, a Canadian federal government contest held from 2017 to 2019 to disburse funding in support of smart city projects. We analyzed each of the finalist proposals, coding all instances of citizen engagement used to develop the proposal. A significant majority of the proposals used traditional types of citizen engagement, notably citizen meetings, round tables, and workshops, to develop their smart city plans. We also noted the use of transactional forms of citizen engagement, such as apps, and the use of social media. Despite the general rhetoric of innovation in the development of smart cities, this research finds that citizens are most commonly engaged in traditional ways. This research provides cues for governments that are developing smart city projects, placing an emphasis on the importance of the process of smart city development, and not simply the product.

In the current push for smart city programs around the world, there is a significant focus on enabling transactions between citizen and government. Though traditionally there have always been transactional elements between government and citizen, for example payment of taxes in exchange for services, or voting in exchange for representation, the rise of modern smartphone and smart city technologies have further enabled micro-transactions between citizen, government, and information broker. We conceptualize how the modern smart city, as both envisaged and enacted, incorporates the citizen not necessarily as a whole actor, but as a series of micro-transactions encoded on the real-time landscape of the city. This transactional citizen becomes counted by smart city sensors and integrated into smart city decision-making through the use of certain preferred platforms. To approach this shift from traditional forms of citizen/city interaction towards micro-transactions, we conceptualize four broad modes of transaction; type (intentional contribution), tweet (intermediated by third party), tap (convened or requested transaction), and pass (ambient transaction based on movement). These four modes are used to frame critical questions of how citizens interact with government in the emerging age of the smart city, and how these interactions impact the relationship between citizen and government, introducing new avenues for private sector influence.

Climate change is an evolving business reality influencing the sustainability of ski tourism worldwide. A new integrated model of the co-evolution of supply (27 ski areas) and demand-side (skier behaviour) climate change adaptation in the ski tourism market of Ontario, Canada is presented. Ski area operations are modeled under a high-emission 2050s scenario, with skier responses to altered operations informed by a survey of 2429 skiers. These market adaptive dynamics reveal new insights into differential climate risk, capturing patterns not apparent when considering only operational conditions of ski resorts. A decoupling of ski season length and skier visitation was found at four ski areas, where, despite average season length losses, visitation increased as a result of reduced competition. Simulated skier visit losses were smaller than reductions in season length, contributing to an increase in crowding. Growing the market of skiers was also identified as a critical adaptation strategy that could offset skier visit losses from shortened seasons. Climate change challenges the future sustainability of ski areas in this market in several ways: profitability of ski areas with substantially shorter seasons, increased snowmaking costs, crowding impacts on visitor experience, and potential overtourism at the few most climate resilient destinations.

Open source mapping includes both geospatial software and geospatial data that are provided free of charge, controlled by a licensing framework that permits users to edit, adapt, reuse, and potentially even commercialize components of the software or data for their own purposes. Open source mapping is classified in two ways: open technologies and software, and open data, including crowdsourced open geographic datasets, such as OpenStreetMap. Within each of these classifications, the nature of open, compared to proprietary software and data is explored, with particular focus on the benefits of open provision, as well as challenges and issues that constrain the adoption and/or growth of open projects. Open software and open data stand as important counterpoints to proprietary technologies and data, broadening access, facilitating adaptive reuse and sharing of data and technology, as well as building a global community of use and practice.

The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadienVolume 64, Issue 3 p. 340-343 Introduction Introduction to the special section: Smart citizens creating smart cities: Locating citizen participation in the smart city Rina Ghose, Corresponding Author Rina Ghose Guest editors rghose@uwm.edu Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Correspondence to/Adresse de correspondance: Rina Ghose, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Email/Courriel: rghose@uwm.eduSearch for more papers by this authorPeter A. Johnson, Peter A. Johnson Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of WaterlooSearch for more papers by this author Rina Ghose, Corresponding Author Rina Ghose Guest editors rghose@uwm.edu Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Correspondence to/Adresse de correspondance: Rina Ghose, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Email/Courriel: rghose@uwm.eduSearch for more papers by this authorPeter A. Johnson, Peter A. Johnson Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of WaterlooSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 September 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12644Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume64, Issue3Special Section: Smart citizens creating smart cities: Locating citizen participation in the smart cityFall / automne 2020Pages 340-343 RelatedInformation

The spatial representation of a city is typically formed by top‐down jurisdictional boundaries. A parallel approach would be to consider representing a city based on platial characteristics, that is, a bottom‐up landscape created through individual and collectively derived representations. This study contributes to this discourse through the exploratory examination of the ecology notions of home range and habitat applied to humans in an urban context. Using spatial data collected through a WebGIS platform, we employ a spatial definition of sense of place and social capital to understand the platial nature of the city and, simultaneously, defining home range and habitat as platial notions. We found spatial variability among individual home range and habitat and the difficulty of traditional administrative boundaries to represent these areas. This research defines and presents home range and habitat to partially describe the emergent nature of platial theory and explores their operationalization at the urban level.

Broad academic interest in measuring social relationships within an urban context has grown over recent decades. Significant research attention is focused on where social synergies occur in urban areas, yet the nature and role of urban spatial structure within social interactions is rarely considered. Drawing on existing classifications of social capital (i.e., bonding and bridging), this exploratory research examines their distribution and characterization using spatial data collected through a WebGIS platform. We (1) assess the spatial relationship between bridging and bonding social capital, and (2) analyze the degree of bonding and bridging social capital based on the underlying structure of the urban context, participant socio-demographic characteristics, and local administrative boundaries. Findings from this research show that the degree of both bonding and bridging social capital is shaped by individual socio-demographic characteristics and administrative boundaries (i.e., parishes), while amenity type and location are not significant in the characterization of bonding and bridging social capital. This research presents a new approach to the spatial study of social concepts, mobilizing spatial and individual factors that influence the degrees of bonding and bridging social capital.