This article discusses the case of the Finnish city of Oulu which is designed and constructed as a prototype of an intelligent city equipped with ubiquitous computing technology. By analysing ethnographic materials, the authors explore how the strategies, i.e. the conceptions and goals of urban development by the designers and decisionmakers, meet the tactics (i.e. the everyday practices of the...

Noise in urban context is one of the main concern in terms of societal impact. In fact, sound environment is adressing issues at various levels: transmission of information, social relations, perception of comfort, and in the worst cases, health effects on city-dwellers. The paper will present the first steps of an academic research concerning measurement and perception of noise in urban contex...

In November 2004 California passed Proposition 63, a landmark piece of mental health and fiscal legislation. This initiative places a 1 percent tax on adjusted gross income over dollar 1 million, affecting about 30,000 taxpayers and raising dollar 1.8 billion (a 31 percent increase) in new revenues over the first three years to support county-operated mental health systems. Our analysis suggest...

This project examines impromptu gathering of 20-30 year old urban dwellers. We examine current products in the space, and look to Voice User Interfaces to provide rich interaction in the mobile context. We summarize data from a diary study and focus groups into a set of design principles for this product space. Finally, we propose our design for Gather, a system that meets the communication and...

The city has proved to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: how will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across US urban area...

Over half of the world's population lives in cities and United Nations (UN) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. Yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (HPAM), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. We make a case for creating a global database on citie...

U rban populations have skyrocketed globally and today represent more than half of the world’s population. In some parts of the developing world, this growth has more-than-proportionately involved rural migration to informal settlements in and around cities, known more commonly as “slums”— densely populated urban areas characterized by poor-quality housing, a lack of adequate living space and p...

We describe a novel methodology that examines perceptions of urban space, and present a study using this methodology that explores people’s perceptions of their neighbourhood. Previous studies of spatial cues have involved a variety of tasks such as pointing and sketching to externalise participants’ internal spatial maps. Our methodology extends these approaches by introducing mobile technolog...

This paper discusses the influences on food and farming of an increasingly urbanized world and a declining ratio of food producers to food consumers. Urbanization has been underpinned by the rapid growth in the world economy and in the proportion of gross world product and of workers in industrial and service enterprises. Globally, agriculture has met the demands from this rapidly growing urban...

Migration to urban areas is a regular phenomenon but climate induced displacement forced to migrate to cities over the recent years is a matter of concern. Increased frequency and severity of natural disasters by climate change over the past recent years are not only displacing people physically but also exposing to enhanced poverty by threatening their livelihoods temporarily and permanently. ...