In recent years, the smartphone apps that allow you to request a ride, get food delivered, or even find a place to stay at the push of a button have become household names. But, what about an app to fill the pothole on your street, or monitor the flooding risks of local streams, or raise funds to spruce up your local park? This talk will present ideas from a manuscript under preparation for a book telling the story of five civic urban platforms that have matured into new urban infrastructures in the United States in the past decade: municipal 311, city data portals, civic crowdfunding, open stormwater, and the use of crowdsourcing to analyze historical racial exclusion. Although these platforms may use similar technical ingredients as smart cities – such as data, algorithms, and interfaces – none aim at creating the automated, optimized city animating the smart city dream. Instead, they pursue a different, more digitally connected city, where technology is fostering new forms of connection, resilience, and civic vitality. The book’s original case studies are developed through interviews with the technologists and public servants who created them, drawing out both the unique stories of each but also identifying generalizable lessons to inspire the next generation of urban technology. The argument of the book is that digital technology isn’t only for building a utopian automated city, but instead a new type of city that fosters new forms of connections between citizens, city government, and the places they share.

Robert Goodspeed, PhD, AICP, is an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of collaborative planning, urban analytics, and scenario planning theory and methods. He is the author of the book Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures, over 30 articles and book chapters, and an editor of four edited volumes on urban analytics and smart cities. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and currently serves as the board chair for Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM), a global society that organizes a leading biennial conference.

This event is in partnership with the Urban Tech Collective (UTC) housed at the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute. UTC convenes U-M faculty and students from various disciplines investigating the imaginaries, design, and use of digital technologies within urban everyday life. UTC investigates topics related to physical and digital spaces; mediated representations of urban space and urban communities; digital rights and inequalities; datafication; urban intelligences; and social change. The collective meets throughout the academic year to share research, methodologies, and best practices for the study of technology and urban life, to host speakers, and reimagine the role of urban technology scholarship, design, and policy in affecting more equitable, sustainable futures.

The DSI Research Colloquium Series is closed to DSI-affiliated faculty and students. If you have questions about joining this event, please contact Eric Mancini at [email protected].