11.522: UIS Research Seminar (Fall 2007) - Discussion notes
I would like to discuss planning strategies and information infrastructure that might facilitate 'community empowerment' and innovative community development strategies. Spatially detailed metropolitan data about land use, ownership, jobs, etc. is rapidly improving and more and more agencies and NGOs have, or want, in-house capacity to do their own neighborhood analyses. In recent years, a number of projects and research efforts have tried to assist community groups and local agencies in acquiring relevant planning data and improving their neighborhood planning and advocacy capacity. These trends have led to many 'indicator' efforts and a proliferation of 'data centers' whereby each organization tries to acquire and maintain a copy of all relevant data. At the scale of cities or even census tracks, it is practical to archive decennial datasets. However, at the scale of parcels, persons, building permits, bus stops, and the like, having a copy of everything is not practical. The more detailed and time-varying datasets are potentially far more useful for developing urban indicators and analyzing neighborhood change, but the traditional 'data center' approach for making decennial census data available is unlikely to be as 'empowering' as some have anticipated. I would like to discuss some of the strategies and institutional issues involved in empowering communities through better access to information.
To facilitate the discussion, I've identified 6 online readings. They are listed below. Item (1) is a 1996 article (in JAPA) by Sawicki and Flynn discussing early interest in urban indicators. Item (2) is an Urban Institute 'Opinion" written in 2004 concerning the development of neighborhood information systems written by two Urban Institute researchers who have organizaed and managed the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). describes the UMI initiative. Item (3) is a paper of mine from 1999 illustrating why community 'empowerment' necessiftated more capability to accumulate and use 'local knowledge.' Item (4) is the 2004 proposal for a Brookings-funded 'Urban Markets Initiative' project here at MIT that is prototyping particular approaches for codifying and using local knowledge to address the issues raised in Item 3. Item (5) is a chapter of Dr. Raj Singh's PhD dissertation on the use of web services architectures to support collaborative planning.
Given the short time available before our next class, skim through the first and last readings (1 and 5) and focus on #2 nd #3 which discuss building neighborhood information system capacity (#2) and some of the difficulties and options for utilizing official datasets at the local level. Then skim #4 - the proposal for the ongoing MIT 'middleware' project that addresses some of the issues raised in #4. Finally, review the questions listed below so that you can participate in their discussion at the seminar.
(1) Sawicki D. S. and P. Flynn (1996). Neighborhood Indicators, Journal of the American Planning Association, 62(2):165-183
(2)* Kingsley, G. Thomas, and Kathryn L.S. Pettit, "Neighborhood Information Systems: We Need a Broader Effort to Build Local Capacity," Urban Institute Opinion, Oct. 12, 2004, Permanent Link: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=900755
(3)* Ferreira J. (1999). "Information technologies that change relationships between low-income communities and the public and non-profit agencies that serve them", in Schon D. A., B. Sanyal and W. J. Mitchell (Eds.) . High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 163-189.
(4) The MIT/MAPC proposal that has been funded by the UMI program: "Intelligent Middleware for Understanding Neighborhood Markets"
(5) Chapter 1 of Raj Singh's PhD dissertation: Collaborative Urban Information Systems: A Web Services Approach
(a) In what way do the author's suggest that neighborhood information systems help to 'empower' local communities? Are data, indicators, and analyses developed for city planning and management purposes very different from what is desired/needed by community groups? Where does GIS fit in?
(b) How does the MIT/MAPC 'middleware' approach differ from the traditional way of building the types of decision support tools that UI proposes? What applications are most promising to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach? Are web services necessary to accumulate and share local knowledge?
(c) What 'middleware' system architecture is practical today? What skill set is needed by whom in order for it to deliver useful assistance to community groups? What partners make sense? What role can/should a regional planning organization (such as MAPC) play?
Discussion Slides:
(1) CUPUM07 talk (by Joe Ferreira and Raj Singh): "New Information Technologies for Community Development: Intelligent Middleware for Understanding Neighborhood Markets," Presented at Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management Conference (CUPUM), Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, July, 2007.
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