Trends in Smart City Development

This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems

NINGBO: A REGIONAL CITY LEAPFROG INTO HI-TECH DEVELOPMENT

The dynamic development in Ningbo illustrates local changes that have their basis in government support and resources from all levels of government. The rapid development arises from a combination of excellent infrastructure, a strong private entrepreneurship and strong foreign direct Investment (FDI) to exploit the geographical location which will be further enhanced when the bridge, across Hangzhou Bay to Shanghai, is completed by 2008.Ningbo, a famous port city in China, reached in 2000 a population of six million. It is situated 100 kilometres from Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, and 150 kilometres across the water from Shanghai. In terms of geo-economics Ningbo is an integral part of the dynamic Yangtze Delta region; but Ningbo is also trying to develop its own niche based on its comparative advantage. This is an important feature of China’s regional development model. Ningbo is the native place of Ningbo Bird, the forerunner in China’s, as well as a strong contender in the global, mobile handset industry. Ningbo has traditionally been a location for car component industries with early development of spark plugs and car wheels. The Geely car company has used Ningbo for its national expansion The Ningbo car components industry is expanding fuelled by support from the mould industry and a number of private supplier entrepreneurs. There are three major moulding industry centres in China. The moulding industry in Ningbo now employs about 100,000 workers. Ningbo does not want to remain only in knowledge application but in knowledge creation too. To this end Ningbo has four national-scale development zones, one hi-tech zone and 10 provincial and municipal level development zones which cater to both shipping and trade sectors; it is widely using incubators to stimulate new technologies. The Ningbo Hi-Tech Park is an important hi-tech zone in the region. jointly developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ningbo Municipal Government, it was opened in July 1999. In March 2004, the Chinese Ministry of Education approved the establishment of Ningbo-Nottingham China's first Sino-foreign university. The new university will be founded jointly by the University of Nottingham of Britain and the Zhejiang Wanli University in Ningbo with an investment of RMB600 million.Regional innovation system; local universities; industrial parks; incubators; clusters; industrial zones

Working with the homeless: The case of a non-profit organisation in Shanghai

This article addresses a two-pronged objective, namely to bring to the fore a much neglected social issue of homelessness, and to explore the dynamics of state-society relations in contemporary China, through a case study of a non-profit organisation (NPO) working with the homeless in Shanghai. It shows that the largely invisible homelessness in Chinese cities was substantially due to exclusionary institutions, such as the combined household registration and 'detention and deportation' systems. Official policy has become much more supportive since 2003 when the latter was replaced with government-run shelters, but we argue that the NPO case demonstrates the potential for enhanced longer-term support and enabling active citizenship for homeless people. By analysing the ways in which the NPO offers services through collaboration and partnership with the public (and private) actors, we also argue that the transformations in postreform China and the changes within the state and civil society have significantly blurred their boundaries, rendering state-society relations much more complex, dynamic, fluid and mutually embedded

Road-safety management in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

This study examined road-safety management in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries). The main topics reviewed were recent crash statistics, key governmental agencies in charge of road safety, road-safety programs, influential organizations outside of the government, key research institutes, and major barriers to improvement. The main findings are as follows: (1) Each BRIC country has governmental organizations with responsibilities for road safety. However, none of these countries has a single lead governmental unit responsible for national road safety. (2) The Russian Federation has a strategic road-safety plan, including a specific target for reduction of road fatalities. The strategic safety plan of China is limited to certain types of roads, and it aims to reduce fatality rates per vehicle. In Brazil and India, there is not yet any road-safety plan or road-safety targets. (3) There are several non-governmental organizations involved in road-safety work in Brazil, the Russian Federation, and India, but not in China. (4) Road-safety research is conducted in each of the four countries. (5) All four countries have recently introduced several new road-safety interventions. However, the introduced interventions are not based on a systems approach that would involve comprehensive measures supporting each other, or they are not applied uniformly throughout the country.The University of Michigan Sustainable Worldwide Transportationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89427/1/102786.pd

CHOICE Internal Report I-2, Chinese Regional and Local Funding Bodies for Scientific and Technical Research

In this report it is shown that to understand the structure of the Chinese local government offices funding S&T research it is necessary to be aware of where they are located in the hierarchy of Chinese administrative divisions. The activities of a sample of Chinese local government offices funding S&T research are reviewed according to the type of administrative division to which they belong starting with the most important divisions and progressing down the hierarchy. Conclusions are presented followed by recommendations on how an EU organisation could explore the potential for collaborative ICT R&D&I with a Chinese regional or local funding body

Regional Data Archiving and Management for Northeast Illinois

This project studies the feasibility and implementation options for establishing a regional data archiving system to help monitor and manage traffic operations and planning for the northeastern Illinois region. It aims to provide a clear guidance to the regional transportation agencies, from both technical and business perspectives, about building such a comprehensive transportation information system. Several implementation alternatives are identified and analyzed. This research is carried out in three phases. In the first phase, existing documents related to ITS deployments in the broader Chicago area are summarized, and a thorough review is conducted of similar systems across the country. Various stakeholders are interviewed to collect information on all data elements that they store, including the format, system, and granularity. Their perception of a data archive system, such as potential benefits and costs, is also surveyed. In the second phase, a conceptual design of the database is developed. This conceptual design includes system architecture, functional modules, user interfaces, and examples of usage. In the last phase, the possible business models for the archive system to sustain itself are reviewed. We estimate initial capital and recurring operational/maintenance costs for the system based on realistic information on the hardware, software, labor, and resource requirements. We also identify possible revenue opportunities. A few implementation options for the archive system are summarized in this report; namely: 1. System hosted by a partnering agency 2. System contracted to a university 3. System contracted to a national laboratory 4. System outsourced to a service provider The costs, advantages and disadvantages for each of these recommended options are also provided.ICT-R27-22published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Local e-Government in the Netherlands: from ambitious policy goals to harsh reality

The Netherlands took up e-Government development relatively early and was considered to be one of the leading nations in e-Government developments. In recent years, it has slipped back in the various international benchmarks, and also other signs show that the country no longer is at the front of e-Service development. This paper discusses possible causes for the decline of Dutch e-Service delivery development. Important factors in the explanation can be found in the structure of the Dutch public sector which can be characterized as fairly decentralized. The central government sets ambitious policy goals, but lacks the means to have them realized on the local level which is the primary level at which public service delivery takes place. The municipalities on the other hand are incapacitated by relatively small scale, the large number of services they provide and the lack of real incentives to move service delivery online. As a result, e-Service development on the local level is inefficient and progresses relatively slow. There are signs though that things are changing: the central government takes on a more active stance, and local authorities join forces to develop services together.e-Government, e-Government policy, electronic service delivery, public service delivery maturity, the Netherlands

Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Jails: Recommendations for Local Practice

People of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system. One in three African American men born today will be incarcerated in his lifetime. In some cities, African Americans are ten times more likely to be arrested when stopped by police. With the national debate national focused on race, crime, and punishment, criminal justice experts are examining how to reduce racial disparities in our prisons and jails, which often serve as initial entry points for those who become entangled in the criminal justice system.This report, which relies on input from 25 criminal justice leaders, pinpoints the drivers of racial disparities in our jails, lays out common sense reforms to reduce this disparity, including increasing public defense representation for misdemeanor offenses, encouraging prosecutors to prioritize serious and violent offenses, limiting the use of pretrial detention, and requiring training to reduce racial bias for all those involved in running our justice system

Boundaries and Policing: Space, Jurisdictions, and Roles in the Collection of Official Crime Data

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a law enforcement statistical system open to unreported information due to its voluntary nature. As such, there need to be a valid and accepted means to estimate official reports of crime for those different levels of geography where reporting may be incomplete. Current methods of imputing and modeling UCR data, which have not been updated since the 1960s, are based upon conceptualizations of law enforcement agencies that may no longer be valid. These older models do not appropriately represent the law enforcement assessment of space and place and its effects on discretionary recording behavior. The number of specialized agencies that share jurisdiction and population with primary law enforcement agencies has increased since early data modeling techniques were developed around the 1960s. This study explores the connection between the policing and the collection of crime data to advance our understanding of how differences among types of law enforcement may impact the discretionary decision to record data. To explore this topic, I have divided this study into three papers touching on differing dimensions of place, scale, and uncertainty connected to the recording of law enforcement data. The data for these papers includes national UCR Program data, as well as calls for service and recorded incident data from two law enforcement agencies in the mid-South—Knoxville Police Department and the University of Tennessee Police Department. Firstly, this research explores the influence of agency attributes to assess their possible impact on the treatment of missing data. The coefficient of variation (CV) is used to measure the internal variation of reported crime within various groups of agencies. The average CVs calculated with and without specialized agencies are compared using a Jackknifing technique to test whether the presence of specialized agencies increases the internal variation within the group or not. The comparison demonstrates that eliminating specialized agencies from the strata has a statistically significant effect on reducing internal variation for property crimes. For violent offenses, however, the results are more modest. While the average CV for violent crime does decrease with the elimination of specialized agencies, the improvements are not statistically significant. The results from this research point to a greater need to address the changing circumstances to incorporate the diversity of law enforcement agency type. Secondly, although there is an interest by researchers to use calls for service (CFS) as a useful proxy for recorded incident information by law enforcement as more of this type of data is made available in open data initiatives, the assumption that CFS could serve as a proxy for incident information in spatial analysis is not supported by the evidence. Instead, there is some indication that law enforcement activities are mediated by the agency’s goals for its data, such as intelligence-led policing or fulfillment of Clery Act reporting, thus affecting the recording of incident information. Using data from two different types of law enforcement agency within the same community, CFS and incident reports for property crimes in April 2014 were tested for spatial association using both the Cross-K function and the Co-location Quotient. Findings from this study show there is a modest amount of detectable clustering of CFS for the agency that fits a model of traditional municipal law enforcement. However, the law enforcement agencies serving a large university campus did not show any detectable spatial association for these events. The findings suggest that in the movement towards using open data researchers will need to take greater care in the selection of data to understand if underlying spatial assumptions about the data can be supported. Thirdly, an increasing quantity of data is currently being made available by law enforcement agencies, but frequently that data is not a consistent level of areal aggregation and scale. Factors such as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) and the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem (UGCoP) make rectifying differing scales problematic. Central to this problem are the dynamics of recording crime data and whether law enforcement activity—specifically the concept of the patrol officer in a boundary role—is a key influence that should be accounted for in crime data models. With data from a midsized, southern municipal police department, two dasymetric allocation techniques using street networks and street networks weighted by calls for service are used to test potential improvements on the scale and aggregation problem through the introduction of law enforcement activity into allocation models for recorded crime data. Results demonstrate that the introduction of law enforcement activity—especially officer-initiated activity—improves the overall fit of the allocation of recorded crime into smaller subjurisdictional units. In addition, there is modest evidence to advocate for the use of law enforcement-generated subjurisdictional units (such as a precinct or beat) as opposed to population-based Census Tracts. These findings suggest that the production of crime statistics is subject to influences originating from law enforcement agency policy and the recording behavior of its officers. The findings of the three studies inform important discussions in the geographic community on the heterogeneous nature of law enforcement. More explicitly, combining the conclusions of these three papers contributes to an evolving understanding of the representations of place by geographic information science (GISc) and criminology, and the construction of place through the roles and behaviors of individuals, and the increasing use of “Big Geodata”. Future research with data collected from official police activities should consider the degree of uncertainty introduced by the nature of the activities themselves — especially considering the growing use, influence and reliance on georeferenced data produced by individuals not particularly informed about the nuances of geography