The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change

Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected

Expanded urban media: from discretized social collages to corrugated social brain

Big data, the mobile Internet, social media and the Internet of things (IOT) generate more information than ever but the aggregation of social intelligence remains far from realising it’s potential. Two exemplary works, mediated_moments and plasma_flow, exhibited at Beijing’s China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts in 2012 model the scalable potential of urban media to weave itself into the city’s social fabric, mapping and visualizing individuals’ thinking/intelligence onto a mixed-reality urban canvas

Beyond First/Last Mile Active Transportation - BikeShare@UH

Bike sharing is a new green transportation solution that has been developed and adopted at various cities around the world. In this paper, we present the process and results of the design and prototypes that a group of undergraduate students developed for a BikeShare@UH program during Summer 2017. After presenting the detailed results of four project teams focusing on customer discovery, bike share station (BSS) location identification, cloud-based mobile computing platform for user engagement and bike share program operation and management, smart lock, and alternative energy source based on PV panel. With the phase one implementation at the University planned in Spring 2018, we anticipate gathering real time data and feedback to improve the system.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Sustainable bike-sharing systems: characteristics and commonalities across cases in urban China

Bicycles are a desirable form of transportation for many reasons, including the fact that taking a bicycle is environmentally-friendly, economically cost-effective, a way to keep fit and healthy and, on occasions, an enjoyable social activity. This paper explores the characteristics and commonalities between particular bike-sharing systems in urban areas, with a view to deriving influences on the sustainability of such systems. The empirical study is China and the paper analyses bike-sharing systems in five Chinese cities. China is suffering from the severe negative consequences of high private vehicle usage in large and densely populated cities. Nevertheless a long history of bicycle usage in the country provides great potential for such a green form of travel to be part of public and private transportation. The findings show that bike-sharing systems have varying degrees of success. The configurations which seem the most sustainable consider and integrate elements relating to transport planning, system design and choice of business model. Key conclusions are that those responsible for developing policy and practices in relation to bike-sharing systems need to understand the diverse aspects of value for the stakeholders wishing to engage with such a system. Public bicycle sharing, as a Product Service System, needs to be carefully developed to appreciate the quality and timely interplay between the physical design of the system and the provision of services being offered. Keywords Bike-sharing system; Sustainable development; Sustainability; China; Case studie

Service-Learning Times : semester 2 & summer term, 2017/18

Service-Learning (S-L) is an experiential learning approach that empowers students to apply academic knowledge in meaningful community service with reflection. In particular, the Service-Learning and Research Scheme (SLRS) seeks to build research elements into the S-L opportunities, which provide students with diverse and insightful service experiences to enhance their personal growth, intellectual advancement and career readiness while bringing substantial benefits to the collaborating partners. This booklet highlights popular S-L courses. Students wishing to experience the best of S-L should plan ahead and act quickly while places are available.https://commons.ln.edu.hk/sl_times/1001/thumbnail.jp

Emerging platform urbanism in China: reconfigurations of data, citizenship and materialities

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.In this article, we argue for an extension of current debates on smart urbanism in China by focusing on the emergence of urban platforms as a key way in which Chinese cities are developing into digitally-enhanced and governed urban areas. China has undergone multiple rounds of thematic urban development, culminating in a recent policy focus on the smart city and on digitally-enhanced urbanism. We argue that this has now evolved, and outline the rapidly emerging phenomenon of platform urbanism, which we conceptualise as not only confined to the policy sphere, but as stretching across the policy-governance-corporate nexus, the market, and urban consumption practices and broader culture. We do so by focusing on key themes emerging in contemporary platform-based digital urban development in China: a.) the rapidly developing geography of urban platforms; b.) a swiftly expanding mass of data and its implications for state-private sector power geometries; c.) domestic urban policy and practice mobilities, and consequences for the circulation of digital urban platforms between cities and across national boundaries; d.) implications for a reconfiguration of urban citizenship; e.) new configurations of urban materialities in the digital platform era. We conclude with brief reflections on data-led urbanism in contemporary China.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC