The digital skin of cities: urban theory and research in the age of the sensored and metered city, ubiquitous computing and big data

A ‘digital skin’ of the city is coming into being. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. The urban world is becoming a platform for generating data on the workings of human society, human interactions with the physical environment and manifold economic, political and social processes. The advent of the digital skin opens up many questions for urban theory and research, and many new issues for public and urban policy, which are explored in this article

The Digital Skin of Cities: Urban Theory and Research in the Age of the Sensored and Metered City, Ubiquitous Computing, and Big Data

Information technologies are now being developed that transform the physical environment, and the human interactions within it, into a "digital skin" of the city. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. In concert with ubiquitous computing, and the increasing use of electronically-mediated interactions in general, the physical world is becoming a platform for generating much new data on the workings of human society, its interactions with the physical environment, and manifold processes in economics, politics, and social interactions. The city is a subject of this revolution, in the sense that the technologies are predicted to make it possible to manage the physical city in ways not previously possible, but also to make possible major changes in the political and social interactions of people within cities, and between citizens and government. The city is also an objective basis for the revolution, in the sense that it is the sensored and metered platform that can generate unprecedented "big data" for many new types of uses. This revolution opens up many questions for urban theory and research, and many new issues for public and urban policy, which are explored in this paper

Hypercities Captures a Revolution

The ubiquitous presence of “smart” phones, mobile Internet-connected devices, and rapidly evolving social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, is changing the nature of political activism. Recent uprisings like the 2011 revolt in Tunisia have been popularly anointed as “Twitter Revolutions.” Critical Planning sat down with Technologist Yoh Kawano and Humanities Professor Todd Presner, both from the University of California’s Center for Digital Humanities and creators of Hypercities, a digital research and education platform, as well as Urban Planning PhD student John Scott-Railton, founder of The Voices Feeds, to discuss their respective work digitally chronicling the social revolutions in Egypt and Libya. The interviews shed light on a relatively new area of research among social scientists, and reveal how emerging technologies are impacting the relationship between people and the state.