Making big data work: smart, sustainable, and safe cities

The goal of the present thematic series is to showcase some of the most relevant contributions submitted to the ‘Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge 2014’ and to provide a discussion venue about recent advances in the appplication of mobile phone and social media data to the study of individual and collective behaviors. Particular attention is devoted to data-driven studies aimed at understanding city dynamics. These studies include: modeling individual and collective traffic patterns and automatically identifying areas with traffic congestion, creating high-resolution population estimates for Milan inhabitants, clustering urban dynamics of migrants and visitors traveling to a city for business or tourism, and investigating the relationship between urban communication and urban happiness

The Relevance of Amenities and Agglomeration for Dutch Housing Prices

Dutch cities which combine a favourable location in terms of distance to work with a variety of urban amenities appear to be the most attractive locations for people to live. Relatively safe cities, offering a variety of history and culture events, as well as good restaurants have significantly higher housing prices. In addition, successful cities are places where people can optimize their job prospects, not necessarily only as a result of jobs in these cities, but also because of access to jobs in other Dutch cities.urban amenities, population growth, housing prices

The Relevance of Amenities and Agglomeration for Dutch Housing Prices

In this paper we have combined concepts from the field of urban economics with views from the area of geographic economics (the New Economic Geography). This approach enabled us to depict both the significance of the characteristics of the city itself and that of its location. Cities which combine a favourable location in terms of distance to work with a variety of urban amenities appear to be the most attractive locations for people to live. These are relatively safe cities, offering a variety of history and culture events, as well as good restaurants. In addition, successful cities are places where people can optimize their career prospects, not necessarily – as often assumed – as a result of business districts in these cities, but access to jobs from these cities.

Universal Representation

In an era in which there is little good news for immigrant communities and even holding the line has become an ambitious goal, one progressive project has continued to gain steam: the movement to provide universal representation for noncitizens in removal proceedings. This effort, initially born out of a pilot project in New York City, has generated a host of replication projects throughout the nation and holds the promise of even broader expansion. But as it grows, this effort must confront challenges from within: the sort-of supporters who want to limit this representation system’s coverage in a number of ways, some of which may not merely change the scope of the program, but the core of the project itself

Study Group on Immigrant Representation: The First Decade

All of us here have a common goal: ensuring adequate legal representation of the immigrant poor. A courtroom has multiple players with different roles, but all would agree that adequate legal representation of the parties is essential to the fair and effective administration of justice. Deficient representation frustrates the work of courts and ill serves litigants. All too often, and throughout the country, courts that address immigration matters must contend with such a breakdown in legal representation, a crisis of massive proportions with severe, tragic costs to immigrants and their families. For our nation’s immigrants, the urgent need for competent counsel in deportation proceedings has never been more critical. This nation’s immigrant representation problem is twofold: (1) there is a profound lack of representation, indicated by the fact that 63 percent of noncitizens in deportation proceedings do not have representation nationwide;1 and (2) in far too many deportation cases, the quality of counsel is substandard.2 Immigrants are easy prey for unscrupulous lawyers, who gouge their clients out of scarce resources and provide shoddy legal services

Agenda 2030: Preventing Violence Against Children and the Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -- ratified by world leaders in September -- provide a blueprint for action to end poverty, protect the environment, and build a safer and more just world through the year 2030. The SDGs are unprecedented for inherently linking the prevention of violence against children to a broad human development agenda in industrialized and developing countries alike. In particular, they underscore the intersections between eradicating violence against children -- explicitly called for under Target 16.2 and linked to many other related targets -- and sustainable development across generations

Creating Safe and Inclusive Cities that Leave No One Behind

Half of humanity now lives in urban areas, and a growing number of cities are leading the way in generating global GDP. However, cities have increasingly become key loci of violence over the last 50 years, which particularly affects the most marginalised. Creating safe cities which adhere to the principles of the New Urban Agenda will require fostering urban safety through inclusive policies and practices that secure, but do not securitise, urban spaces. This involves using innovative measures to accurately understand people’s vulnerabilities, supporting evidence-gathering from small and medium-sized towns alongside larger cities, and analysing safe and resilient urban spaces alongside more fragile ones.UK Department for International Developmen

A Happiness Approach to Cost-Benefit Analysis

Subjective well-being (SWB) surveys ask respondents to quantify their overall or momentary happiness or life-satisfaction, or pose similar questions about other aspects of respondents\u27 mental states. A large empirical literature in economics and psychology has grown up around such surveys. Increasingly, too, scholars have advanced the normative proposal that SWB surveys be used for policymaking—for example, by using survey results to calculate monetary equivalents for nonmarket goods (to be incorporated in cost-benefit analysis), or to calculate gross national happiness. This Article skeptically evaluates the policy role of SWB data. It is critical to distinguish between (1) using SWB surveys as evidence of preference utility versus (2) using them as evidence of experience utility. Preference utility is a measure of the extent to which someone has realized her preferences; experience utility, a measure of the quality of someone\u27s mental states. The two are quite different because individuals can have preferences regarding non-mental occurrences. Having drawn this distinction, the Article then argues, first, that SWB surveys are poor evidence of preference utility—given problems of preference and scale heterogeneity, as well as other difficulties. Stated-preference surveys are a much better survey format for eliciting preference utility. Second, in considering SWB surveys as an experience-utility measure, we should recognize that experientialism about well-being—the view that well-being is simply a matter of good experiences—is highly controversial. More plausibly, an experience-utility measure might be seen as an indicator of one aspect of well-being. However, even constructing this weak experience-utility measure is not straightforward—as the Article demonstrates by discussing Daniel Kahneman\u27s detailed proposal for such a metric

Okos, fenntartható és biztonságos városok = Smart sustainable and safe cities

Smart, sustainable and safe cities. But how can a traditional metropolis achieve this complex aim? What facts are go handed together with the sustainability and the safety expected by the townsmen? How could we improve our city better all by ourselves? What kinds of technological side has got a smart city’s construction and development? We could easily illustrate the answers several numbers from among the urban infrastructures. At the same time in our sight the urban traffic infrastructure in the city's fabric such as the vascular system which encompassed human bodies. The vehicular traffic in cities is almost look likes the flow of the blood in our body. Accordingly, we will point out the local transport system of the city only subjective way. The reason of the above applied method is that we would like to analyse the main qualities of the clever city transport subsystem

Okos, fenntartható és biztonságos városok = Smart sustainable and safe cities

Smart, sustainable and safe cities. But how can a traditional metropolis achieve this complex aim? What facts are go handed together with the sustainability and the safety expected by the townsmen? How could we improve our city better all by ourselves? What kinds of technological side has got a smart city’s construction and development? We could easily illustrate the answers several numbers from among the urban infrastructures. At the same time in our sight the urban traffic infrastructure in the city's fabric such as the vascular system which encompassed human bodies. The vehicular traffic in cities is almost look likes the flow of the blood in our body. Accordingly, we will point out the local transport system of the city only subjective way. The reason of the above applied method is that we would like to analyse the main qualities of the clever city transport subsystem