I was intrigued by the American Road Map that made the rounds on Facebook and Twitter last week, and wondered how hard it would be to make one for Alberta. Not too hard! Data from Open Street Map. GIS from QGIS and Mapbox. Full size map can be found on the Mapbox site.
[mapbox layers='mattdance.Alberta_Roads' api='' options='' lat='53.5472' lon='-113.55669999999999' z='8' width='700' height='600']
There is an emerging narrative that characterizes Twitter as a tool of public engagement that can augment more traditional means of consulting with the public (for instance, see here for Environment Canada's commitment to "...implementing more avenues to facilitate online connections with partners, stakeholders and interested members of the Canadian public") . While there is no doubt that there are many many people who use Twitter (it is reported that there are over 200 million active Twitter accounts) as a mean of conversing with their elected officials, it is important to remember that Twitter does not include all voices within our Canadian cities. This blog post is an attempt to understand who might, in fact, be Tweeting within Toronto in a effort to understand who might be Tweeting about Toronto. About this map
[mapbox layers='mattdance.toronto_tweets' api='' options='' lat='43.65969596299056' lon='-79.38002295227051' z='15' width='600' height='400']
Above are Twitter maps of Toronto that represents all of the geolocated tweets for Toronto in 2011, about 1.5% of the total Tweets (in other words, 98.5% of Tweets are not location enabled). The Twitter data were provided by Trendsmap through John Barratt (thank you!). A full sized version of the dynamic map can be found on the Map Box site.
This was a challenging data to work with as it is so large. I started in QGIS to understand how the data looked and to pair it down to just tweets within the GTA. I moved the data into Tile Mill by Map Box, and layered Open Street Map data to provide visual context for the tweets. The 'heat map' effect that I used is described here, as I was not able to make the QGIS heat map plugin work, for some reason (please let me know if you can help with this). I plan on learning how to build a PostGIS database on my computer so that I can do this.
The idea for the map and post came from these three beautiful and interactive twitter maps: (1) London, (2) New York and, (3) Melbourne.
Observations and analysis
A closer look at the map reveals very dense Twitter areas and areas that are very sparsly Tweeted. The most densely Tweeted area is bounded by Bloor Street to the North and Lake Ontario to the South, connected by Young Street. There is a greater density along the Lake, away from Young to the West. There are also a small number of ghost Tweets on the lake North of Toronto Island.
These boundaries are visible in the above image. There are also a couple of identifiable hot spots - the Eaton Center, Rogers Center (cut off in the above picture). The areas described by this Twitter Density also corresponds with the tourist and suburban destinations - the areas around Young - Bloor - and Front Street, including the sports stadiums, are not just neighbourhood destinations, but destinations for those interested in shopping or taking in the sights in Toronto.
In contrast, those areas that are strictly neighbourhoods, such as Hillsdale Avenue (running east from Young) do not offer that same density.
The above example shows a middle class neighbourhood within Toronto that does not have a large number of Tweets other than the cluster at the corner of Young Street and Eglington Avenue in the top left of the image. The Mt Pleasant Cemetery bounds the neighbourhood to the South.
In addition, poorer neighbourhoods also seem to have a dearth of tweets. The following image is of the Regent Park area between Dundas and Gerrard.
It is clear from the image that many people are Tweeting on Young Street. You can even see a hotspot in the Eaton's Center and at the south east corner of Young and Dundas. Further east, nothing. From the Regent Park Wikipedia page:
The average income for Regent Park residents is approximately half the average for other Torontonians. A majority of families in Regent Park are classified as low-income, with 68% of the population living below Statistics Canada's Low-Income Cut-Off Rate in one of its census tracts, and 76% in the other (compared to a Toronto-wide average of just over 20%).
Conclusions
I suspect that most of the Tweets that occur in Toronto are from those who live in the region, but who may be downtown for some shopping, to take in a game, or other recreation. I also suspect that a majority of those who live in Toronto are a small portion of the overall Tweets in the area between the Lake and Bloor, adjacent to Young.
As you move from this area, I suspect that a greater portion of Tweets are made by residents of those neighbourhoods, simply because fewer 'tourists' would travel to these neighbourhoods unless there was an attraction, such as shopping or food. Although I am only exploring those ~1.5% of tweets that are geolocated, I feel that these are the Twitter users who are most likely to engage with an Open311type of application, to use their smart phones as a means of communicating location details to their municipality. If this is the case, then those poor areas of the city, potentially the most disenfranchised, will become more so (look at Mark Graham's work mapping the digital divide in Francophone Africa).
For many reasons the Air Quality Egg represents a profound shift from the current regiem of regulator controlled Air Quality monitoring Specifically, the current model of AQ monitoring sees a regulator (government) define the AQ issue, the substances of concern, and the monitoring response to these top-down defined concerns. The AQEgg turns this model on its head by allowing, though citizen lead (though still early adopter) monitoring technology that is accessible to those who can afford a $185 sensor, or have the knowhow to build their own via 3D printers and electronic schematics. In other words, the model shift from top down to bottom up where a citizen, or group of citizens, can define where monitoring should occur. As detailed in this post, the current AQ monitoring network focuses on a regional level of air quality. For instance, there are three sensors in Edmonton that provide a regional overview of the air quality through a metric called the Air Quality Health Indicator. Southern and Western Ontario have a total of 15 stations (see map below) that provide air quality data for over 6 million people.
The AQ Egg provides three distinct advantages:
The one big advantage of regulator monitoring is the quality of the sensor, and thus the data where the measure of a sensor is the quality of the data it provides. As stated on the AQEgg wiki "...more work is really needed to make the low cost sensors sensitive to ambient pollutant concentrations." This can be seen in the sensitivity of the NO2 sensor as compared to actual ambient concentrations. In Vancouver, for instance (from the 2011 Lower Fraser Valley Air Quality Monitoring Report [PDF], pp. S-9) the annual average NO2 goal for Vancouver is 40 ug/m3 or less, with the one hour range being up to 122 ug/m3. The range of the NO2 sensor is 94 - 9400 ug/m3, less sensitive than the 'normal' ambient concentrations as detected by the regulator sensor.
Furthermore, the quality of the data is confounded by cold (an issue where I am from in Edmonton), and humidity. Regulator sensors heat or cool the air feed to a standard temperature and strip out any humidity to create a 'clean' sample.
My next post, hopefully coming soon, will examine some of the initial data generated by the AQEggs as compared to the regulator data.
My egg is now up and running! I was able to easily figure out the instructions for connecting the AQE to my computer and applying a software fix to the AQE. The Vimeos for the fix can be found here. There are three components to the AQE that I really like:
Open Sourced Air Quality Monitoring
The above schematic is but one example of how the AQE people endeavor to make the framework for the egg as open as possible. Granted, it is an elite person who could go out and build one from scratch, but having everything that goes into the egg available on-line means that individuals can carve off a little section of the project that they can personally improve, and make it better. Perhaps you are not a hardware person, then you can build the software, or perhaps you want to establish a AQE community in your city, or maybe you want to shell out you 185$ to simply monitor the air outside your home. Whatever fits your mood.
Data is available
Granted, this is similar to Cosm's open hard- and soft-ware approach, but it is worth noting based on how accessible the data is. As a novice data user, I appreciate that they support basic graph making within their platform, and provide tools to embed your graph into a blog post, Facebook, or on Twitter.
'Triggers' can also be created. A trigger is defines a set of criteria for the data to meet, and if those criterium are met, then a tweet is sent out via your account alerting you, and the world, to the pertinent information. From the image above, an alert will be sent out when the temperature is >-8C or <0C. A user friendly tool that alters you to user defined changes in the data stream.
The data is also accessible via JSON, XML and CSV. While I am not capable of creating a data feed through JSON into, for instance, Excel, the feeds are available for those who are. I will, though, access the CSV function and compare the AQE feed with Alberta Environments NO2 feed for the City Center monitoring site. Coordinates for the AQE, Feed ID, and other information are provided clear and obvious.
Dashboard or 'Console'
Finally, Cosm has provided a console interface to allow the user control over the data feeds that they follow, including API keys for each feed, and the ability to create apps. I have not yet explored the app feature to any extent, but I will report back when I do!
Finally, you can access and review the NO2, CO, Temperature and Humidity data that I am collecting from here.
Below is my first interactive map, published on the web! I used Map Box and Tile Mill technology to move from a CSV and Shape files to this map. The data came from data.edmonton.ca. Please explore and let me know what you think!
[mapbox layers='mattdance.Edmonton_Population_Density' api='' options='' lat='53.54079999999999' lon='-113.51039999999999' z='11' width='800' height='800']
I am trying to learn Map Box and Tile Mill so that I can produce interactive maps for the blog. An image below of a neightbourhood density vs. traffic density map of Edmonton.
As reported in the Edmonton Journal on 13 February 2013, Edmonton was under a week long air quality advisory due to elevated levels of particulate matter (PM), a constituant of smog. The smog was detected at two of the three AESRD stations in Edmonton - Edmonton East and Edmonton Central. From Alberta Health Services, here:
Precautionary air quality advisory lifted for city of Edmonton
February 13, 2013
EDMONTON– Alberta Health Services has lifted the precautionary air quality advisory issued February 6, 2013 for the city of Edmonton.
Monitoring indicates air quality in the city of Edmonton is no longer being impacted by the temporary air-inversion event.....
Information about the air quality in some areas of the Edmonton Zone is updated regularly on the Alberta Environment Air Quality Website:http://environment.alberta.ca/0977.html. Air quality information is also available by phone, toll-free, at 1-877-247-7333.
The reporting of this air quality event was thin in many respects. What causes smog in general, and what caused the smog in this specific event? How do we know the extent of the problem, and is there any way to identify the pollution sources that are contributing to the problem? I will attempt to answer these questions.
The USEPA defines smog as...
...a condition that develops when primary pollutants (oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds created from fossil fuel combustion) interact under the influence of sunlight to produce a mixture of hundreds of different and hazardous chemicals known as secondary pollutants. Smog is the brownish haze that pollutes our air, particularly over cities in the summertime.
As indicated by the USEPA, smog is more commonly found in the summertime. In Edmonton, for the week of 06 - 13 February, a health advisory was called as a result of vehicle and other emissions being trapped under a temperature inversion, where the temperatures aloft are warmer than those on the ground. In this instance, the temperature inversion acted as a cap, not allowing the pollution to dissipate by wind. The Edmonton Journal article also indicated that the smog was a result of vehicle emissions. How widespread is the 'problem' of vehicle emissions, and how to we track them?
The following map of Edmonton does NOT depict air pollution. Rather, it indicates where some of the sources of air pollution are, and where the monitoring takes place that tracks these pollutants.
The Map: The black diamonds indicate industrial emissions sources from the NPRI database found within Edmonton. The white circles are the Alberta Environment run air monitoring stations, and the colour layer indicates density of traffic from the City of Edmonton open data catalogue where I ran an IDW analysis to define a 'topography' of traffic flow - the blue is no or low traffic density, yellow moderate and red high (the highest volumes of traffic are over 100 000 vehicles per day, and the lowest less than 50). Rail lines are dashed. I do not indicate other emissions sources such as light or moderate industrial activity that would not report under the NPRI.
It is apparent from the map that there are many 'hotspots' of high vehicle flow, most notably on the Yellowhead, Whitemud and Henday. There are also some smaller pockets of high traffic flow in the downtown core, along 57th Street / Wayne Gretzky Drive, and Gateway BLVD. Environment's monitoring is located in the downtown, east Edmonton, and SW Edmonton. It is worth noting that the downtown monitoring station is on the top of a small building.
These regional monitors are great at pickup large are trends over time and are vital to the AQHI network, which is national in scope. There are three main issues with this AQ network: (1) it is limited in geographic area; (2) it is not at street level, and; (3) it is expensive to install and maintain.
So, we don't know the relative contributions of vehicle emissions vs other sources such as industrial or rail. We don't monitor or even really model in a public way vehicle emissions (The Clean Air Strategic Alliance, in 2007, released a ROVER report documenting vehicle emissions on Alberta roadways - the CASA link to the ROVER 2 report is broken, but I have a copy if you're interested), and so we cannot even speculate on the extent of smog pollution in Edmonton. This is a problem as the City of Edmonton becomes more urban, denser and bigger. How many cars can we add to the roadways, and how do we balance this with an appropriate amount of 'alternative' transportation options?
There is currently some debate in Edmonton regarding bike lanes, and the inconvenience that they will provide to drivers. In particular, Mayor Mandel was quoted as saying:
Not that they’re not a good idea, but it just seems someone behind your scenes out there has just decided we’re going to eliminate all vehicles and only have bikes.
In response, I wanted to look at the number of interactions that cars have with bike or pedestrian in Edmonton. The data.edmonton.ca portal had the appropriate data from 2010 - intersection collisions here, and midblock collisions here. I sorted the data for pedestrian and bicycle collisions with vehicles, and I included all data for bikes and pedestrians, regardless of who was deemed to be a fault. I loaded the CSV data into Cartographica, a lightweight Mac based desktop GIS, and used OpenStreetMap as the base layer for Edmonton. The results are below, captured as an image (I will work with someone more capable that me to check the data and to get it on line in an interactive format). Legend: red/yellow diamonds are intersection collisions, blue/blue diamonds are midblock collisions. The numer adjacent to each diamond represents an aggregate of pedestrian/bicycle interactions with motor vehicles. .
Some things to note:
Conclusions
There is a greater safety issue at intersections where advanced pedestrian and cyclist activated lights should be installed in conjunction with bike lanes. Furthermore, if the bike lanes are being considered for safety reasons, residential street speeds should be lowered from 50 km/hr to 30 km/hr. There is convincing data that cars travelling slower inflict less damage than tose travelling faster - see this WHO report [PDF].
Finally, if the City of Edmonton were serious here, they could conduct an interesting study to track accident rates with cyclists and pedestrians give the introduction of bike lanes, intersection controls and low residential speed limits.
Please skip to 4.0 Conclusion for the abridged version of this long post. 1.0 Introduction I wear a helmet when I bike, and cannot imagine cycling without one when either road riding, mountain biking or on a family ride. I am uncomfortable without a helmet and feel vulnerable to injury by cars and my own stupidity - I have fallen off my bike often enough to know that for me a helmet is probably a good idea. Furthermore, I am trying to instill this habit with my children; they always have a helmet on when they get onto any self propelled wheeled vehicle. To my mind, there is no downside to wearing a helmet as long as you cycle within your ability.
But, having said the above, I am not certain that mandatory helmet laws are effective in preventing head injuries. In fact, I wonder if the bicycle helmet debate distracts us from a harder discussion on road safety and risk. I think that it is easy to have a public debate about a fringe group of cyclists and how they should be safer, rather than focus on road safety which would include slower residential speed limits, impact road and urban design, and be more difficult to reach consensus. After all bike helmets save lives, right? I am not sure, and so I am looking to answer the following questions:
A. Do mandatory helmet laws prevent head injuries?
B. What are the consequences, intended or otherwise, of mandatory helmet laws?
C. Are there better ways to protect cyclists?
I am writing within context of Alberta, which has had a helmet law since May 2002 that applies to children under the age of 18. Furthermore, this is a first attempt at understanding a complex issue. Please help me understand you position, comment below!
Please note: I AM NOT ADVOCATING A BEHAVIOUR. I WEAR A HELMET, AND SO DO MY KIDS. YOU CHOOSE WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU!
2.0 Evidence Based Policy I don’t think that it is correct to assume that helmets save lives, just as I don’t believe that climate change is a hoax because it is −20C in Edmonton while I write this. Where there is a hypotheses related to policy, there should be a way of collecting data to test that hypotheses. In other words, good public policy is not made from individual cases, anecdote, or from a gut feeling, but rather should be made from a position of informed choice where all viable options and outcomes are examined through the lens of data analysis. The final policy choices may be made for political reasons, but at least these are informed decisions. Medicine is an example where evidence plays a big role in determining best practices. As discussed here, evidence based medicine (EBM) is the “…conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions…”.
Every time (I hope, but perhaps this is a pipe dream) you go to an emergency department, see a medical specialist, or have a procedure done, you rely on this process to get the best results and safest treatment (otherwise you see a naturopath). Evidence based decision processes do not have to be limited to medicine, we can expect the same rigor for public policy, in general, and within the helmet debate specifically. To that end, I plan on examining the evidence that addresses my questions.
3.0 What does the data say? Three types of data should be considered when assessing whether cyclists, by law, should be required to wear helmets - (1) bicycle / vehicle collisions and (1a) bicycle incidents that are comprised of falls or collisions with stationary objects or other bikes, and (3) emergency room visits related to bicycling accidents. These data should be looked at within an Albertan and international perspective. To give a relative risk, pedestrian data will also be examined. Caveat: I don’t have total numbers of cyclists and pedestrians - so their is some interpretation going on here based on totals numbers.
3.1 Bike, pedestrian and vehicle interaction in Alberta The following data are taken from Alberta Traffic Collision Statistics 2010 (found here [PDF]) , and represent the number of incidents for 2010.
| Road User | Killed (N) | Killed (%) | Injured (N) | Injured (%) | Total (N) | Total (%) |
| Drivers | 185 | 53.8 | 11012 | 60.3 | 11197 | 60.2 |
| Passangers | 65 | 18.9 | 4528 | 24.8 | 4593 | 24.7 |
| Pedestrians | 35 | 10.2 | 1129 | 6.2 | 1164 | 6.3 |
| Motorcyclists | 31 | 9.0 | 683 | 3.7 | 714 | 3.8 |
| Bicyclists | 6 | 1.7 | 467 | 2.5 | 467 | 2.5 |
| Other | 22 | 6.4 | 450 | 2.4 | 462 | 2.5 |
| Total | 344 | 100 | 18253 | 100 | 18597 | 100 |
These data were copied from Table 3.1 of the Alberta Traffic Collision Statistics, 2010
3.1.1 Observations I am surprised that more pedestrians were killed and injured than bicyclists in 2010. 1164 pedestrians (6.3% of the total) as compared to 467 bicyclists (or 2.5% of the total). These are interesting numbers, but not really relevant unless we know the total number of pedestrians in Alberta vs. bicyclists. Or even better, the total number of kilometers walked by pedestrians vs. the total number of kilometers cycled by bicyclist. In this latter case, we could then calculate injuries and deaths per kilometer travelled for each case. It would also be interesting to factor motorcycles into this mix. A side note. The raw numbers clearly indicate that about 2.5 times more pedestrians were killed than cyclists in 2010 and yet no one is suggesting that pedestrians wear helmets.
3.1.2 Other observations from the Traffic Collision 2010 report From the same report, Table 9.4 indicates that “Casualty rates per 10 000 population were highest for persons between the ages of 15 and 19”. The lowest rates were for those under 5 and over 55. 27.1% of bike accidents due to the cyclist disobeying a traffic signal, and 13.5% due to the cyclist failing to yield the right of way at an uncontrolled intersection.
From Table 9.3, 9.2 and 9.1 - most accidents occurred on weekdays between 3 − 7PM (rush hour), in June. From Section 8 of the report; Pedestrians faced the similar hazards, with most vehicle, pedestrian interactions occurring during rush hour, in October. It is interesting to note the language of the report points to the actions of the drivers being responsible for pedestrian injury (rather than pedestrians being responsible for their own injury) or death, versus the action of the bicyclist being responsible for their own injury or death.
3.2 Cycling rates and ER admittance The section will draw upon a PhD thesis, from the University of Alberta, written by Mohammad Karhaneh in 2011. Commentary and insight on this thesis was found here. . Karhaneh notes the following based on pre- and post-law observational studies completed in 2006:
In his dissertation, Karhaneh simply notes a decease in the number of people seen in the ER as a result of cycling injury. He does not create a ratio of cycling injury to the number or rate of cycling in the population (from cyclehelmets.org). In contrast to the decline in cycling, the rate of injury seems to have gone up after a mandatory helmet law was legislated. As cyclinghelmets.org notes:
“The number of children treated in emergency rooms for non-head injuries was an average of 1,762 per year in 2003-6 compared with 1,676 in 1999-2002, despite there having been a fall of 56% in children cycling over the period. For teenagers the average number of injuries rose from 870 to 1,101 per year while the amount of cycling went down by 27%.”
4.0 Conclusion
This is a complex issue that involves many factors, and I have only offered a slice of the available data, with some commentary that makes sense to me provided by cyclehelmets.org. I have not touched on most of the available data, nor have I explored the physical limits of helmets as protective equipment (see here [PDF] for an overview). I have also neglected to look at injury rates in other jurisdictions that have slower residential speed limits, dedicated cycling lanes and a stronger bike culture. I could complete a PhD on this question, and in fact some have - perhaps this complexity and depth of information is a barrier.
To summarize, it seems that helmets are of use for a limited population in certain circumstances, as in children cycling at slower speeds who fall a shorter distance onto smooth ground. As soon as the speeds increase, and the falls become more complex (uneven ground, impacts with other moving objects such as cars, etc.), the protective benefits of a helmet are negated. Male children 15 - 19 seem to be the most at risk of injury - the data indicates that they are, as a population, more reckless, and take greater risks beyond the capacity of a helmet to manage. In fact, it is speculated, that if they were not wearing a helmet, that 15-19 YO males might not take so many risks. In other words, the helmet was perceived to offer more protection than it does. This finding can be extrapolated more widely to account for the general increase in head injury found in Alberta AFTER the introduction of bike helmet laws. People take more risks when they think they are protected + the limited protection afforded by a helment = more cycling injuries.
I also got the sense from the data that a culture of cycling was protective against injury for those who commute. Dedicated bike lanes, more bikes on the road and drivers who were more aware seems to make roadways safer. I also wonder about residential speed limits for overall road safety. What if we were limited to 30KM/HR rather than 50?
Finally, the data also seems to indicate that the perception of cycling as a dangerous activity dissuades people from riding, leading to two unfortunate outcomes: (1) those who do not cycle, don't gain the health benefits, and this could be significant given increases in obesity, and; (2) spontaneous Bixi Bike type trips are less likely to happen in those jurisdictions that have helmet laws.
“In general the rate of head injuries is declining, but this is not consistent across the country, nor is it attributable to legislation as some provinces with legislation experienced a decline while others did not.” Middaugh-Bonney T, Pike I, Brussoni M, Piedt S, Macpherson A, 2010. Bicycle-related head injury rate in Canada over the past 10 years. Injury Prevention 2010;16:A228.
My Kickstarter contribution has finally paid off! My Air Quality Egg has arrived in the mail! To recap, the AQ Egg over-reached its funding goal in April 2012. The project had asked for $39 000.00, and raised over $144 000.00 with 927 backers. Impressive. And scary. As we soon learned, their were high expectation, and the egg almost hatched as vapour-ware (an impressive timeline can be found here). In short, what was promised in July 2012, was shipped in January 2013. What shipped, sadly, is not what I had expected.
Given the extra time that was used to create the egg, I was disappointed at how 'cheap' and flimsy it felt. In removing it from the shipping box, the sensor pictured at the base of the left egg became loose and fell out. The egg, which is 'snapped' together via a vertical seam that runs around the device, was not properly 'snapped'. It was loose and I was able to easily pull the shell apart. Furthermore, when reading the directions on how to set the sensor up, I was surprised to learn that they shipped some of the eggs, and unknown numer of them, with a software bug (the details here).
Needless to say, these are annoying details.
But, I am still a fan. While the NO2 sensor is not sensitive enough to pick up all but the highest spikes in NO2 (that we know as no one has consistently monitored busy roadways in Edmonton), it feels cheap, and it arrived months late, it still represents a remarkable revolution. No other AQ sensor offers such easy and inexpensive citizen access to AQ monitoring. Granted, you have to be rich and technically literate to deploy one of these things, but it is a step away from government controlled monitoring. It is possible to build or purchase at a low cost, and it is complete open sourced. In other words, you can download a component list, 3D printing schematics, and the code to build and launch your own sensor. I have to remember that I received a V.1, and as with many V.1, there are issues. But these issues will get ironed out in successive iterations as more people look at, and improve upon, the egg.
You can learn more about the Air Quality Egg here , and you can view my (empty for now) data stream here. I'll update this when I have my egg feeding data to the web.
I just completed my MA in Human Geography. My research pertained to people's understanding of location and their communication of that understanding through emerging location based technologies. My entire thesis can be access here (be warned, it is a large PDF via Google Drive).
In an effort at transparency, the next series of blog posts will examine some of the data that I collected pertaining to place and space, and the communication of that understanding through the tools of neogeography. These posts will draw upon two sources of data; mental maps that my research cohort drew, in conjunction with descriptions of the places represented in their mental maps. I will start by framing the discussion with place, space and mapping concepts.
Please note: The University of Alberta’s Arts, Science, and Law Research Ethics Board granted permission for me to post sections of interview transcripts to personal blogs, as did each informant. Any names that are referenced are pseudonyms.
The notion of 'place' is a common descriptor of the world, and is a central theme in the study of geography (Relph 1976) and other social sciences such as sociology and psychology (Gieryn 2000). These various disciplines characterize and describe place in a variety of ways (Harrison 1996); for the purpose of this study, place is defined as being comprised of three dimensions (after Relph, 1976):
A place is comprised of its physical characteristics, the activities that occur there and the meanings derived thereof (Devine-Wright 1997). The more familiar a person is with a place, through experience (for instance, through recreational or sporting activities), the greater the meaning that place is likely to have (Lynch 1995).
Maps are a common metaphor used to describe place (Zook 2007) where simple points on the map represent a much more complex reality. Lynch (1960) views place as a series of connected locations where individuals mentally organize their spatial environment in predictable ways around five elements (see below). Lynch's view of place implies that linkages exist between places based on a person's experience with those locations, creating a tapestry of meaning imposed upon an urban landscape. Similarly, (Tuan 1977) differentiates place from space based on the familiarity a person might have of the former; as a space becomes more familiar, more intimately known, it is transformed into a place. `If space is movement, then place is pause' (Tuan 1977, p.6).
Maps are one tangible way of conceptualizing and representing place and space. Modern maps, such as atlas and road maps, are mass-produced for a consumer market, and are the result of painstaking work done by experts in the fields of cartography, air photo interpretation, statistics, and other disciplines. One of the goals of a modern map is to communicate an objective representation of place that is accurate, useful and that conveys a sense of that place (Taylor 2009). For instance, a map of a city may convey a sense of place by rendering a collection of place names (buildings, roads, plazas, etc) overlaid on a road network, on top of topographic features.
While a map-reader may get a sense of that place, via those representations, the map does not convey the deeper understanding of place that comes from everyday experience, meanings and associations that a resident may possess. In fact, maps may distort a local knowledge by misrepresenting the meaning of place as reflected by, for instance, place names (Frank 2000). In this instance, expert knowledge of map-making is not enough to produce maps that convey an accurate sense of place. The missing ingredient is the experience of a place that can only be gleaned by visiting, or perhaps by interacting with someone who has intimate knowledge of it.
One outcome of this central and authoritative communication of place, via consumer maps, is that citizens are relegated to the role of consumers to be consulted by experts (i.e. urban planners, academics) in their quest to understand what a place means to people. Tools such as cognitive mapping (Kitchen 2009) and mental maps (Lynch 1960) are traditionally utilized to mine these location data from individuals. Tversky (1993) defines cognitive mapping as the process of mentally acquiring, storing, recalling, and decoding metric information relative to location. Mental mapping is the non-metric capture of spatial relations among elements, allowing reorientation, spatial inference and perspective taking (Downs 1977). The importance of these concepts is that they rely on an individual's non-expert or lay, understanding of space. Indeed, the academic notion of Naïve Geography (Egenhofer 1995) is predicated on a `common sense' understanding of geography, where the focus is largely on the non-expert.
The descriptions of place gleaned from the cognitive, mental or naïve are the result of an individual process of understanding. While there are shared map elements between people (e.g. most people will recognize a 'cross' as being the location of a church on a map), these shared elements do not represent a shared experience or the basis of a common understanding within a community. Within this context, there are a variety of ways that an individual or community can understand place, maps being one.
Devine-Wright, P. and Lyons, E.: 1997, Remembering Pasts and Representing Places: The Construction of National Identities in Ireland, Journal of Environmental Psychology 17, 33–45.
Downs, R. M. and Stea, D.: 1977, Maps in Minds. Reflections of Cognitive Mapping., Harper and Row.
Egenhofer, M. J. and Mark, D. M.: 1995, Naive Geography, in A. Frank and W. Kuhn (eds), Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, International Conference COSIT ’95, Vol. 988 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Semmering, Austria, pp. 1–15.
Gieryn, T.: 2000, A Space for Place in Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology 26, 463–496.
Harrison, S. and Dourish, P.: 1996, Re-place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW ’96, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 67–76.
Kitchen, R. M.: 1994, Cognitive Maps: What they are and why we study them?, Journal of Environmental Psychology 14(1), 1–19.
Lynch, K.: 1960, The Image of the City, The MIT Press.
Lynch, K., Banerjee, T. and Southworth, M.: 1995, City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch, MIT Press.
Relph, E.: 1976, Place and Placelessness, Pion.
Tuan, Y.: 1977, Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press.
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I am sorry about the mess presented here, but I am concurrently updating my site and learning Wordpress! Please have a look and let me know what you think!
Everyone knows Ezio Farone Park. Its the park at the top of the stairs adjacent to the Glenora Club, and is a node between the southside and downtown; the top of the bank with the river valley. I lived for years at 100 Avenue and 110 Street and love how cycling and pedestrian traffic flows north / south through Ezio. On winter days while walking down to the Kinsmen, I could feel the temperature drop as I descended down the stairs into the River Valley.
Ezio Farone park is named after Constable Ezio Farone, a member of the Edmonton Police Service who was killed in action on June 25th, 1990 (from Crime and Punishment website here). While the park is lauded by the running and stair walking community, it is more than just a stairway to fitness heaven. Ezio Farone is a hub of transportation and offer some of the best views of the River Valley, the University and the High Level Bridge. Just check out a Flickr Search to see the great views offered by the park. Furthermore, Ezio provides the best vantage point for the Canada Dat fireworks, as is evident from Flickr.
But, more importantly, Ezio's place in Edmonton is based on several design choices that I think work in the park's favour. The park flows north to access points at (1) 110 street, (2) to the bike trail that parallels 109 street, and; (3) pedestrians can walk up 111 street.
The central part of the park has a few paved trails that connect with the High Level Bridge, stairs adjacent to the Glenora Club, and paved paths that run to the west adjacent to the Victoria Golf Course. It is a true urban park offering great access and is used by people seeking exercise (boot camps, stair running), strolling or simply sitting around. Walking up 100 street offeres access to one of the heritage communities in Edmonton, and to the Grandon LRT station.
Up on the right near the Copper Pot restaurant stands a parkaide next to a hight rise building. A section of the parkaide is distinguished because it is constructed out of clinker brink, by Peter and Olga Figol. Clinker brick is baked at a very high temperature rendering the bricks denser and less pores that normal bricks, they also represent an 'Arts & Crafts' style. Clinker bricks are not used as building materials, and are rarely seen in Edmonton.
The escalators from track level to the Grandin Station feel deep and steep, and when you emerge from the tunnel on a summers day, you are met by tall mature trees and an urban environment that is saturated with green space . This community, part of Oliver, flows well from the River Valley, through Ezio Farone and connects with Jasper Ave a few blocks to the north. Groceries, local and chain coffee shops and cloths shopping are all accessible within a short walk. While each of these elements on its own is not remarkable, in combination they allow this community to shine.
Health applications and data are becoming a greater part of the GeoWeb as more people start working with aggregated data sets to look for trends. of course, MIT is exerting some influence in this domain with their Health Infoscape project. From the project website:
Health InfoScape from MIT Senseable Cities and GE aims to create new ways of understanding human health in the United States. By analyzing data from over 7.2 million anonymized electronic medical records, taken from across the country, we are seeking to uncover statical relationships between space, geography and health.We often have a tendency to think of illness as an isolated event, but our first analysis details the numerous (sometimes unexpected) associations that exist around any given condition. This gives us new insight as to how closely connected some seemingly un-related health conditions might be. Such results force us to re-examine conventional categories of disease classification, as the boundaries between traditional disease categories are thoroughly blurred.
Another big player in the GeoWeb domain is UCLA, with their URBANSENSING project, their vision:
We see a future in which we - individuals, neighbors, friends, and relatives - can use the technology around us to observe, discover, and act on the patterns that shape our lives. Whether your passion is personal or global, whether your interest is in health or the environment, whether you act alone or in a group, Urban Sensing is a new approach that empowers all of us to illuminate and change the world around us.
Within this context, there are two project that I think are particularly excellent: (1) Personalized Estimates of Environmental Exposure and Impact (PEIR), and; (2) Cycle Sense. PEIR seeks to document your environmental exposure within four categories - smog and fast food exposure, carbon impact and your impact on sensitive sites such as schools. This is accomplished through the use of location-based tech installed on your mobile devise.
Cycle Sense provide cyclists with current feedback on the quality and safety of the bike routes, and suggest modifications based on the time of day. This is accomplished within a larger community of cyclists who provide feedback by loggin their bike routes, and by providing geotagged annotations augmented by automatic sensor data common to many smart phones (sound, accelerometer) that can infer road roughness and traffic density.
One of Edmonton's most used areas, and one of my favorite spaces, is the legislative grounds. The ledge is iconic in Edmonton with its domed roof and spire raised over the downtown, and is visible from across the river to the south, down 108th Street and from the east as well. The Legislature Building is situated on 23 HA of parkland that represents a history going back to the late 1800's when these grounds were a 5-hole golf course. A history of the Legislative Grounds can be found here (PDF).
What I like about the ledge is its status in Alberta, as the seat of government, and its use by the citizens of Edmonton and Alberta. The grounds represent the diversity of people that can be found within Alberta, with symbols ranging from aboriginal (a totem pole) to Asian (Korean and Japanese symbols), including several memorials to workers and the Holocaust.
The ledge grounds are welcoming and used. In the summer it is common to see children splashing in the pools to the north of the legislative building, as well as office workers sitting in the sun during lunch and coffee breaks. The grounds also link the north side of the High Level Bridge with downtown, allowing pedestrians and cyclists a traffic-free alternative to their commute. Canada day is celebrated with cycling races, Christmas with lights; Hanukah and other multi-cultural events are also celebrated. Protesters also march to the steps of the legislative building to voice their concerns and disapproval.
These events are significant in that they provide the context for the grounds as being public, open, and inclusive - even democratic. In a time when 'space' is more often private or a weird hybrid of public and private (for instance, Chapters, where you are welcome if you are willing to pretend that you have and want to spend money). These grounds welcome everyone, and people are empowered to experience and interact with others and the space adjacent to our elected government.
One of my biggest concerns with the legislative grounds is currently being addressed. Given the current slate of demolitions in Edmonton, it is encouraging the see that the Federal Building is being refurbished. The renovation began in 2008, and will be completed in 2011 in time for Alberta's 100th anniversary in 2012. The design concept of the renovation includes a west entrance pavilion re-orienting the building towards the legislative grounds and adding to the public space found on the grounds, there will be an additional 650 underground parking stalls added, and a skating rink.
I believe that the legislative grounds provides an interesting and public connection between the riverside and the downtown core. While the extent of the grounds, size and nature of the buildings makes this close to impossible to replicate in other parts of Edmonton, there are design elements worth considering. The linkages between different modes or transportation (transit with a terminal on the east side of the grounds, walking, cycling, parking), activities such as splash ponds, and skating, coupled with public space make this a model to be replicated.
We’re a city of nearly 800,000 people, and we’re basing the public involvement part of the decision on 80 comment forms and 15 interviews? I truly believe more people want to provide feedback, it’s just too difficult to do so at the moment. Mack Male, in a blog on Public Involvement.
A recent blog post in the Charette.ca discussed the idea of DYI Revitalisation, where a bunch of citizens, business owners and associations get together to host evens such as the 104 Street Block Party. There are several benefits that arise from closing down a few blocks of a downtown street that include building a sense of community, connecting citizens with the local business, artests, musicians, each other. While the 104 Street Block Party is an awesome event that highlights what a place can be, it is a shallow way to engage citizens in a meaningful discussion of urban planning and development. In my view there are four practical "levels" that citizens can be engaged on: (1) a Charette where citizens attend municipally sponsored meets that address specific issues such as the Walter Dale Bridge Project, or the Arena; (2) DYI Revitalisation such as the 104 Street Block Party; (3) Tactical Urbanism, and ;(4) Data Driven Urbanism. We need all four to successfully engage citizens and municipalities, but we are currently operating at the first and second levels.
Tactical Urbanism (TU) is much like open source software development which seeks to produce consistent but incremental change over time. This requires frequent releases involving input from all who are interested in specific local projects. TU is implemented in an urban environment through experimentation (i.e. a single $500 bench rather than $10000 worth of benches) that supports (requires) feedback from citizens. Citizens are also empowered to claim their own space with paint and small infrastructure improvements (putting in a local bike lane, speed bump). The goal is to get people involved with the local through "a deliberate and sometimes experimental phased approach to instigating change. The result is the development of desirable locations and social capital between citizens, local government and businesses."
Data Driven Urbanism (DU) recognizes that the world of citizen engagement is changing with mobile devises proliferating our urban fabric even as the GeoWeb develops as a platform that enables crowdsourced mapping. DU recognizes that truly participatory planning must go beyond drawing on flip charts and maps and requires a plethora of open data sets, a platform of engagement and building long term relationships with developers and engaged citizens. What would it look like if we could GeoTweet a downed tree in a river valley path such that the River Valley Rangers received it; that these tweets were mapped? Now imagine if we could use the tools in our pockets - iPhones, BlackBerries and all other GPS, camera and connected mobile devises to provide feedback to our Municipality on what works and what does not. While there are privacy and behaviour concerns, these concerns are navigable and can be addressed.
The gap, as I see it, is a City wide strategy to address public involvement using new technologies and approaches. As great as the IT department is (and they are great!), they are too few to enact widespread change within the City of Edmonton bureaucracy. Immediate improvements that could be made tomorrow include higher standards for developers. For instance, why are they not required to produce 3D files for Google Earth that would allow citizens to engage with a developers vision? Why are public consultations limited to old style Charette, surveys and questionnaires? It is possible and desirable to engage with citizens via an on-line map that supports geo-located comments, wikis or discussion forums.
Within geography it is commonly understood that people are experts of their local environment. Lets engage with all who would have something to say about their locality via different and varied channels that include face-to-face meetings in addition to web-based consultations. The combined technologies of smart phones and the web as a consultation platform would offer a data driven approach to urbanism that might provide insight into what makes a location a place.
Transit is an obvious way to incorporate several data streams - open transit data which describes the bus schedule and bus stop locations, potentially GPS from individual buses - all displayed on an interactive map interface that supports queries. This is standard. Mapnificent is not standard as it displays all of the Google enabled transit maps in the world, and provide the user travel times. TripTropNYC creates a travel time heat map from any location of New York. Boston's Street Bump app utilises a smart phone's GPS and accelerometer to provide a realtime view of the state of Boston's roads. I love this this type of application development is seeking to crowdsource, through citizen based sensors, less expensive ways to track urban infrastructure.
Sustainable Cities Collective expands on this theme by discussing WikiCity as a way to engage citizens in city improvement:
Local groups all around the world are taking the initiative and are building the infrastructure that governments refuse or are slow to do.
Charlie Williams, an UK based artist, has created some very cool looking Air Boxes which provide realtime feedback to citizens on the quality of their air. These boxes sit at street level and simply shows a red, orange, or green graphic depending on the quality of the air.
Finally, the MIT Sensable City Lab hosted a Future Cities forum that brought together a number of leading thinkers, including Carlo Ratti the Lab's director, to discuss future cities. The video of these talks can be found here.
I'll close with these words from the Future Cites website:
Over the next few decades, the world is preparing to build more urban fabric than has been built by humanity ever before. At the same time, new technologies are disrupting the traditional principles of city making and urban living. This new condition necessitates the creation of innovative partnerships between government, academia, and industry to meet tomorrow's challenges including higher sustainability, better use of resources and infrastructure, and improved equity and quality of life.
Last week I responded to an open call by Alberta's Expert Monitoring Panel to present my take on the following questions:
1. What should a world class environmental monitoring system look like? 2. What type of organization should manage and operate the proposed environmental monitoring evaluation and reporting system? 3. What kind of information should the environmental monitoring system produce? 4. How should the environmental monitoring system be funded? 5. Do you have any further suggestions or advice to help the Panel as they develop recommendations for a world-class environmental monitoring system?
As I didn't feel that I could adequately address each question, my presentation and argument focuses on components of Q1 and Q2. This blog post will focus on the Open Data aspects of Q2. My full presentation can be found here: Presentation to Alberta Environment Expert Panel on AAQM.
Slide #5 outlines the 3 Laws of Open Data as proposed by David Eaves, Slide #6 outlines the process of turing open data into a community good. Open Data is important in this context as it has the potential to engage a broader base of citizens in a conversation that is normally limited and closed. While engagement is possible it does not happen quickly or easily. If there was a formal process for turning open data into community engagement, it might like this:
Step One: Create An Open Data Catalogue
This open data catalogue should be indexed such that it can be found and formatted such that the data is readable by a computer. The data should also be supported by a generous licensing agreement that demonstrates trust in the community. Keep in mind that the data should be good and complete, but not perfect. If there are issues, the community that you build will find them and tell you.
Step Two: Engage a Community of Developers
There are a number of things that need to happen here: (1) create and Application Programming Interface (API) as an invitation for developers to access and use the data; (2) advertise that the data exists, and where it is; (3) link the core data with other support data, for instance a description of what the substances are, any location information and other meta data; (4) finally create an event or competition as a means of engaging developers. Something like and Apps for Air contest, coupled with a hack-a-thon.
Step Three: Get the Apps Out There
There are groups of smart phone and web users who love new toys. Ensure that these folks know that some cool Air Quality Applications are being developed, and invite these early adopters (and researchers) to use the apps and to provide feedback on them. Perhaps they can even vote on the winning application. In this instance, it is important to engage the early adopters through the smart use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. Create a FB page, start using a Twitter hashtag, ask key members of the community for advise and help in getting the word out. Engage and don't be afriad.
Step Four: Wider Acceptance
As the apps start making their way onto the web and possible mobile devises, more people will use them and, hopefully, two things will happen over time. Citizens will realize that they have access to cool and useful tools, and the government will slowly become more comfortable with greater openness and transparency.
Conclusion
I was asked by the expert panel about brand protection. I believe that the best strategy to protect one's own brand is to engage with a community of people who support your goals and activities. That engagement is the best brand protection available. It is unfortunate that, to date, the Government of Alberta is too busy yelling things that we don't believe. More listening, engagement, and trust is required.
