People can refer to city residents, citizens,  community groups, from various socio-cultural backgrounds, as well as the social dimensions of non-profit organisations and businesses. The social research domains that urban informatics draws from include urban sociology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, city planning and others. Place can refer to distinct urban sites, locales and habitats, as well as to larger scale geographic entities such as neighbourhoods, public space, suburbs, regions, or peri-urban areas. The place or spatial research domains entail urban studies, architecture, urban design, urban planning, geography, and others. Technology can refer to various types of information and communication technology and ubiquitous computing / urban computing technology such as mobile phones, wearable devices, urban screens, media façades, sensors, and other Internet of Things devices. The technology research domains span informatics, computer science, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and others. In addition to geographic data/spatial data, most common sources of data relevant to urban informatics can be divided into three broad categories: government data (census data, open data, etc.); personal data (social media, quantified self data, etc.) , and; sensor data (transport, surveillance, CCTV, Internet of Things devices, etc.). Although first mentions of the term date back as early as 1987, urban informatics did not emerge as a notable field of research and practice until 2006 (see History section). Since then, the emergence and growing popularity of ubiquitous computing, open data and big data analytics, as well as smart cities  contributed to a surge in interest in urban informatics, not just from academics but also from industry and city governments seeking to explore and apply the possibilities and opportunities of urban informatics. Many definitions of urban informatics have been published and can be found online. The descriptions provided by Townsend in his foreword and by Foth in his preface to the " Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics " emphasize two key aspects: (1) the new possibilities (including real-time data) for both citizens and city administrations afforded by ubiquitous computing, and (2) the convergence of physical and digital aspects of the city. One of the first occurrences of the term can be found in Mark E. Hepworth's 1987 article "The Information City", which mentions the term "urban informatics" on page 261, however, Hepworth's overall discussion is more concerned with the broader notion of "informatics planning . "  Considering the article pre-dates the advent of ubiquitous computing and urban computing, it does contain some visionary thoughts about major changes on the horizon brought about by information and communication technology and the impact on cities. The Urban Informatics Research Lab was founded at Queensland University of Technology in 2006, the first research group explicitly named to reflect its dedication to the study of urban informatics. The first edited book on the topic, the " Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics " , published in 2009. , brought together researchers and scholars from three broad domains: people, place, and technology , or; the social, the spatial, and the technical. There were many precursors to this transdisciplinarity of "people, place, and technology." From an architecture, planning and design background, there is the work of the late William J. Mitchell, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and author of the 1995 book " City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. " Mitchell was influential in suggesting a profound relationship between place and technology at a time when mainstream interest was focused on the promise of the Information Superhighway and what Frances Cairncross called the "Death of Distance . "  Rather than a decline in the significance of place through services such as telecommuting, distance education,  e-commerce, the physical / tangible layers of the city started to mix with the digital layers of the internet and online communications. Aspects of this trend have been studied under the terms community informatics and community network . One of the first texts that systematically examined the impact of information technologies on the spatial and social evolution of cities is Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places, by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. The relationship between cities and the internet was further expanded upon in a volume edited by Stephen Graham entitled "Cybercities Reader " and by various authors in the 2006 book " Networked Neighbourhoods: The Connected Community in Context " edited by Patrick Purcell. Additionally, contributions from architecture, design and planning scholars are contained in the 2007 journal special issue on "Space, Sociality, and Pervasive Computing" published in the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34(3), guest edited by the late Bharat Dave, as well as in the 2008 book " Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City " edited by Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio, based on contributions to the Digital Cities 4 workshop held in conjunction with the Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference 2005 in Milan, Italy. The first prominent and explicit use of the term urban informatics in the sociology and media studies literature appears in the 2007 special issue "Urban Informatics: Software, Cities and the New Cartographies of Knowing Capitalism" published in the journal Information, Communication & Society, 10(6), guest edited by Ellison, Burrows, & Parker. Later on, in 2013, Burrows and Beer argued that the socio-technical transformations described by research studies conducted in the field of urban informatics give reason for sociologists more broadly to not only question epistemological and methodological norms and practices but also to rethink spatial assumptions. In computer science, the sub-domains of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and urban computing , provided early contributions that influenced the emerging field of urban informatics. Examples include the Digital Cities workshop series (see below), Greenfield ’ s 2006 book " Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing " as well as the 2006 special issue "Urban Computing: Navigating Space and Context" published in the IEEE journal Computer, 39(9), guest edited by Shklovski & Chang, and the 2007 special issue "Urban Computing" published in the IEEE journal Pervasive Computing, 6(3), guest edited by Kindberg, Chalmers, & Paulos. The Digital Cities Workshop Series started in 1999 and is the longest running academic workshop series that has focused on, and profoundly influenced  the field of urban informatics. The first two workshops in 1999 and 2001 were both held in Kyoto, Japan, with subsequent workshops since 2003 held in conjunction with the biennial International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T). Year Research centres 1995 UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London 1995 MIT Urban Information Systems Group, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2003 Smart Cities Program, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2004 MIT Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2005 Urban Scaling Working Group, Santa Fee Institute 2006 Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology 2007 The Mobile City, The Netherlands 2009 Media Architecture Institute, Vienna. From 2011 also in Sydney, for 2015 in Beijing, and 2016 in Toronto. 2009 Urban Analytics Lab, University of California, Berkeley 2010 Future Cities Laboratory, ETH Zürich 2011 Boston Area Research Initiative, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University 2012 Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University 2012 Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable and Connected Cities (ICRI Cities), Imperial College and University College London 2012 Urban Center for Computation and Data, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory 2013 Urban Information Lab, The University of Texas at Austin2013MediaLab-Prado, Madrid 2013 Programmable City Project, Maynooth University 2013 Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, TU Delft 2014 Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities, University of Warwick 2014 Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow 2014 City Sciences, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 2014 Metro21, Carnegie Mellon University 2015 Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University 2015 Urban Informatics Program, Northeastern University 2017 Urban Informatics Major, Shenzhen University 2017 City Analytics, University of New South WalesCity Future Lab, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 2017 Centre of Urban Science and Progress London, King's College London action research and participatory action research big data analytics and urban science critical theory cultural mapping grounded theory interaction design participatory design spatial analysis including urban modelling, complex urban systems analysis, geographic information systems,  space syntax analysis user-centred design Since Foth's 2009 " Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics " , a number of books and special issues of academic journals have been published on the topic, which further demonstrate the increasing significance and notability of the field of urban informatics. Key works include: Year Publication 2011 Shepard, M. (Ed.) (2011). Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Foth, M., Forlano, L., Satchell, C., & Gibbs, M. (Eds.) (2011). From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Kitchin, R., & Dodge, M. (2011). Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Gordon, E., & de Souza e Silva, A. (2011). Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011 Hearn, G., Foth, M., & Stevenson, T. (Eds.). (2011). Community Engagement for Sustainable Urban Futures. Special issue of Futures, 43(4). 2012 Foth, M., Rittenbruch, M., Robinson, R., & Viller, S. (Eds.) (2012). Street Computing. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 19(2). 2013 Townsend, A. (2013). Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. 2013 McCullough, M. (2013). Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2013 Greenfield, A. (2013). Against the Smart City. New York, NY: Do Projects. 2014 Foth, M., Rittenbruch, M., Robinson, R., & Viller, S. (Eds.) (2014). Street Computing: Urban Informatics and City Interfaces. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 2014 de Waal, M. (2014). The City as Interface: How New Media are Changing the City. Rotterdam, NL: NAi010 Publisher. 2014 Unsworth, K., Forte, A., & Dilworth, R. (Eds.) (2014). Urban Informatics: The Role of Citizen Participation in Policy Making. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 21(4). 2015 Houghton, K., & Choi, J. H.-j. (Eds.) (2015). Urban Acupuncture. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 22(3). 2015 Kukka, H., Foth, M., & Dey, A. K. (Eds.) (2015). Transdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Computing. Special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 81. 2015 Foth, M., Brynskov, M., & Ojala, T. (Eds.) (2015). Citizen's Right to the Digital City: Urban Interfaces, Activism, and Placemaking. Singapore: Springer. 2015 Willis, K. S. (2015). Netspaces: Space and Place in a Networked World. London, UK: Routledge. 2015 Salim, F., & Haque, U. (2015).  Urban computing in the wild: A survey on large scale participation and citizen engagement with ubiquitous computing, cyber physical Systems, and internet of Things  . International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 81(Transdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Computing), 31–48. 2016 Katz, V. S., & Hampton, K. N. (Eds.) (2016). Communication in City and Community: From the Chicago School to Digital Technology. Special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, 60(1). 2016 Ratti, C., & Claudel, M. (2016). The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2017 Thakuriah, P., Tilahun, N., & Zellner, M. (Eds.) (2017, in press). Seeing Cities Through Big Data: Research, Methods and Applications in Urban Informatics. London, UK: Springer. Relation to other research fields Community informatics Geoinformatics Human-computer Interaction Interaction design Ubiquitous computing Urban computing
"People" can refer to city residents, citizens, and community groups, from various socio-cultural backgrounds, as well as the social dimensions of non-profit organisations and businesses. The social research domains that urban informatics draws from include urban sociology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, city planning and others. "Place" can refer to distinct urban sites, locales and habitats, as well as to larger-scale geographic entities such as neighbourhoods, public space, suburbs, regions, or peri-urban areas. The place or spatial research domains entail urban studies, architecture, urban design, urban planning, geography, and others. "Technology" can refer to various types of information and communication technology and ubiquitous computing / urban computing technology such as mobile phones, wearable devices, urban screens, media façades, sensors, and other Internet of Things devices. The technology research domains span informatics, computer science, software engineering, human–computer interaction, and others. In addition to geographic data/spatial data, most common sources of data relevant to urban informatics can be divided into three broad categories: government data (census data, open data, etc.); personal data (social media, quantified self data, etc.) ; and sensor data (transport, surveillance, CCTV, Internet of Things devices, etc.). Although first mentions of the term date back as early as 1987, urban informatics did not emerge as a notable field of research and practice until 2006 (see History section). Since then, the emergence and growing popularity of ubiquitous computing, open data and big data analytics, as well as smart cities , contributed to a surge in interest in urban informatics, not just from academics but also from industry and city governments seeking to explore and apply the possibilities and opportunities of urban informatics. Many definitions of urban informatics have been published and can be found online. The descriptions provided by Townsend in his foreword and by Foth in his preface to the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics emphasize two key aspects: (1) the new possibilities (including real-time data) for both citizens and city administrations afforded by ubiquitous computing, and (2) the convergence of physical and digital aspects of the city. One of the first occurrences of the term can be found in Mark E. Hepworth's 1987 article "The Information City", which mentions the term "urban informatics" on page 261. However, Hepworth's overall discussion is more concerned with the broader notion of "informatics planning " . Considering the article pre-dates the advent of ubiquitous computing and urban computing, it does contain some visionary thoughts about major changes on the horizon brought about by information and communications technology and the impact on cities. The Urban Informatics Research Lab was founded at Queensland University of Technology in 2006, the first research group explicitly named to reflect its dedication to the study of urban informatics. The first edited book on the topic, the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics , published in 2009 , brought together researchers and scholars from three broad domains: people, place, and technology ; or, the social, the spatial, and the technical. There were many precursors to this transdisciplinarity of "people, place, and technology." From an architecture, planning and design background, there is the work of the late William J. Mitchell, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and author of the 1995 book City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Mitchell was influential in suggesting a profound relationship between place and technology at a time when mainstream interest was focused on the promise of the Information Superhighway and what Frances Cairncross called the "Death of Distance " . Rather than a decline in the significance of place through services such as telecommuting, distance education, and e-commerce, the physical / tangible layers of the city started to mix with the digital layers of the internet and online communications. Aspects of this trend have been studied under the terms community informatics and community networks . One of the first texts that systematically examined the impact of information technologies on the spatial and social evolution of cities is Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places, by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. The relationship between cities and the internet was further expanded upon in a volume edited by Stephen Graham entitled Cybercities Reader and by various authors in the 2006 book Networked Neighbourhoods: The Connected Community in Context edited by Patrick Purcell. Additionally, contributions from architecture, design and planning scholars are contained in the 2007 journal special issue on "Space, Sociality, and Pervasive Computing" published in the journal Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34(3), guest edited by the late Bharat Dave, as well as in the 2008 book Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City , edited by Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio, based on contributions to the Digital Cities 4 workshop held in conjunction with the Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference 2005 in Milan, Italy. The first prominent and explicit use of the term "urban informatics" in the sociology and media studies literature appears in the 2007 special issue "Urban Informatics: Software, Cities and the New Cartographies of Knowing Capitalism" published in the journal Information, Communication & Society, 10(6), guest edited by Ellison, Burrows, & Parker. Later on, in 2013, Burrows and Beer argued that the socio-technical transformations described by research studies conducted in the field of urban informatics give reason for sociologists more broadly to not only question epistemological and methodological norms and practices but also to rethink spatial assumptions. In computer science, the sub-domains of human–computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and urban computing provided early contributions that influenced the emerging field of urban informatics. Examples include the Digital Cities workshop series (see below), Greenfield ' s 2006 book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing , and the 2006 special issue "Urban Computing: Navigating Space and Context" published in the IEEE journal Computer, 39(9), guest edited by Shklovski & Chang, and the 2007 special issue "Urban Computing" published in the IEEE journal Pervasive Computing, 6(3), guest edited by Kindberg, Chalmers, & Paulos. The Digital Cities Workshop Series started in 1999 and is the longest running academic workshop series that has focused on, and profoundly influenced , the field of urban informatics. The first two workshops in 1999 and 2001 were both held in Kyoto, Japan, with subsequent workshops since 2003 held in conjunction with the biennial International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T). Year Research centres 1995 UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London 1995 MIT Urban Information Systems Group, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2003 Smart Cities Program, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2004 MIT Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2005 Urban Scaling Working Group, Santa Fe Institute 2006 Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology 2007 The Mobile City, The Netherlands 2009 Media Architecture Institute, Vienna. From 2011 also in Sydney, for 2015 in Beijing, and 2016 in Toronto. 2009 Urban Analytics Lab, University of California, Berkeley 2010 Future Cities Laboratory, ETH Zürich 2011 Boston Area Research Initiative, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University 2012 Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University 2012 Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable and Connected Cities (ICRI Cities), Imperial College and University College London 2012 Urban Center for Computation and Data, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory 2013 Urban Information Lab, University of Texas at Austin2013MediaLab-Prado, Madrid 2013 Programmable City Project, Maynooth University 2013 Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, TU Delft 2014 Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities, University of Warwick 2014 Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow 2014 City Sciences, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 2014 Metro21, Carnegie Mellon University 2015 Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University 2015 Urban Informatics Program, Northeastern University 2017 Urban Informatics Major, Shenzhen University 2017 City Analytics, University of New South WalesCity Future Lab, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 2017 Centre of Urban Science and Progress London, King's College London Action research and participatory action research Big data analytics and urban science Critical theory Cultural mapping Grounded theory Interaction design Participatory design Spatial analysis, including urban modelling, complex urban systems analysis, geographic information systems, and space syntax analysis User-centred design Since Foth's 2009 Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics , a number of books and special issues of academic journals have been published on the topic, which further demonstrate the increasing significance and notability of the field of urban informatics. Key works include: Year Publication 2011 Shepard, M. (Ed.) (2011). Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Foth, M., Forlano, L., Satchell, C., & Gibbs, M. (Eds.) (2011). From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Kitchin, R., & Dodge, M. (2011). Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2011 Gordon, E., & de Souza e Silva, A. (2011). Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011 Hearn, G., Foth, M., & Stevenson, T. (Eds.). (2011). Community Engagement for Sustainable Urban Futures. Special issue of Futures, 43(4). 2012 Foth, M., Rittenbruch, M., Robinson, R., & Viller, S. (Eds.) (2012). Street Computing. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 19(2). 2013 Townsend, A. (2013). Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. 2013 McCullough, M. (2013). Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2013 Greenfield, A. (2013). Against the Smart City. New York, NY: Do Projects. 2014 Foth, M., Rittenbruch, M., Robinson, R., & Viller, S. (Eds.) (2014). Street Computing: Urban Informatics and City Interfaces. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 2014 de Waal, M. (2014). The City as Interface: How New Media are Changing the City. Rotterdam, NL: NAi010 Publisher. 2014 Unsworth, K., Forte, A., & Dilworth, R. (Eds.) (2014). Urban Informatics: The Role of Citizen Participation in Policy Making. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 21(4). 2015 Houghton, K., & Choi, J. H.-j. (Eds.) (2015). Urban Acupuncture. Special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 22(3). 2015 Kukka, H., Foth, M., & Dey, A. K. (Eds.) (2015). Transdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Computing. Special issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 81. 2015 Foth, M., Brynskov, M., & Ojala, T. (Eds.) (2015). Citizen's Right to the Digital City: Urban Interfaces, Activism, and Placemaking. Singapore: Springer. 2015 Willis, K. S. (2015). Netspaces: Space and Place in a Networked World. London, UK: Routledge. 2015 Salim, F., & Haque, U. (2015). " Urban computing in the wild: A survey on large scale participation and citizen engagement with ubiquitous computing, cyber physical Systems, and internet of Things " . International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 81(Transdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Computing), 31–48. 2016 Katz, V. S., & Hampton, K. N. (Eds.) (2016). Communication in City and Community: From the Chicago School to Digital Technology. Special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, 60(1). 2016 Ratti, C., & Claudel, M. (2016). The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2017 Thakuriah, P., Tilahun, N., & Zellner, M. (Eds.) (2017, in press). Seeing Cities Through Big Data: Research, Methods and Applications in Urban Informatics. London, UK: Springer. Relation to other research fields Community informatics Geoinformatics Human–computer interaction Interaction design Ubiquitous computing Urban computing
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