Social Media in Urban Planning

On Monday I participated in a presentation on Social Media in Planning at the American Planning Association’s annual convention in New Orleans. At the session, my co-presenters and I discussed example projects spanning community-based planning, transportation, and professional development. Afterwards, the attendees broke into small groups to discuss their own experience and thoughts about using social media to engage the public. Here’s some links to the cases we discussed:

• I presented on Rethink College Park and some preliminary observations from my research on the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan.
• Jennifer Evans-Cowley, a professor at Ohio State, presented on the SNAPPatx project in Austin which seeks to aggregate content about transportation across several platforms. In addition, she told attendees about the Social Networking Applications for Planners Facebook group.
• Ryan Link, a planner with the Baker company, presented on More for 1604, an environmental impact statement for Loop 1604 in San Antonio, TX, and the Driving 95 corridor study in North Carolina.
• Shana Johnson, a planning consultant, presented on the APA Economic Division Blog she has spearheaded, as well as the Division’s use of Twitter.

In addition, many attendees shared their own experiences, and we had a lively conversation about equity, satisfying regulations, and integration with more conventional forms of public participation. We plan to propose a session on the same topic for the 2011 conference, to be held here in Boston.

On Small Step for Social Data?

When swivel.com launched in 2007 I was excited: at last, a company set themselves to creating a user-friendly platform for exploring data. However, something disappointing happened: the core software of the website hasn’t evolved much. The problems I identified in an early blog post, such as not highlighting user-created charts and the limited customization of the visualizations have not been addressed. Growth of the user community has been modest, with apparently 14,287 users today. Recently the company has launched Swivel Business, which I explored after requesting an invitation. Sadly, this application works more like a web-based version of Excel, with less emphasis on visualization and data sharing – what made the original tool unique. In April the company announced they’ll be merging both tools into one website – let’s hope it captures the best parts of both.

IBM’s Many Eyes, a similar website, has been somewhat more successful. It boasts some 70,000 datasets and allows users to experiment with a variety of sophisticated visualizations. However the site’s navigation and interface seems a bit clunky, and seems to obscure the best quality data. The site also lacks the ability to easily download or extract data, or compare between datasets.

The newly-renamed Socrata.com stands to finally crack the difficult space of social data sharing and exploration tools. For one, the website has de-emphasized visualizations and focused on data access. Ironically, even in the data exploration business I think this is a good move. In the rapidly evolving world of visualizations, developers are working on a host of platforms and approaches. Google has purchased some outright (see Gapminder) and quickly rolled them out as gadgets. By avoiding the visualization fray, Socrata can focus on a robust and flexible platform for storing and sharing tabular data.

The tool allows users to upload datasets with basic metadata, download it in a host of formats (CSV, PDF, EXL, XML, JSON) and embed it in a webpage. The embeddable applet includes the all-important search and sort functions, required to explore any dataset extending beyond one or two screens deep. Here’s an example of the embeddable applet, using a dataset I analyzed for a previous post:

The system automatically recognizes several type so fields: text, number, money, checkbox, percent, and boolean (?). The site’s not perfect, but provides for the first time a robust, free platform for sharing tabular data. Although very new, you can already find Socrata widgets sharing White House salary data on WhiteHouse.Gov, or Oklahoma’s suburban growth. Only time will tell whether Socrata stands to become the go-to website for sharing data.

APA Minneapolis Conference

I am attending the American Planning Association’s National Conference in Minneapolis. Whether or not you’re actually here, there’s a number of ways to keep tabs on what’s going on.

I’ll be posting Twitter updates at @rgoodspeed, along with several other users including this official account. Technology consultant @Ryan_Link is involved with a group that set up a recently launched Ning APA Social Network and a conference blog.

It will certainly generate some blog posts over the coming weeks and months on e-government software, federal transportation policy, social indicators, etc, etc. Starting on Wednesday at the City Planning, Civic Engagement, and the Internet Conference at Princeton University, where I will participate in the Thursday night opening discussion.

The Online Landscapes of Social Networking

Facebook and MySpace have emerged as America’s dominant social networking websites, boasting over 124 and 245 million members, respectively. While their technical, political, and social implications have been much discussed, these websites also represent virtual landscapes drawing from two distinct strains in American culture.

Invented at Harvard University by a native of New York’s Westchester County, Facebook offers users a regimented experience. Aside from minor customizations in layout, users profiles share a common structure, color, pattern, and design. The individual must be subordinate to the common order unifying the whole. It is, I’ll argue, a European approach to space.

The brainchild of Los Angeles internet entrepreneurs, Myspace users can fully customize their profiles. In a sense they fully “own” what web designers call screen real estate. This is the digital equivalent to the landscape of suburbia, where each owner may landscape and decorate their own as they choose.

A quick tour through American and European cities and cemeteries will clarify the comparison.

In the 19th Century American culture entered a new phase of self conscious cultural independence. Romantic cemeteries were created throughout the country. Designed to replace the church boneyard, where remains were often disinterred to make room for more, the romantic cemetery sought to “rob death of a portion of its terrors,” staking out for each of the deceased a portion of earth. Bellefontaine Cemetery in Saint Louis is a celebrated example. The deceased occupy individual plots, decorate and identified (generally) as the family pleases.

Visitors are reminded through design and allusion this is a natural landscape, far away from the domain of everyday life. Here, in the form of a stained glass window.

At the same time, the country’s first garden suburbs were developed, such as Riverside, Illinois. Invariably these neighborhoods were single family homes placed on uniquely landscaped lots, a pattern that continues to this day.

In contrast, European cemeteries and cities are often quite different. Paris’s famous Père-Lachaise Cemetery, founded in 1804, takes a different pattern. Here family mausoleums line miniature cobblestone streets, creating an urban landscape of death where the individual is subordinated to a familial structure.

Here and elsewhere in Europe from Roman times, human remains are often stored vertically in Columbarium, high-rises of human remains removing the individual from a direct relationship with the earth. Multifamily housing for the deceased, if you will.

Apartment living is commonplace in both city and suburb, seen here in this picture of Finland.

These deep-grained cultural preferences are reflected in the structure of social networking websites, tools used intimately by millions. To be popular, the system must reflect their users preferences. Although celebrated as a seat of American cultural independence, Boston shares close cultural ties with Europe, and its physical structure of many neighborhoods resembles European cities. Like Europe’s vertical family crypts or apartment house living, Facebook’s regimented framework removes from individual control the digital turf on the screen.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has been celebrated as a quintessentially American city in structure. While it is true the city once enjoyed a large urban railway system and has the highest population density of any major U.S. city, it is a city of single family homes on individual lots. It is fitting, then, that Myspace deeds full ownership of screen real estate to members, allowing them to decorate their profiles with blaring music, intelligible color schemes, and absurd fonts, the digital equivalent of pink flamingos in the yard.

These subtle cultural preferences may explain why Facebook’s membership growth has slowed and remains biased towards certain groups. Perhaps it is some cultural quirk that explains why Orkut has become wildly popular in Brazil. Although Mark Zuckerburg may hope to transform his service into a social networking “utility,” its appeal for some Americans may be limited until he lets the American masses deck out their page in flashing colors and blaring pop tunes. It is, after all, the American way.