Community Informatics and the New Urbanism: Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies into Planning Integrated Urban Communities

Abstract

The growing development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has influenced the use of urban spaces. People tend to depreciate physical place, while they extend structures of associational life beyond geographic limitation and focus on a place-less, networked form of human relationship as community. On the other hand, urban spaces are strategically designed and developed with the help of technological innovation to boost local tourism, draw global investment, and effectively control the public. This study deals with this technology-driven, bifurcated, urban spatial transformation. First, we discuss what drives such change and how the use of ICTs affects the way people use urban spaces. Based on this assessment, we address a normative use of ICTs for community-based urban planning. For this, we provide the concept, Community Informatics-Supported New Urbanism (CI-NU), which basically suggests ways of collaboration between community informatics practitioners and new urbanists to accomplish their shared goals of integrated community development.

Exploration of building adaptations and retrofitting challenges in Ghana

“…Notwithstanding, legislation, programming and funding have been hindering retrofitting of existing building facilities; it is emphasized that, most often, the legislation that supports the retrofitting of existing building has been slow to evolve and it is limited large buildings (Nishita and Pynoos, 2006). What is more, the introduction and increased use of sophisticated "urban informatics" to provide robust and internationally comparable metrics for evolving environmental performance reporting requirements, by governments, communities and investors (Mamoru, 2008;Shin, 2009;Shin and Shin, 2012;Caldwell et al, 2013;Cristian et al, 2013;Whenua, 2013) is apparently challenging to adaptation and retrofitting projects more especially for evolving economies (Pinnegar et al, 2008;Lange and Waal, 2013) such as Ghana. With this introduction as a background presentation into adaptation and retrofitting, the ensuing second section will give an overview of rural banking in Ghana.…”

Smart cities: an effective urban development and management model?

“…Whilst the technical barriers particularly due to the size of application ground, city, is vast, Heo et al (2014) stress the major constraints and challenges in this area as identifying and standardising the city-scale cloud infrastructure and interfaces; device addressing; network scalability; system interoperability; increasing the sensing modalities; and security and privacy concerns. On the contrary, according to Shin and Shin (2012), in fact socio-economic aspects are much challenging to deal with than technical ones as innovation and advancements in the field moving forward so rapidly that these issues do not cause a major threat to smart city formation.…”

“…As stated by Shin and Shin (2012), technological developments are modifying and expropriating spaces in the way that every media development changes the availability and character of traditional private and public spaces. For example, the technologically equipped homes or home offices lead to a home-centred lifestyle, while mobile communication fosters interaction beyond the limit of distance, but drives individuals and institutions from a geographically bound community -in both actual and virtual spaces (Wellman 2001;Van Dijk 2006).…”

“…As a result, urban spaces have been started strategically designed and developed with the help of technological innovation (Shin and Shin 2012). According to Heo et al (2014), the remarkable development of cutting-edge technology over the last few decades, such as high-performance computing systems, high-speed communication networks and low-power embedded sensing technologies, which enable the 'Internet of Things', have acted as a catalyst in bringing up the need for smart cities.…”

Volunteered Geographic Information (Vgi) and Environmental Monitoring, a New Approach in Developing Countries

“…Fixourcity.org encourages volunteers in reporting problems with their respective geographic location and forwards the report to the nearby authority (Pfeffer, Martinez, Baud, & Sridharan, 2011). In response to these mechanical advancements and merging's, local governments have been additionally receiving ICTs for different urban improvement ventures (Shin & Shin, 2012). 21st-century digital world requires all knowledge (sounds, images, texts .…”