Collective city memory: field experience on the effect of urban computing on community

Abstract

In this paper we present field experience and user evaluation results from a long-term real world deployment of a novel urban computing application. Our goal has been to study the effect of applying urban computing to its three constituents: place, community and infrastructure. A suitable application for this, should enable us to evaluate how a city is altered, how the perception of people about the city changes, whether the communication among people is encouraged and what is the benefit from a city's infrastructure. We deployed CLIO, an urban computing application that allows forming and interacting with the collective city memory, in two different cities, in Greece and Finland. We carried out in-the-field user trials and interviews, and collected detailed logs for more than two months, evaluating both the suitability of our application for our purpose and the effect of this urban computing application to the city and its people. Our findings shed light on how a city and the perception of people about it change, reveal the extend to which an urban computing system can affect a community and evaluate the role of public infrastructure in those transformations.