SYMPOSIUM ABSTRACTS

SYMPOSIUM ABSTRACTS, in order of agenda
 
Exploring the Role of Social Media in Urban Design: The Bike Lane Wars
By Deb Niemeier
 
Most research agrees that while social media promotes community engagement, it can also increase the spread of misinformation. There is less consensus in the literature on how much, and under what circumstances misinformation spreads. To examine the role of social media in urban design, I use recent dialogue on the addition of a bike lane in Washington DC. Like many other places considering bike lane additions, social media has helped to air the pros and cons of the design change. The anti-bike lane complaints usually revolve around the economic impacts to adjacent businesses, increased safety hazards, and the loss of parking. The pro-bike lane contingents argue that bike lanes bring improvements in safety, significant beneficial health effects, and help with decarbonization. Nationally, the increasingly incendiary rhetoric over bike lanes signals more than a simple dispute over design benefits, and suggests that opinions are deeply rooted in culture and ideology. In this talk, I will explore how the use of a moderated listserv amplified differences in opinion and increased misinformation about the design features of a proposed bike lane project in a wealthy, white, and almost exclusively Democratic community. More fundamentally, this talk shows that while the use of social media promotes civic engagement, it also can also increase the spread of misinformation even in a largely homogeneous community. This has important implications for designing a more equitable built environment.
Data-driven decision making for resilient and equitable cities
By Vanessa Frías-Martínez
 

The pervasiveness of cell phones and mobile applications generates vast amounts of digital traces that can reveal a wide range of human behavior.  From mobility patterns to social networks, these signals expose insights about human behaviors in the built environment that could assist decision makers in the design of novel policies. However, due to cell phone use barriers - e.g., data plans are costly for low-income population and phones are harder to use by elderly population - certain socio-economic and demographic groups might be under-represented in the data, resulting in biased behavioral insights that could lead to potentially unfair policies.

This talk will highlight research that my lab is doing in two areas: the design of computational models to extract behavioral insights from cell phone data and the design of methods to evaluate the impact of data bias on the output of these computational models. First, I will discuss computational approaches that can help local governments and non-profit organizations better understand the spatial dynamics of cities and communities - offering additional behavioral insights beyond more traditional sources of information - and assisting them in the design of more accessible, resilient and humane cities. After that, I will present our work on auditing and mitigating the impact of data bias on the computational approaches we develop to guarantee the design of fair and equitable policies across all socio-economic and demographic groups.

Responding from Within
By Miguel Jaller
 

The number of natural and anthropogenic disasters has grown in recent decades all around the globe, and the capabilities and capacities of responding organizations usually determine the magnitude of post-disaster community impacts. Based on fieldwork research and empirical evidence, this presentation discusses regular, semi-regular, and emerging disaster response logistics structures characterized after major events. The evidence shows that effective response efforts require leveraging and integrating community-based efforts. Collaborative aid networks and social assistance networks, examples of these efforts, share a structure typology based on social networks highly integrated within the communities they serve. Despite sometimes having a different objective than disaster response, they can extend and expand their mission. They provide advantages in information gathering and sharing, connect local populations with supply sources, have a significant capacity to mobilize supplies, and help achieve humanitarian relief objectives using a reliable network. The presentation compares these structures with agency-centric and partially integrated efforts and provides recommendations for their consideration.

A Discussion on the Challenges for Resilient Communities and the Way We are Rising to Meet Them
Moderated by H. Oliver Gao
 

This dynamic panel with individuals working at the leading edge of engineering solutions to challenges of building equitable and resilient communities will discuss their next steps and the catalysts in this field of study.