In 2015 the Government of India announced an ambitious mission to develop 100 smart cities throughout the rapidly urbanising country. As part of this mission, the Government has initiated ICT based citizen engagement through a dedicated website - MyGov.in. The disparity in digital infrastructure between different socio-economic demographics is a challenge for cities in emerging economies wishing to implement smart city policies. Our research explores the relationship between active civic engagement and the availability of basic digital infrastructure and socio-economic standards in Indian cities. This study provides insights on factors that lead to the success or failure of cities’ online citizen engagement platforms. Such insights offer important lessons for building future smart and connected cities as well as promoting healthy urban relationships and welfare, in the emerging economies of the world

There is broad agreement among the scientific community that local government’s play a vital role in fostering smart cities which focusses...

COVID-19 dashboards with geospatial data visualization have become ubiquitous. There is a growing sense of responsibility to report public health data pushing governments and community organizations to develop and share web-based dashboards. While a substantial body of literature exists on how these GIS technologies and urban analytics approaches support COVID-19 monitoring, their level of social embeddedness, quality and accessibility of user interface, and overall decision-making capabilities has not been rigorously assessed. In this paper, we survey 68 public web-based COVID-19 dashboards using a nominal group technique to find that most dashboards report a wealth of epidemiologic data at the state and county levels. However, these dashboards have limited emphasis on providing granular data (city and neighborhood level) broken down by population sub-groups. We found severe inadequacy in reporting social, behavioral, and economic indicators that shape the trajectory of the pandemic and vice versa. Our survey reveals that most COVID-19 dashboards ignore the provision of metadata, data download options, and narratives around visualizations explaining the data’s background, source, and purpose. Based on these lessons, we illustrate an empirical experiment of building a dashboard prototype—the COVID-19 Economic Resilience Dashboard in Arizona. Our dashboard project demonstrates a model that can inform decision-making (beyond plain information sharing) while being accessible by design. To achieve this, we provide localized data, drill-down options by geography and sub-population, visualization narratives, open access to the data source, and accessible features on the interface. We exhibited the value of linking pandemic-related information with socioeconomic data. Our findings suggest a pathway forward for researchers and governments to incorporate more action-oriented data and easy-to-use interfaces as they refine existing and develop new information systems and data analytics dashboards.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world enacted various levels of “shelter-in-place” policies, leading to a notable reduction in urban mobility. To understand the relationship between policy implementation and mobility effects, we use Apple COVID-19 Mobility Trends Reports to assess how urban travel, by mode, changed in response to public policy. The data were used to statistically evaluate and visualize the changes in urban mobility patterns across four regions: Sydney, London, Phoenix, and Pune, which reflect the global nature of the pandemic and the local nature of policy responses. The results provide insights into how policies can receive a starkly varied response from communities across global regions.