Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs

Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs
Author: Mariana Valverde
Publisher: James Lorimer & Company
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1459415442

"Smart cities" use surveillance, big data processing and interactive technologies to reshape urban life. Transit riders can see the bus coming on a map on their phones. Cities can measure and analyze the garbage collected from every household. Businesses can track individuals' movements and precisely target advertisements. Google's failed Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, which drew sharp criticism over surveillance and privacy concerns, is just one of the many smart city projects which have been proposed or are underway in Canada. Iqaluit, Edmonton, Guelph, Montreal, Toronto and other cities and towns are all grappling with how to use these technologies. Some cities have quickly partnered with digital giants like Uber, Bell and IBM. Others have kept their distance. Big tech companies are hard at work recruiting customers and shaping – sometimes making – public policy on data collection and privacy. Smart Cities for Canada: Promise and Perils is the first book on smart cities in Canada. In this collection, experts from across the country investigate what this new approach means for the problems cities face, and expose the larger issues about urban planning and democracy raised by smart city technology. This is a valuable, timely, independent‐minded book for Canadians.

Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1

Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1
Author: Uwe Engel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-11-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000448584

The Handbook of Computational Social Science is a comprehensive reference source for scholars across multiple disciplines. It outlines key debates in the field, showcasing novel statistical modeling and machine learning methods, and draws from specific case studies to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges in CSS approaches. The Handbook is divided into two volumes written by outstanding, internationally renowned scholars in the field. This first volume focuses on the scope of computational social science, ethics, and case studies. It covers a range of key issues, including open science, formal modeling, and the social and behavioral sciences. This volume explores major debates, introduces digital trace data, reviews the changing survey landscape, and presents novel examples of computational social science research on sensing social interaction, social robots, bots, sentiment, manipulation, and extremism in social media. The volume not only makes major contributions to the consolidation of this growing research field but also encourages growth in new directions. With its broad coverage of perspectives (theoretical, methodological, computational), international scope, and interdisciplinary approach, this important resource is integral reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers engaging with computational methods across the social sciences, as well as those within the scientifi c and engineering sectors.

Platformization of Urban Life

Platformization of Urban Life
Author: Anke Strüver
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839459648

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange.

The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals

The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals
Author: Matthew Rimmer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 180392523X

Complex geopolitical debate surrounds the role of intellectual property (IP) in advancing and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Summarising and advancing this discourse, this prescient Companion is a thorough examination of how IP law interacts, influences and impacts each of the seventeen SDGs.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure
Author: Mariana Valverde
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 100061042X

This book provides an overview and assessment of infrastructure’s legal and governance underpinnings. Infrastructure is often thought of as a term referring only to the physical entities – pipes, cables, utility poles, highways, airports – that facilitate the transmission of water, gas, telecommunications and electricity, as well as enabling both private and public transportation, and serving to house more or less public services such as health care and schools. However, infrastructure planning and implementation are not reducible to bricks and mortar. The complex process requires drawing from and sometimes re-inventing or recycling legal tools, from construction contracts to financing ‘deals’, which are often taken for granted by both practitioners and urban studies scholars. These are as important today as they were when the first railway lines were built, and to a large extent they remain just as invisible: the avalanche of drawings and photographs of planned or in-process fancy buildings tends to hide from view the behind- the-scenes negotiations and decision-making that had to happen before construction could start, and which in some cases continue afterwards. This book does not ignore the material and nonhuman aspects of infrastructure. But, focusing on the legal and governance underpinnings of infrastructure projects, via a series of key terms that refer to hybrid legal processes, the book offers an important socio-legal supplement to the current ‘infrastructure turn’. This book will be of interest to students in the areas of socio-legal studies, urban sociology, urban studies, urban geography, planning, public law, and contract law, as well as practitioners involved in infrastructure projects.

Trends and Innovations in Urban E-Planning

Trends and Innovations in Urban E-Planning
Author: Nunes Silva, Carlos
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-03-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1799890929

The digital transformation of the 21st century has affected all facets of society and has been highly advantageous in many industries, including urban planning and regional development. The practices, strategies, and developments surrounding urban e-planning in particular have been constantly shifting and adapting to new innovations as they arrive. Trends and Innovations in Urban E-Planning provides an updated panorama of the main trends, challenges, and recent innovations in the field of e-planning through the critical perspectives of diverse experts. This book adds new and updated evidence on recent changes in this field and provides critical insights on these innovations. Covering topics such as citizen engagement, land property management, and spatial planning, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, urban planners, engineers, public officials, community groups, and academicians.

Queerly Canadian, Second Edition

Queerly Canadian, Second Edition
Author: Scott Rayter
Publisher: Canadian Scholars
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2022-09-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0889616191

In the second edition of this remarkable and comprehensive anthology, many of Canada's leading sexuality studies scholars examine the fundamental role that sexuality has played—and continues to play—in the building of our nation, and in our national narratives, myths, and anxieties about Canadian identity. Thoroughly updated, this new edition features twenty-six new chapters on topics including Indigenous kinship, Blackness, masculinity, disability, queer resistance, and sex education. Covering both historical and contemporary perspectives on nation and community, law and criminal justice, organizing and activism, health and medicine, education, marriage and family, sport, and popular culture and representation, the essays also take a strong intersectional approach, integrating analyses of race, class, and gender. This interdisciplinary collection is essential for the Canadian sexuality studies classroom, and for anyone interested in the mythologies and realities of queer life in Canada. FEATURES: - Sixty percent new and expanded content with twenty-six new chapters - Thoroughly updated to reflect a strong emphasis on the diversity of queer experiences and identities in Canada - Each chapter includes a brief introduction, written for this collection by the author, that provides helpful context about their work for both students and teachers

The New Knowledge

The New Knowledge
Author: Blayne Haggart
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2023-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538160889

From the global geopolitical arena to the smart city, control over knowledge—particularly over data and intellectual property—has become a key battleground for the exercise of economic and political power. For companies and governments alike, control over knowledge—what scholar Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure—has become a goal unto itself. The rising dominance of the knowledge structure is leading to a massive redistribution of power, including from individuals to companies and states. Strong intellectual property rights have concentrated economic benefits in a smaller number of hands, while the “internet of things” is reshaping basic notions of property, ownership, and control. In the scramble to create and control data and intellectual property, governments and companies alike are engaging in ever-more surveillance. The New Knowledge is a guide to and analysis of these changes, and of the emerging phenomenon of the knowledge-driven society. It highlights how the pursuit of the control over knowledge has become its own ideology, with its own set of experts drawn from those with the ability to collect and manipulate digital data. Haggart and Tusikov propose a workable path forward—knowledge decommodification—to ensure that our new knowledge is not treated simply as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a way to meet the needs of the individuals and communities that create this knowledge in the first place.

Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs

Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs
Author: Mariana Valverde
Publisher: James Lorimer & Company
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-10-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1459415450

"Smart cities" use surveillance, big data processing and interactive technologies to reshape urban life. Transit riders can see the bus coming on a map on their phones. Cities can measure and analyze the garbage collected from every household. Businesses can track individuals' movements and precisely target advertisements. Google's failed Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, which drew sharp criticism over surveillance and privacy concerns, is just one of the many smart city projects which have been proposed or are underway in Canada. Iqaluit, Edmonton, Guelph, Montreal, Toronto and other cities and towns are all grappling with how to use these technologies. Some cities have quickly partnered with digital giants like Uber, Bell and IBM. Others have kept their distance. Big tech companies are hard at work recruiting customers and shaping – sometimes making – public policy on data collection and privacy. Smart Cities for Canada: Promise and Perils is the first book on smart cities in Canada. In this collection, experts from across the country investigate what this new approach means for the problems cities face, and expose the larger issues about urban planning and democracy raised by smart city technology. This is a valuable, timely, independent‐minded book for Canadians.