Public Perception, Big Data, Smart City, and Future

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My fieldwork observation and participatory interview allowed me to hear the voice of slum dwellers. Some of their opinions and explanation were not covered in the standard questionnaires. The unbalanced distribution of income, education, political power in public spaces as well as biased against the urban poor easily pushed them into a corner when a new tide of urban renewal comes. It is necessary to understand them to reach inclusiveness in policy makings. However, if doing a comprehensive grassroots survey about urban redevelopment and renewal in all the informal settlements, it might be perfect for thoroughly understanding the needs and interests of informal settlers. However, it is not practical.

 

First, the concern about informal settlers from the other stakeholders (developer, urban agency, residents of the middle class and above, industrial companies, etc.) is not like a third-party researcher. They usually maintain their own interests of space and land use prior to informal settlers'. Politicians' empty promising or bribery voting further make the problems complex. Even though governments have an intention to upgrade slums, sometimes settlers failed to get what they really want. It will also take a lot of time and funds for policymakers to carry out a comprehensive survey to hear all the people's voice in the data-poor cities with insufficient techniques and tight budget. For most of the people who have more social power, their life is far away from the conflicts of space locally, they barely understand the process from the first-hand data collection but the news.

 

Therefore, I have a new direction for research: investigating the impact of public perception of informal settlements on informal settlement and relevant policies?  

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• What tags did you attach to informal settlements: Understanding the interaction between the public’s perceptions in social media and the strategies of neighborhood redevelopment (Accepted by 2019 ACSP conference)

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Abstract: 25% of the world’s population have flooded into unplanned informal settlements on the land without legal tenure and adequate facilities. To inclusively formalize informal settlements through neighborhood redevelopment projects is a long-lasting topic due to the complexity of opinions and interests among stakeholders of different types. Important to inclusive neighborhood redevelopment are the abilities of community stakeholders to form partnerships and identify the demands of each other’s. However, due to unbalanced access to education opportunities and facilities between the general public, policymakers, researchers, and informal settlement dwellers, their powers of voice and their impact on decision-making during neighborhood redevelopment are diverse. Therefore, it is unknown whether the general public, who live outside informal settlements, significantly influences the directions of neighborhood redevelopment at the cost of informal settlement dwellers’ well-beings.

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This paper aims to investigate the public’s sentiments of informal settlements in social media worldwide and to evaluate how different neighborhood redevelopment strategies influence sentiment at the national and subnational levels. Tweets and comments or forwarded messages in microblogs are one of the richest resources for crowdsourcing public sentiment related to neighborhood redevelopment. This study will also focus on the context of different regimes and local urban governance in the global North and South. We will employ natural language processing tool for collecting comments data and analyze the texts. We will examine how public sentiment regarding public security, poverty, economic development, and the well-beings of informal settlement dwellers over time and in response to high-profile local neighborhood redevelopment events. We will collect the data of local neighborhood redevelopment events by news titles and keywords relevant to national or subnational redevelopment schemes (i.e., Slum-free Scheme in India and Penghuqugaizao in Beijing, China, etc.) and features of global or local public events or movement (i.e. Public-Private Participation, forced displacement, legislation of anti-violent displacement, etc.). By analyzing the temporal-spatial data of events and sentiments, we plan to find the clusters or correlations between the events of different types and the sentiments regarding the reasons, processes, and outcomes of informal settlement upgrading.   

 

While accounting for the larger trends in the public perception of the informal settlements, the study intends to find whether biased or stereotyped sentiments of informal settlements emerged or reinforced during the aftermath of urban redevelopment events. Such type of sentiment consists of, but not limited to, negative attitudes towards neighborhood insecurity in informal settlements and the blame based on the perception that informal settlements are the breeding grounds of crime and violent conflicts. Furthermore, the public’s empathy, rather than sympathy, with the urban poor, is influenced by the news about innovative and inclusive urban redevelopment strategies and poverty alleviation at the local level, which could further inspire discussions about applicable paths to inclusiveness and social justice during urban redevelopment worldwide. The study also attaches great importance to adopting advanced mixed methodologies to understand dynamic community participation in future planning education.

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 Keywords:  Data mining, sentiment analysis, slum upgrading, displacement

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Back to the housing selection and policies: Culture vs. modernization 

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However, the above approach ignores a basic factor influencing the housing preferences of slum dwellers: the social psychology embedded in informal built-environment, which structure as a culture of informality. I find some interesting way that slum dwellers deal with water shortage. (See photo) I call it, behavior based on individualism. Then I dig into individualism, collectivism, familism to understand what is missing in public housing projects. 

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• Why formalizing slum in India is so tough? An explanation from the perspective of individualism

 

​Abstract: Updated Census reports that one in six Indians in cities live in informal settlements. Since the 2000s, Indian union government and subnational governments have launched multiple urban redevelopment missions including ambitious slum upgrading plans. However, the progress of slum formalization is still far behind the goal of being “slum-free” India, which was proposed in Rajiv Awas Yojana (Slum-free India Mission) in 2011. 

 

We intend to explain why government-initiated slum upgrading programs in India confronted challenges from the grassroots. Through utilizing multistage stratified random sampling, we selected 600 slum households from cities of Bihar—Patna, Muzzafarpur, Gaya, and Bhagalpur. We also had participatory observations, 24 focus group discussions, and 35 semi-structured individual interviews in 16 slums in Patna. We identify a unique pattern of slum dwellers’ housing preferences and behaviors in mitigating the exclusive process and unsatisfactory outcomes of slum upgrading, which partly affected the progress of slum upgrading. We describe this pattern as “individualism.” It consists of slum dwellers’ preferences for in-situ upgrading projects over displacement, self-built over collectively-built construction, single-family house over multi-family apartments, complete land tenure ownership over land renting, and private solutions to basic infrastructure insufficiency over collaboration for applying for formal and communal infrastructure. The case studies in two slums further show how local communities deal with such structural toughness of slum upgrading successfully. It implies that to cultivate the mutual understandings about all stakeholders’ interests in urban redevelopment from formally empower slum dwellers is the key to break the vicious circle between slum upgrading project design and execution.

 

Keywords:  Informality, institutional defects, affordability, privatization​