From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites,
have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available
for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS.
From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and
personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic
engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the
world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in
urban areas. Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the
theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges
digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the
environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in
cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for
improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development
of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.