This work describes SenseCityVity, an approach to engage and support youth of a city in Mexico to investigate, document, and reflect upon urban problems though mobile crowdsourcing. SenseCityVity focused on the development of a mobile crowdsourcing platform; the deployment of an Urban Data Challenge, co--designed by our research team and actors to collect geo--localized images, audio and video; and the analysis, appropriation, and creative use of the collected data for community reflection and artistic creation. Our approach integrates mobile technology and community practices involving a large population of young people for urban engagement. The collective action generated a new multimedia data set that is rich in terms of content and is enabling a number of studies towards the understanding of the urban landscape of cities in the Global South.
We present a study involving twenty in-depth, semi-structured interviews, a street survey, and online data, to understand Airbnb hospitality exchange practices in the context of a developing country. As case studies, we investigate Airbnb practices of both hosts and guests in two touristic venues in Mexico-the eighth most visited country worldwide. The analysis of the data revealed that Airbnb practices in Mexico have some similarities but also important differences with those previously reported in the literature. We found: (1) that money is the main motivation for hosts to participate in Airbnb, and that the earned money contributes significantly to the overall income of hosts; (2) that traditions that permeate the Mexican culture motivate hosts to engage in more personal hospitality experiences; (3) that Airbnb host practices lead to the creation of informal jobs that support the local community; and (4) that Airbnb local guests suggest that the lack of contextual information (i.e. the characteristics of the neighborhood where the accommodation is located) is a problem when renting in Mexico due to safety issues.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.