Because of the often remote and fledgling character of Canada's aboriginal tourism attractions, developing alliances with knowledgeable and culturally sensitive distribution channel operators are especially important. The distribution channels developed can affect the patterns of destination use, target markets attracted, and economic impact created for aboriginal communities. This research describes the structure and perspectives of the European tour operator industry as it relates to the distribution of North American aboriginal tourism experiences to European travelers. The findings suggest strategies for working with tour operators in configuring, positioning, promoting, and delivering aboriginal tourism.
This chapter examines the ways in which big data is involved in the rise of smart cities. Mobile phones, sensors and online applications produce streams of data which are used to regulate and plan the city, often in real time, but which presents challenges as to how the city's functions are seen and interpreted. Using a socio-technical approach, we offer a critical evaluation of the types of data being used in urban governance and their advantages and drawbacks in comparison to previous information systems. Using examples from New York and Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, we demonstrate how big data can both illuminate and obscure our understanding of urban development. We outline methodological considerations for the use of such data, offering conclusions towards the development of a critical urban data science.
While plans to develop “smart cities” are gathering pace across the world, we know little about the ways in which the discourses of datafication, smartness, and big data play out in material contexts of urban development, including utility and resource management. In this paper, we explore this intersection in the case of Bangalore’s water supply, where IBM in alliance with the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is implementing a water-flow sensor network and geographic database system under the label of “big data for water supply.” We illustrate how the BWSSB-IBM approach narrows down the complex field of water provision to a question of water in- and out-flow measurements and the monitoring of BWSSB ground personnel. In theoretical terms, we discuss the ways in which these processes constitute both particular claims to knowledge, and the redefinition of citizenship as consumption.
This research examines gated communities in the Denver-Boulder area to better understand the phenomenon at the metropolitan scale. To gain some insight into why they have proliferated, we examine the characteristics of gated communities and the areas in which they are located, as well as residents' motivations for moving into one.The Denver area has most of the types of ownership-based gated communities prevalent across the United States. We also studied rental gated communities. Ownership-based communities are located in the suburban, exurban, and prestigious inner urban areas of Denver. Prestige, privacy, and maintenance are among the most important reasons for moving to a gated community, but the gates per se were among the most important considerations only for those residents who had previously lived in such a community. Spatial distribution within the area leads to the conclusion that competition among developers may help explain the clustering of these communities.
In this paper, we investigate people's perception of datafication and surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbility, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutrality of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the dominant technical framing of smart cities.
Sustaining up-to-date land registers in the global south is an increasing concern for the protection of tenure, development of land markets and long-term sustainable planning practices and policy. It requires both the prompt reporting of land transfers and also an alignment between prevailing land rights and official recording systems. The literature on land registration highlights some effects of inheritance practices on the land register and land development. Taking these studies a step further, our research investigates how such effects evolve from the rules that guide inheritance practices using a qualitative research approach. We found that normative practices of inheritance mostly lead to communal property through numerous processes which have implications on the timing and likelihood of possible registration. Also, we found that the significance of land and buildings in the social context transcends the physical property per se and includes dimensions of spirituality and social identity. Our findings explain the misalignment between the official and social logics of property and suggest likelihood of non-reporting. We conclude that flexibility is required in recording communal rights in rural areas and that the transition to individual property is more likely in peri-urban and urban areas where the social logics of property have broken.
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