By considering public safety as a relevant component of a smart city framework, the development and use of city dashboards that explore the spatio-temporal monitoring of crime incidence to help local governments base their decision-making process on evidence is becoming more relevant. This research deals with the case study of the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico, whose capital hosts the annual San Marcos Fair, considered the most important fair in the country. By developing an online dynamic platform consisting of several different modules that rely on the use of geovisual analytics for dynamic and interactive data display and exploration, authorities can gain insights about the times and locations of the impact of criminal incidence, detect patterns over space and time, and look into what actions could be put in place. This becomes useful in advancing a circular model of the smart city in which urban processes are observed, data is collected and analyzed, management and decision actions occur, and more data is collected to measure their effectiveness. By comparing statistics for the three year period of 2016–2018, it is found that the second year of the study had a significant decrease in pedestrian crime incidence during the Fair, supporting the use of city dashboards with geovisual analytics to help monitor urban processes and aid authorities in making decisions. Further research is needed to uncover more efficient practices to achieve inter-institutional collaboration and data sharing schemes that adhere to and boost the principles of the smart city.
This paper presents a case study of user-generated geographic information in a small neighbourhood in Mexico City. It deals with citizen empowerment and actions directed to improve their local surroundings. It is constructed in a bottom-up fashion: from the citizens towards the local authorities. The exercise is carried out using an online platform developed for this purpose. The tools, methodology and lessons learned so far are described. This is an ongoing project and preliminary results are discussed. The acquisition of enough citizen data helps citizens focus their efforts when negotiating with the authorities, in situations and locations that have been found to be problematic. A digital map constructed by the citizenry is a helpful tool to locate areas of opportunity that require attention. Additionally, it is an effective communication tool to convey messages to the authorities. The identification of these types of locations is helpful in gaining insights into what, from the citizens' perspective, can cause significant discrepancies between what they observe and what is officially reported. The proposed platform incorporates a way to validate official data, a voting strategy to assess the credibility of citizen contributions, and crowdsourced information on parcel data.
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