On the challenge of inclusivity in urban public transport: Utilizing computational ethnography for accessible and sustainable mobility systems

The myth of the homogeneous city

Cities have never been the homogenous entities we often implicitly assume because of their spatial unity, but rather heterogenous places where people with fundamentally different characteristics coexist in the shared material space. Individuals within the city feature unique cultural, ethnic, spatial, and socio-economic attributes, all of which are inextricably linked to particular experiences, concerns, and attachments to the same city. This is especially true of transport infrastructure and modes.

‍

Consider this example: Based on my own characteristics (where I live, what languages I speak, how much money I earn, my age, my gender, my skin color, my fitness and physique), I may have a completely different experience and pattern of moving around Copenhagen than people who can't cycle as much as I can, or who have more money to rent an apartment in central Copenhagen than I do, or who own a car, or who feel unsafe on the S-train when they have to go home at night to one of Copenhagen's outer suburbs.

‍

Why democracy matters in transport governance

In the context of transport planning and governance, this raises questions about how to develop urban infrastructure and mobility systems that map the interests and lived experiences of intersecting groups. At the heart of these questions lies a democratic ethos (often embraced even in non-democratic societies for its potential to shape future-proof cityscapes), with an emphasis on equal rights to the city and procedural justice, recognizing the reciprocal nature of (transport) infrastructure and citizenship. Sustainable infrastructure and urban planning depend on citizen participation (i.e., democracy) due to the theoretical and practical limitations of top-down, techno-rational planning approaches, but at the same time democracy itself depends on a democratic materiality and and thus on sustainable infrastructure.

‍

This concerns, for example, the ability to use transport infrastructure and modes (roads, public transport) as a platform for protest, and perhaps more importantly, the ability of urban citizens to exercise their own agency, which in turn largely determines their satisfaction with local politics and state-society relations more broadly. In transport planning, the latter point is crucial, since the design and availability of infrastructure and services, such as roads, railways, metro, buses, cycle paths, etc., immensely affect the capacity to access schools, doctors, jobs, leisure spaces, etc. The calculation seems straightforward: The less members of particular groups have access and capabilities to participate in the urban fabric as full citizens, the less they feel recognized, represented, and thus satisfied with the democratic system of which they are a part.

‍

The promise and limits of traditional participation in transport planning

In response to the problems outlined above, the engagement of the „public“ (again, the public is anything but homogenous) has become standard practice in urban planning. The underlying rationale is that social intelligence derived from the tacit knowledge of the city’s diverse inhabitants can produce more nuanced and sustainable urban planning outcomes.

‍

To this end, planners make use of a plethora of analogue qualitative engagement methods and tools — public hearings, workshops, meetings, and participant observation being the most common — to enter into dialogue with the public in order to create tailored transport plans that aim to reflect the diverse public. Yet some social groups are more public than others — and this is precisely why public participation in its traditional formats often falls short of its theoretical potential (leading to a „participation gap“).

‍

Rethinking participation through digital tools

The shortcomings of traditional formats (which are fraught with power asymmetries, as well as being time-consuming, lacking in objectivity, difficult to analyze and susceptible to common cognitive biases such as social desirability bias) therefore call for a rethinking of engagement methods that offer opportunities to overcome the conceptual and practical limitations of public participation, so that it can live up to its potential.

‍

Ongoing innovation in technology, particularly the advent of large language models, has now given us the opportunity to 'digitally remaster' traditional methods of participation, offering the prospect of better engaging a more diverse and wider public by digitizing and reducing the barriers of the conventional methodological toolbox for improving mobility systems. In other words, instead of gathering perspectives and insights from residents through flawed and / or laborious formats such as public hearings, traditional participant observation and interviews, it is now possible for planners to push the frontiers of conventional participation, enabling citizen involvement in unprecedented ways by automating data collection and analysis through methods such as sentiment analysis and trend detection.

‍

Computational ethnography: The benefits of new empirical tools for participatory transport governance

The benefits of such advances, which now collectively form the relatively new field of computational ethnography, are many and center around the ability to produce and capture large amounts of data at very low cost, which

‍

(1) scales up ethnography (the „description of everyday life and practice“, i.e. lived experiences, in and across communities) by reducing intrusion and increasing inclusiveness in social and spatial spaces where direct interaction between planners and citizens becomes impossible or impractical, effectively allowing for larger samples;

‍

(2) improves transparency in the planning of mobility systems and infrastructure by providing conclusive systematic techniques for pattern analysis and results;

‍

and (3) offers significant analytical potential, because the traditionally strictly qualitative domain of tapping into citizens’ tacit knowledge can be complemented with the strengths of quantitative tools for data collection, aggregation and and analysis. In this context, computational ethnography is less a specific method than a general approach to digitizing ethnography that takes into account the technological transformation of human societies.

‍

The emerging family of methods thus provides fertile ground for an alternative empirical engagement with participatory transport planning that brings to light the complex flows and experiences of how people live and move through cities.

‍

In conclusion, when I think about the transport infrastructure in Copenhagen that functions effectively for me in Nordvest (in terms of frequency, service times, coverage, etc.) but not for my non-English speaking, working class, immigrant friends who live in a less affluent suburb of Copenhagen, it is anything but irrational to suspect that „planning for and with the people“ has worked well for people with backgrounds similar to mine, but not so well for people with backgrounds similar to theirs. In this way, the deficits and consequences of the above problematics become very real and tangible. It is now time to push the boundaries of ethnography in ways that are relevant and at the heart of the diverse communities we are researching and planning for, and to generate outcomes of participation in ways that are appropriate to the lived experiences of all of the urban „public“.

‍

Bibliography

Abramson, C. M., Joslyn, J., Rendle, K. A., Garrett, S. B., & Dohan, D. (2017). The promises of computational ethnography: Improving transparency, replicability, and validity for realist approaches to ethnographic analysis. Ethnography, 19(2), 254-284. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1466138117725340

‍

‍Brooker, P. (2022). Computational ethnography: A view from sociology. Big Data & Society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211069

‍

‍Burgos-Thorsen, S., Niederer, S., & Madsen, A. K. (2023). What is an inclusive city? Reconfiguring participation in planning with geospatial photovoice to unpack experiences of urban belonging among marginalised communities. Visual Studies, 39(1–2), 144–163. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2261897

‍

‍Lemanski, C. (2019a). Citizenship and infrastructure: Practices and identities of citizens and the state. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351176156

‍

‍Madsen, A. K., Burgos-Thorsen, S., De Gaetano, C., Ehn, D., Groen, M., Niederer, S., Norsk, K., & Simonsen, T. (2023). The Urban Belonging Photo App: A toolkit for studying place attachments with digital and participatory methods. Methodological Innovations, 16(3), 292-314. https:// doi.org/10.1177/20597991231185351

‍

Zheng, K., Hanauer, D.A., Weibel, N., Agha, Z. (2015). Computational Ethnography: Automated and Unobtrusive Means for Collecting Data In Situ for Human–Computer Interaction Evaluation Studies. In: Patel, V.L., Kannampallil, T.G., Kaufman, D.R. (eds) Cognitive Informatics for Biomedicine. Health Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17272-9_6

‍

‍