Justice
What Can 'the Mystery' of Cell-Phone Data Tell Us About What a City Needs?
Tracking communication patterns can help city planners improve digital and other infrastructure by revealing the behaviors of residents.
Most people are pretty attached to their phones. Ninety percent of adults have one, and 78 percent of kids use one. As Aaron Reiss observes in his documentation of the cell phone storage industry in New York, cell phones are a huge part of our lives. And the information they provide about us reveals regional patterns of urban life.
"Cellphones now live with us—they have a symbiotic relation with our bodies," Carlo Ratti, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's SENSEable Lab, writes in an email. "Using aggregated data from cellphone networks, we can better understand our cities and the ways we inhabit them."