Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City

Alive with movement and excitement, cities transmit a rapid flow of exchange facilitated by a meshwork of infrastructure connections. In this environment, the Internet has advanced to become the prime communication medium, creating a vibrant and increasingly researched field of study in urban informatics. The Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City brings together an international selection of 66 esteemed scholars presenting their research and development on urban technology, digital cities, locative media, and mobile and wireless applications. A truly global resource, this one-of-a-kind reference collection contains significant and timely research covering a diverse range of current issues in the urban informatics field, making it an essential addition to technology and social science collections in academic libraries that will benefit scholars and practitioners in an array of fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.

Marcus Foth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He received a BCompSc(Hon) from Furtwangen University, Germany, a BMultimedia from Griffith University, Australia and an MA and PhD in digital media and urban sociology from QUT. Marcus is the recipient of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship supported under the Australian Research Council s Discovery funding scheme and a 2007 Visiting Fellowship from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Marcus work is positioned at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications. His research has significantly shaped the social strategies of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village, the Queensland Government s flagship urban renewal project. Employing human-centred and participatory design methods, Marcus and his team pioneer new interactive social networking systems informed by community, social and urban studies.

Since 2003, Marcus has (co-)authored over 50 publications. The high quality of his research output has attracted over $1.16M in national competitive grants from the Australian Research Council and industry in 2006 and 2007. He is a chief investigator on the projects New Media in the Urban Village: Mapping Communicative Ecologies & Socio-Economic Innovation in Emerging Inner-City Residential Developments, and Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future: Embedding Narrative and New Media in Urban Planning. He is lead chief investigator of Opportunities of Media and Communication Technology to Support Social Networks of Urban Residents in Mexico, South Africa, UK and Australia, and Swarms in Urban Villages: New Media Design to Augment Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Developments. He is a member of the Australian Computer Society and the Executive Committee of the Association of Internet Researchers.