Hi #SmartCommunity friends, in this episode of the Smart Community podcast I have a great conversation with Professor Pascal Perez. Pascal is the Director of the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), a national research infrastructure facility funded by the Australian government that serves researchers across the country working on urban systems, infrastructure and local communities.

In this episode Pascal tells us about using story mapping tools to communicate research outcomes, mixing plain text, interactive maps and traditional graphs. We discuss the Australian Urban Health Indicators project examining heat waves, including the challenge of creating better causation indicators while realising mobile location data is the missing piece. 

We talk about the Map of the Month project bringing global community engagement approaches to Melbourne and digital tools for urban design.

We finish our chat discussing the critical difference between data, information and knowledge, and why the hard yards are really between information and knowledge. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

What we cover in this episode:

• AURIN’s role supporting urban researchers around Australia with data curation, analytics, modeling, and digital infrastructure 
• Story mapping tools as a way to combine plain text, interactive maps with sliders, and traditional graphs for awareness and engagement
• The Australian Urban Health Indicators project story mapping heat wave vulnerability across five Australian urban areas
• The Map of the Month project in Melbourne with six maps over six months including nighttime economy, social connection bumping spaces, and City of Dogs
• Moving from SA2 level correlation to SA1 level granularity for heat wave analysis, but still finding the signal wasn’t clear
• Creating a synthetic vulnerability indicator that normalises for baseline temperature differences between areas like Penrith versus Manley in Sydney
• Arki_Lab’s digital tools for community engagement including mobile phone collage apps and digitised Monopoly board games for precinct planning
• The Jakarta flooding project using Twitter crowdsourcing for real-time disaster management mapping, now operated annually by local teams

Quotes:
“I think environmental studies had for a long time been two or three steps ahead of what was happening in urban research in terms of engagement and participation.”

“ Map of the Month was really about using maps as a conversation starter – not as a final product…The idea was not to make the perfect map, but to make something people could react to.”

“One of the key principles of the companion modelling charter was that whomever is represented as a human being in the model should be aware of the way they’re represented…This process cannot happen in isolation of the context you’re trying to describe.”

“Make a difference between data, information, and knowledge. Data has to be as objective as possible… The hard yards are really between information and knowledge. What kind of knowledge does the audience need to make a decision?”

“You can have data, you can have graphs, but if people don’t understand them, or don’t relate to them, it doesn’t matter.”

Links:

• AURIN website
• Australian Urban Health Indicators project
• Map of the Month Melbourne project
• Jakarta flooding twitter project (Peta Jakarta)
• Arki_Lab

Connect:

Connect with Prof. Pascal Perez on LinkedIn

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital

This podcast is recorded on the traditional lands of the  Kabi Kabi peoples and edited on the lands of the Gaibal peoples.   I pay my respects to traditional owners of country and their elders past and present. I also extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.  Here on the Smart Community Podcast, we talk about data, technology, communities and the future. First Nations peoples have been sharing knowledge, caring for country, and telling stories for tens of thousands of years.  I honour that deep connection of storytelling and community connection as we continue our conversation together here today.

Disclaimer

The views, opinions, and perspectives expressed by guests on The Smart Community Podcast are solely those of the individual speakers. They do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of the host, Zoe Eather, or of The Smart Community Podcast as a whole.

Any discussion of ideas, products, organisations, or services by podcast guests does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by the host or the podcast. Listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions and seek professional advice where appropriate.