DIGITAL CITY
Year: 2020; number: 20; date: March 2020; location: CABA
Authors: Margarita Gutman, Ileana Versace, Javier Nesprias, Julia Nesprias and Ximena Puppo.
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INTRODUCTION
This study identifies and analyses the demands arising from non-compliance with the economic, social, and cultural rights enacted by the Constitution of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, as expressed by individuals or communities in a selection of platforms of the digital public space between 2016 and 2018. The text focuses on five comunas in the south of the City of Buenos Aires, where the highest levels of vulnerability are recorded (comunas 1, 4, 7, 8 and 9)1, and on demands related to Education, Health, Housing, Urban Space, Infrastructure, Security, Work, and the Environment. The data presented in this study comes from digital space, where new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have opened up a wide range of possibilities to convey the voices and problems of civil society. Digital tools allow for the surveying and interpretation of information in depth, beyond traditional or usual methods, thereby allowing a more focused basis for public policies and actions.
The innovative work presented in this text complements the functions of the Office of the General Defender in several aspects: 1. It contextualizes ongoing demands, on the basis of the selection and interpretation of large amounts of data voluntarily disseminated on the Internet. 2. It offers a different channel to detect potential demands through a new modality comprising images, videos, and notes that circulate in the digital space. 3. It makes it possible to compare the statistical data published by official agencies with the results obtained in the digital area. And, particularly, it offers a finer granular view of problems and actors in the territory. 4. Eventually, it should improve the probability of solving little-recognized issues, through an increase in their visibility.
Produced between 2017 and 2019, this study has been part of a collaboration between the Office of the Public Defender of the City of Buenos Aires and the Observatory on Latin America (OLA), at the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs of The New School in New York.
The first part of the text contains general considerations considerations on the possibilities offered by digital technologies for the surveying and interpretation of unfulfilled rights, as well as the methodology developed for this purpose, called the Techno Social Explorer (TSE). The second part presents the interpretive survey, analysis, and visualization of the unfulfilled rights contained in 648 files (articles and videos) identified on websites, YouTube, and Facebook, disaggregated into eight categories: Education, Urban Space, Housing, Security, Infrastructure, Work, Health, and Environment, and their corresponding subcategories. The third part concludes with the reading of a series of geo-referenced diagrams, which visualize the interrelationships between categories, emerging territorial fragments, actors, and platforms, based on which an interpretation of the information compiled is articulated at the general level, as well as provides an assessment of its contributions.
Tags: Human Rights, Identity, Inequity, Land Policies, NUA, Public Management, Public Policy, Research, SDGs, Urban Development, Urban Inequity, Urban Practice
