Etienne Turpin

From Social Media to GeoSocial Intelligence: Crowdsourcing Civic Co-management for Flood Response in Jakarta, Indonesia

Here we present a review of PetaJakarta.org, a system designed to harness social media use in Jakarta for the purpose of relaying information about flood locations from citizen to citizen and from citizens and the city’s emergency management agency. The project aimed to produce an open, real-time situational overview of flood conditions and provide decision support for the management agency, as well as offering the government a data source for post-event analysis. As such, the platform was designed as a socio-technological system and developed as a civic co-management tool to enable climate adaptation and community resilience in Jakarta, a delta megacity suffering enormous infrastructural instability due to a troubled confluence of environmental factors—the city’s rapid urbanization, its unique geographic limitations, and increasing sea-levels and monsoon rainfalls resulting from climate change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research in open source platform and their role in infrastructure and disaster management.

Citizen-Driven Flood Mapping in Jakarta: A Self-Organising Socio-technical System

The PetaJakarta.org project aims at advancing our capacity to understand and promote the resilience of cities to both extreme weather events as a result of climate change and to long-term infrastructure transformation as a process of climate adaptation. PetaJakarta.org is a pioneering web-based platform that harnesses the power of social media by gathering, sorting, and displaying information about flooding for Jakarta residents and governmental agencies in real time. It allows situational information to be collected and disseminated by community members through their location enabled mobile devices, and shared with emergency response agencies. We argue that PetaJakarta.org is, in essence, a self-organizing socio-technical system that couples people, mobile technology and autonomous sensors in a complex network of information. As a consequence, we need to explore the various dimensions of computational justice that characterize this system in order to identify its opportunities and challenges.

Spatio-topological network analysis of hydrological infrastructure as a decision support tool for flood mitigation in coastal mega-cities

Hydrological infrastructure components such as pumps, floodgates, and flood gauges are invaluable assets for mitigating flooding, which threatens millions of lives and damages property worth billions of dollars in coastal mega-cities around the world. By improving the understanding of how these hydrological infrastructure components are both spatially and topologically connected through waterways (rivers, canals, streams, etc.) within coastal mega-cities, more precise decisions can be made regarding the most appropriate hydrological infrastructure components required to mitigate flooding during emergency conditions. This paper explores the use of graph theory to create a spatio-topological model of a real world hydrological infrastructure network for one of the most representative coastal mega-cities—Jakarta, Indonesia. The network is modeled as a directed multigraph, with hydrological infrastructure represented as network nodes and waterways as edges. The article demonstrates how the network model can be used as a real-time decision support tool for responding to flooding events by alerting decision makers to the occurrence of rising water levels in any given area and, suggesting the most appropriate infrastructure components to engage in order to prevent a given area from flooding.