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What’s the Role of Social Media in Urban Disasters?

What’s the Role of Social Media in Urban Disasters?

by / October 15, 2014/ Misc./
A broken world. Photo: Fiona McAllister (CC BY 2.0) on Flickr

Photo: Fiona McAllister (CC BY 2.0) on Flickr

I have just been asked to contribute to a book that looks at the role of social media during disasters in urban areas.

And while I have some ideas what to write about, I’m sure you have many, many more!

Please tell me about them!

Please leave a comment if you know of a case study, document, article or simply remember something interesting that you saw or heard about!

3 Comments

  1. Alesh Brown (www.apt-info.org) October 15, 2014

    Just looking at social media or does this also include SMS and other data streams?

    Initial ideas:

    Mapping Population Movements / tracing /

    Baseline Mapping: (Hazard Mapping, Livelihood Zoning, Mapping Wealth Distributions)

    Asset mapping: Hosting refugees, market locations, evacuation centers

    What sectors are you looking at?

    • Timoluege October 15, 2014

      Thanks, Alesh. Unfortunately I’ll only be looking at social media and not on related technologies. I find that separation a little awkward, but there you are. There is no limit on what sectors I can look at. Generally speaking I think it will mainly be disaster preparedness, response and spontaneous self-coordination by the affected population.

  2. mtthwhgn October 17, 2014

    Timo, might be worth looking at the London 2011 Public Disorder –
    examples of both positive and negative emergent uses of social media.
    Official Police report here
    (http://content.met.police.uk/News/MPS-report-into-summer-disorder/1400007360193/1257246745756)
    but lots of other sources covered social media response too. Matthew