The last issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing is devoted to urban computing (edited by Tim Kindberg, Matthew Chalmers and Eric Paulos), a topic defined as "the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles". What is interesting is that it gives a sort of overview of the current subtopics and main issues of the field:

"rban settings are challenging places for experimentation and deployment, and they remain lit- tle explored as pervasive environments for largely practical reasons. For one thing, they’re complex in terms of ownership. For example, placing sensors in a city will typically require permission from many stakeholders. Urban settings also tend to be far more dynamic and dense in terms of what and who would participate in an application or system. People constantly enter and leave urban spaces, occupying them with highly variable densities and even changing their usage patterns between day and night. (...) The articles we selected confirm that urban computing is a practical reality but that research is still at an early stage, with much of the subject still to be mapped out systematically. "

Why do I blog this? lots of content to read but this is definitely worthwile to see the cutting edge projects and the current trends. Besides, Fabien, Josep and I wrote a short bit (in the work in progress paper section) about the use of Flickr picture to analyze the behavior of people in cities.