Contribution Towards Smart Cities: Exploring Block Level Census Data for the Characterization of Change in Lisbon

The interest in using information to improve the quality of living in large urban areas and the efficiency of its governance has been around for decades. Nevertheless, recent developments in information and communications technology have sparked new ideas in academic research, all of which are usually grouped under the umbrella term of Smart Cities. The concept of Smart City can be defined as cities that are lived, managed and developed in an information-saturated environment. However, there are still several significant challenges that need to be tackled before we can realize this vision. In this study we aim at providing a small contribution in this direction, by maximizing the usefulness of the already available information resources. One of the most detailed and geographically relevant information resources available for studying cities is the census, more specifically, the data available at block level. In this study we use self-organizing maps (SOM) to explore the block level data included in the 2001 and 2011 Portuguese censuses for the city of Lisbon. We focus on measuring change, proposing new ways to compare the two time periods, which have two different underlying geographical bases. We proceed with the analysis of the data using different SOM variants, aiming at providing a twofold portrait: showing how Lisbon evolved during the first decade of the twenty-first century and how both the census dataset and the SOMs can be used to produce an informational framework for micro analysis of urban contexts.