Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2022

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Source Publication

Urban Affairs Review

Source ISSN

1078-0874

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1177/10780874211021327

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, many cities across the United States have adopted a range of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to make it easier for residents to get informed, communicate their preferences, and hold public officials accountable. In this paper, we ask two questions. First, are service requests and responses illustrative of existing neighborhood differences across a city? Second, do patterns of request and response differ by the type of complaint made to the city? We leverage data from the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to examine neighborhood variation in service requests and subsequent response times to those complaints. Our analysis makes a number of important contributions to the current literature on ICTs, including providing a more nuanced understanding of how types of requests vary by neighborhood context, and a more comprehensive picture of how requests and response times reveal social and racial disparities across the city.

Comments

Accepted version. Urban Affairs Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 (July 2022):1182-1197. DOI. © 2021 The Authors. Used with permission.

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