The need for a people-based representation of space brought up by Miller is increasingly relevant as we continue in an age where distances are shrinking and populations become more mobile. It is no doubt that space has become less of an obstacle and time has become a larger constraint on our lives. Thus the need for more dynamic methods and models of representing the needs of populations in terms of transportation and urban resources is present. These are of course extremely complex and the sheer amount of information involved leads to a great deal of time and effort spent sifting through incoming data. I believe that this is where the difficulty lies. With techniques such as twitter scraping and SQL, there are ways to get a hold of this kind of data. However, what follows is the hard part. How do we decide what data is important? Does one space or group of people more relevant than another?
I understand that we can limit this by means of things like socioeconomic and neighborhood grouping, however I believe this inevitably leads to the kinds of generalizations that people-based GIS is trying to get away from. By attempting to choose which incoming information is deemed important or not, certain space-time activities will be ignored. This is, of course, combined with the gaps created by the digital divide can potentially lead to the marginalization of certain groups.
Overall, this movement to a people-based GIS will definitely lead to nuanced information and practices. Theoretically, transportation systems will become more efficient and become tailored more to the actual day-to-day activities of individuals in a city. It will just require a lot of work and a style of thinking never done before.
-Geogman15
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