Embracing Diversity and Inclusion: A Decolonial Approach to Urban Computing

This vision paper underscores the technical challenges and difficulties of addressing urban computing from a Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) decolonial standpoint. Issues of DEI, which encompass factors such as gender, race, age, socio-economic status, physical abilities, and religion, necessitate a shift in how we conceptualise the design of scientific and engineering methodologies. The decolonial perspective can be employed to scrutinise the influence of dominant viewpoints on our understanding of progress, innovation, and their contribution to societal welfare. The hypothesis is that these perspectives can be integrated into the design processes that deal with solutions, knowledge, and information systems across all layers, from infrastructure to application and user interfaces. This paper exhibits research questions, challenges and possible strategies to design DEI aware urban computing solutions with a decolonial perspective.