Digital Trust In Public Spaces
PAS QuickNotes 113
By Jyoti Singh
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Today's urban infrastructure includes digital systems such as smart lighting, traffic management, and public wifi. While these technologies enhance urban life, they depend on continuous data collection and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled processes, raising privacy, security, and misuse concerns. Building digital trust — public confidence in responsible and transparent data practices — is essential for the successful adoption of these technologies. Digital Trust for Places & Routines (DTPR), an open-source communication standard, provides planners and placemakers with a framework to clearly communicate data and technology practices.
This edition of PAS QuickNotes explains how planners can use DTPR to make digital infrastructure more understandable and enable public participation that can help foster community trust in data-driven smart cities.
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About the Author
Jyoti Singh
Jyoti Singh is a design researcher and civic technologist working at the intersection of trust, urban systems, and emerging technology. She leads research at Helpful Places, where she oversees the evolution of the Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR) framework and design strategy for tools that help residents make sense of the technologies shaping their cities. She has worked with local governments across North America to make public-facing technologies such as sensors and AI systems more transparent and accountable.
Her practice is grounded in Black and Indigenous liberatory methodologies that challenge extractive research models and center care, cultural context, and community knowledge. Drawing on scholars such as Angela Davis, Ruha Benjamin, Margaret Kovach, and Christina Sharpe, she examines how race, power, and history shape the systems we design. Her approach is rooted in relational accountability, reciprocity, and the understanding that knowledge is generated through relationships, not extraction.
Jyoti holds a master of information degree from the University of Toronto, specializing in user experience design, and an undergraduate degree in health studies from the University of Western Ontario, where she focused on the social determinants of health and the role of cities in shaping equity and access.