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.
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