Why Japan is building smart cities from scratch

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tim Hornyak: “By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. In most of these nations, the vast majority of smart-city projects involve upgrades to existing infrastructure. Japan stands out for its willingness to build smart communities from scratch as it grapples with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, meaning that there are fewer people of working age to support older people.

In 2021, the proportion of Japan’s population aged 65 and over hit 29.1%, the highest in the world. By 2036 it will be 33%. Regional cities, especially, face a long, slow economic decline.

As a resource-poor, disaster-prone country, Japan has also had to pursue energy efficiency and resilience following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered. The resulting meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant initially encouraged a shift away from nuclear power, which accounted for less than 4% of Japan’s energy use in 2020. However, there are growing calls, led by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, for some reactors to be reopened to provide energy security and tackle rising fuel prices…(More)”.

Turning city planning into a game

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Brian Owens: “…The digital twins that Eicker’s team builds are powerful modelling tools — but, because they are complex and data-intensive, they are generally used only by experts. That’s something Eicker wants to change. “We want more people to use [these tools] in an easier, more accessible and more playful way,” she says.

So the team harnessed the Unity video-game engine, essentially a software-development workspace that is optimized for quickly and easily building interactive video-game environments, to create Future City Playgrounds. This puts their complex scientific models behind the scenes of a computer game, creating a sort of Minecraft for urban design. “You can change the parameters of your simulation models in a game and send that back to the computational engines and then see what that does for your carbon balance,” she says. “It’s still running pretty serious scientific calculations in the back end, but the user doesn’t see that any more.”

In the game, users can play with a digital version of Montreal: they can shape a single building or cluster of buildings to simulate a neighbourhood retrofit project, click on surfaces or streets to modify them, or design buildings in empty lots to see how changing materials or adding clean-energy systems can affect the neighbourhood’s character, energy use and emissions. The goal of the game is to create the most sustainable building with a budget of $1 million — for example, by adding highly insulating but expensive windows, optimizing the arrangement of rooftop solar panels or using rooftop vegetation to moderate demand for heating and cooling.

A larger web-based version of the project that does not use the game engine allows users to see the effects of city-wide changes — such as how retrofitting 50% of all buildings in Montreal built before 1950 would affect the city’s carbon footprint….(More)”.

Design in the Civic Space: Generating Impact in City Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stephanie Wade and Jon Freach:” When design in the private sector is used as a catalyst for innovation it can produce insight into human experience, awareness of equitable and inequitable conditions, and clarity about needs and wants. But when we think of applying design in a government complex, the complicated nature of the civic arena means that public sector servants need to learn and apply design in ways that are specific to the complex ecosystem of long-standing social challenges they face, and learn new mindsets, methods, and ways of working that challenge established practices in a bureaucratic environment.

Design offers tools to help navigate the ambiguous boundaries of these complex problems and improve the city’s organizational culture so that it delivers better services to residents and the communities they live in. For the new practitioner in government, design can seem exciting, inspiring, hopeful, and fun because, over the past decade, it has quickly become a popular and novel way to approach city policy and service design. In the early part of the learning process, people often report that using design helps visualize their thoughts, spark meaningful dialogue, and find connections between problems, data, and ideas. But for some, when the going gets tough, when the ambiguity of overlapping and long-standing complex civic problems, a large number of stakeholders, causes, and effects begin to surface, design practices can seem ineffective, illogical, slow, confusing, and burdensome.
This paper will explore the highs and lows of using design in local government to help cities innovate. The authors, who have worked together to conceive, create, and deliver innovation training to over 100 global cities through multiple innovation programs, in the United States Federal Government, and in higher education, share examples from their fieldwork supported by the experiences of city staff members who have applied design methods in their jobs. Readers will discover how design works to catalyze innovative thinking in the public sector, reframe complex problems, center opportunities in resident needs, especially among those residents who have historically been excluded from government decision-making, make sensemaking a cultural norm and idea generation a ritual in otherwise traditional bureaucratic cultures, and work through the ambiguity of contemporary civic problems to generate measurable impact for residents. They will also learn why design sometimes fails to deliver its promise of innovation in government and see what happens when its language, mindsets, and tools make it hard for city innovation teams to adopt and apply…(More)”.

A South African City Says It’s Putting QR Codes On Informal Settlement Cabins To Help Services. But Residents And Privacy Experts Are Uncertain.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ray Mwareya: “Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system.

Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system…(More)”.

Culver City, Calif., Uses AR to Showcase Stormwater Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Edinger: “Culver City, Calif., and Trigger XR have teamed up to enhance a stormwater project by adding an interactive augmented reality experience.

Government agencies have been seeing the value of augmented and virtual reality for improved training and accessibility in recent years. Now, governments are launching innovative projects to help educate and engage residents — from a project in Charlotte, N.C., that revives razed Black neighborhoods to efforts to animate parks in Buffalo, N.Y., and Fairfax, Va.

For Culver City, an infrastructure project’s signage will bring the project to life with an augmented reality experience that educates the public on both the project itself and the city’s history…

…as is the case with many infrastructure projects, a big portion of the action would happen out of sight, motivating the project team to include “interpretive signage” that explains the purpose of the project through an interactive, virtual experience, Sean Singletary, the city’s senior civil engineer, explained in a written response…

The AR experience will soon be available for visitors, who will be able to learn about the project by reading the information on the signs — printed in both Spanish and English — or by scanning the QR code to get deeper.

There are six different “experiences” in augmented reality that users can participate in. In one experience, users can visualize the stormwater project that exists beneath their feet or watch images of the city’s history float past them as if they were walking through a museum. Another features a turtle that is native to Ballona Creek, which will swim around users as informational text boxes about the turtle’s history and keeping the creek clean pop up to enhance the experience…(More)”.

Measuring sustainable tourism with online platform data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Felix J. Hoffmann, Fabian Braesemann & Timm Teubner: “Sustainability in tourism is a topic of global relevance, finding multiple mentions in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The complex task of balancing tourism’s economic, environmental, and social effects requires detailed and up-to-date data. This paper investigates whether online platform data can be employed as an alternative data source in sustainable tourism statistics. Using a web-scraped dataset from a large online tourism platform, a sustainability label for accommodations can be predicted reasonably well with machine learning techniques. The algorithmic prediction of accommodations’ sustainability using online data can provide a cost-effective and accurate measure that allows to track developments of tourism sustainability across the globe with high spatial and temporal granularity…(More)”.

Participatory Systems Mapping for Municipal Prioritization and Planning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amanda Pomeroy–Stevens, Bailey Goldman & Karen Grattan: “Rapidly growing cities face new and compounding health challenges, leading governments and donors to seek innovative ways to support healthier, more resilient urban growth. One such approach is the systems mapping process developed by Engaging Inquiry (EI) for the USAID-funded Building Healthy Cities project (BHC) in four cities in Asia. This paper provides details on the theory and methods of the process. While systems mapping is not new, the approach detailed in this paper has been uniquely adapted to the purpose of municipal planning. Strategic stakeholder engagement, including participatory workshops with a diverse group of stakeholders, is at the core of this approach and led to deeper insights, greater buy-in, and shared understanding of the city’s unique opportunities and challenges. This innovative mapping process is a powerful tool for defining municipal priorities within growing cities across the globe, where the situation is rapidly evolving. It can be used to provide evidence-based information on where to invest to gain the biggest impact on specific goals. This paper is part of a collection in this issue providing a detailed accounting of BHC’s systems mapping approach across four project cities…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence in the City: Building Civic Engagement and Public Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Collection of essays edited by Ana Brandusescu, Ana, and Jess Reia: “After navigating various challenging policy and regulatory contexts over the years, in different regions, we joined efforts to create a space that offers possibilities for engagement focused on the expertise, experiences and hopes to shape the future of technology in urban areas. The AI in the City project emerged as an opportunity to connect people, organizations, and resources in the networks we built over the last decade of work on research and advocacy in tech policy. Sharing non-Western and Western perspectives from five continents, the contributors questioned, challenged, and envisioned ways public trust and meaningful civic engagement can flourish and persist as data and AI become increasingly pervasive in our lives. This collection of essays brings together a group of multidisciplinary scholars, activists, and practitioners working on a diverse range of initiatives to map strategies going forward. Divided into five parts, the collection brings into focus: 1) Meaningful engagement and public participation; 2) Addressing inequalities and building trust; 3) Public and private boundaries in tech policy; 4) Legal perspectives and mechanisms for accountability; and 5) New directions for local and urban governance. The focus on civil society and academia was deliberate: a way to listen to and learn with people who have dedicated many years to public interest advocacy, governance and policy that represents the interests of their communities…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Initiatives in City Management: The Perspective of Polish Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ewa Glińska, Halina Kiryluk and Karolina Ilczuk: “The past decade has seen a rise in the significance of the Internet facilitating the communication between local governments and local stakeholders. A growing role in this dialog has been played by crowdsourcing. The paper aims to identify areas, forms, and tools for the implementation of crowdsourcing in managing cities in Poland as well as the assessment of benefits provided by the use of crowdsourcing initiatives by representatives of municipal governments. The article utilized a quantitative study method of the survey realized on a sample of 176 city governments from Poland. Conducted studies have shown that crowdsourcing initiatives of cities concern such areas as culture, city image, spatial management, environmental protection, security, recreation and tourism as well as relations between entrepreneurs and city hall, transport and innovations. Forms of stakeholder engagement via crowdsourcing involve civic budgets, “voting/polls/surveys and interviews” as well as “debate/discussion/meeting, workshop, postulates and comments”. The larger the city the more often its representatives employ the forms of crowdsourcing listed above. Local governments most frequently carry out crowdsourcing initiatives by utilizing cities’ official web pages, social media, and special platforms dedicated to public consultations. The larger the city the greater the value placed on the utility of crowdsourcing…(More)”.

Mapping Urban Trees Across North America with the Auto Arborist Dataset

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Blog: “Over four billion people live in cities around the globe, and while most people interact daily with others — at the grocery store, on public transit, at work — they may take for granted their frequent interactions with the diverse plants and animals that comprise fragile urban ecosystems. Trees in cities, called urban forests, provide critical benefits for public health and wellbeing and will prove integral to urban climate adaptation. They filter air and water, capture stormwater runoff, sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, and limit erosion and drought. Shade from urban trees reduces energy-expensive cooling costs and mitigates urban heat islands. In the US alone, urban forests cover 127M acres and produce ecosystem services valued at $18 billion. But as the climate changes these ecosystems are increasingly under threat.

Urban forest monitoring — measuring the size, health, and species distribution of trees in cities over time — allows researchers and policymakers to (1) quantify ecosystem services, including air quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and benefits to public health; (2) track damage from extreme weather events; and (3) target planting to improve robustness to climate change, disease and infestation.

However, many cities lack even basic data about the location and species of their trees. …

Today we introduce the Auto Arborist Dataset, a multiview urban tree classification dataset that, at ~2.6 million trees and >320 genera, is two orders of magnitude larger than those in prior work. To build the dataset, we pulled from public tree censuses from 23 North American cities (shown above) and merged these records with Street View and overhead RGB imagery. As the first urban forest dataset to cover multiple cities, we analyze in detail how forest models can generalize with respect to geographic distribution shifts, crucial to building systems that scale. We are releasing all 2.6M tree records publicly, along with aerial and ground-level imagery for 1M trees…(More)”