urban planning

Big data helps Belfort, France, allocate buses on routes according to demand

Curated on March 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruce Brown in Digital Trends: “As modern cities smarten up, the priority for many will be transportation. Belfort, a mid-sized French industrial city of 50,000, serves as proof of concept for improved urban transportation that does not require the time and expense of covering the city with sensors and cameras.

Working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and GFI Informatique, the Board of Public Transportation of Belfort overhauled bus service management of the city’s 100-plus buses. The project entailed a combination of ID cards, GPS-equipped card readers on buses, and big data analysis. The collected data was used to measure bus speed from stop to stop, passenger flow to observe when and where people got on and off, and bus route density. From start to finish, the proof of concept project took four weeks.

Using the TCS Intelligent Urban Exchange system, operations managers were able to detect when and where about 20 percent of all bus passengers boarded and got off on each city bus route. Utilizing big data and artificial intelligence the city’s urban planners were able to use that data analysis to make cost-effective adjustments including the allocation of additional buses on routes and during times of greater passenger demand. They were also able to cut back on buses for minimally used routes and stops. In addition, the system provided feedback on the effect of city construction projects on bus service….

Going forward, continued data analysis will help the city budget wisely for infrastructure changes and new equipment purchases. The goal is to put the money where the needs are greatest rather than just spending and then waiting to see if usage justified the expense. The push for smarter cities has to be not just about improved services, but also smart resource allocation — in the Belfort project, the use of big data showed how to do both….(More)”

Mapatón CDMX

Curated on March 10, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

HBS Case Study by Mitchell Weiss and Maria Fernanda Miguel: “There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the labyrinth system that provided an estimated 14 million rides a day. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Lab’s founder and director, had led her team in a project to crowd-source the routes from volunteer riders in what came to be known as Mapatón CDMX. After four pilots and a two-week “mapping marathon” later, she wondered exactly what to make of the lab’s fiftieth experiment? Was Mapatón successful?

Learning objective:

LabCDMX and their crowdsourced bus mapping project provides the setting to explore risk taking and experimentation in public settings. The case is designed to focus students most acutely on questions of can government take more risk and how? This is a key question for public entreprenuers. In class, students are encouraged to think both about the obstacles for risk taking and the tactics that elected leaders and innovation champions can take to surmount those obstacles. Students consider whether experimentation is one of those potential skills and, if so, how best and rigorously those experiments must be run. How willing must government be to admit failure if experiments don’t pan out? What can give them that leeway? How, tactically, can governments run these kinds of experiments? Is using off-the-shelf technology for quick, but imperfect beta services a productive strategy for securing buy-in and for learning? The case is adaptable for exploring big company settings, too. Mexico City’s municipal government is a giant organization, with 300,000 public workers. What is the role of an innovation office and it’s handful of employees in that context? How does it gain credibility with the rest of the organization? How do experiments help – or hurt – in that effort?…(More)”.

Data and the City: New report on how public data is fostering civic engagement in urban regions

Curated on March 10, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jonathan Gray and Danny Lämmerhirt: “…demonstrates how public data infrastructures create new kinds of relationships and public spaces between public institutions, civil society groups, and citizens.

In contrast to more supply-oriented ideas around opening (government) data, we argue that data infrastructures are not a mere “raw” resource that can be exploited. Instead they are best conceived as a lively network or ecosystem in which publics creatively use city data to engage with urban institutions.

We intend to spark imagination and conversation about the role that public data infrastructures may play in civic life – not just as neutral instruments for creating knowledge, but also as devices to organise publics and evidence around urban issues; creating shared spaces for public participation and deliberation around official processes and institutions; and securing progress around major social, economic and environmental challenges that cities face.

Our report describes six case studies from cities around the world to demonstrate civil society’s vast action repertoire to engage with urban data infrastructures. One case study demonstrates how a British civil society organisation gathered budget data through freedom of information requests from municipal government. This information was fed into an open database and made accessible to finance experts and scholars in order to allow them to run a “public debt audit”. This audit enabled government officials and the larger public to debate the extent of public debt in British cities and to uncover how a lack of public scrutiny increased profits of financial institutes while putting a strain on the public purse….

In detail, civic actors can engage with data infrastructures to:

Identify spaces for intervention. Having cadastral data at hand helped civic actors to identify vacant publicly-owned land, to highlight possibilities for re-using it and to foster community building in neighbourhoods around its re-use.
Open spaces for accountability. Using government’s own accounting measurements may provide civil society with evaluation criteria for the effectiveness of public sector programs. Civil society actors may develop a ‘common ground’ or ‘common language’ for engaging with institutions around the issues that they care about.
Enable scrutiny of official processes, institutional mechanisms and their effects. By opening public loan data, civil society was able to identify how decentralised fiscal audit mechanisms may have negative effects on public debt.
Change the way an issue is framed or perceived. By using aggregated, anonymized data about home addresses of inmates, scholars could shift focus from crime location to the origin of an offender – which helped to address social re-entry programs more effectively.
Mobilise community engagement and civic activism. Including facilitating the assembly and organisation of publics around issues….

You can find the full report here.”

Cities need to innovate to survive. Here are four ways they can do it

Curated on March 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alice Charles: “…The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities chronicled a list of Top 10 Urban Innovations from around the world, that are providing best practice examples of how cities are creating innovative solutions to a variety of urban problems.

Within these innovations, four principles surface again and again. They can be seen as a core framework to find innovative solutions to complex urban problems:

Unleashing spare capacity: Many innovations cleverly make use of existing yet underutilized resources. Airbnb, for example, enables the renting out of unused private homes; co-locating schools and recreational facilities enables public-private sharing of space; and the circular economy provides opportunities to reuse, recycle and upcycle.
Cutting out the peaks: From electricity and water to roads and public transport, upwards of 20% of capacity sits idle for much of the time ready to cope with demand peaks; cutting out these peaks with technology-enabled demand management or innovative pricing structures can significantly limit the burden on financial and natural resources.
Small-scale infrastructure thinking: Cities will always need large-infrastructure projects, but sometimes small-scale infrastructure – from cycle lanes and bike sharing to the planting of trees for climate change adaptation – can also have a big impact on an urban area.
People-centred innovation: The best way to improve a city is by mobilizing its citizens. From smart traffic lights to garbage taxes, innovations in technology, services and governance are not ends in themselves but means to shape the behaviour and improve the lives of the city’s inhabitants. All innovations should be centred on the citizen, adhering to the principles of universal design and usable by people of all ages and abilities.

Cities are expected to provide a better standard of living, increase community cohesion, wellness and happiness while progressing towards sustainable development. To be successful in meeting these requirements, cities need to transform their strategies to include innovation and enable the convergence of the digital and physical dimensions. Cities need to support the design and development of cutting-edge solutions and processes in collaboration with the private sector, scientific research institutions, academia, citizens and start-ups, to maintain the competitive edge, while progressing towards better performance and urban service deliveries….(More)”

Open innovation in the public sector

Curated on February 28, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sabrina Diaz Rato in OpenDemocracy: “For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy – more open, more direct, more interactive – is being developed and embraced. It is a framework that overcomes the closed architecture on which the praxis of governance (closed, hierarchical, one-way) have been cemented in almost all areas. The series The ecosystem of open democracy explores the different aspects of this ongoing transformation….

How can innovation contribute to building an open democracy? The answer is summed up in these ten connectors of innovation.

placing innovation and collective intelligence at the center of public management strategies,
aligning all government areas with clearly-defined goals on associative platforms,
shifting the frontiers of knowledge and action from the institutions to public deliberation on local challenges,
establishing leadership roles, in a language that everyone can easily understand, to organize and plan the wealth of information coming out of citizens’ ideas and to engage those involved in the sustainability of the projects,
mapping the ecosystem and establishing dynamic relations with internal and, particularly, external agents: the citizens,
systematizing the accumulation of information and the creative processes, while communicating progress and giving feedback to the whole community,
preparing society as a whole to experience a new form of governance of the common good,
cooperating with universities, research centers and entrepreneurs in establishing reward mechanisms,
aligning people, technologies, institutions and the narrative with the new urban habits, especially those related to environmental sustainability and public services,
creating education and training programs in tune with the new skills of the 21st century,
building incubation spaces for startups responding to local challenges,
inviting venture capital to generate a satisfactory mix of open innovation, inclusive development policies and local productivity.

Two items in this list are probably the determining factors of any effective innovation process. The first has to do with the correct decision on the mechanisms through which we have pushed the boundaries outwards, so as to bring citizen ideas into the design and co-creation of solutions. This is not an easy task, because it requires a shared organizational mentality on previously non-existent patterns of cooperation, which must now be sustained through dialog and operational dynamics aimed at solving problems defined by external actors – not just any problem.

Another key aspect of the process, related to the breaking down of the institutional barriers that surround and condition action frameworks, is the revaluation of a central figure that we have not yet mentioned here: the policy makers. They are not exactly political leaders or public officials. They are not innovators either. They are the ones within Public Administration who possess highly valuable management skills and knowledge, but who are constantly colliding against the glittering institutional constellations that no longer work….(More)”

From Nairobi to Manila, mobile phones are changing the lives of bus riders

Curated on February 26, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shomik Mehnidrata at Transport for Development Blog: “Every day around the world, millions of people rely on buses to get around. In many cities, these services carry the bulk of urban trips, especially in Africa and Latin America. They are known by many different names—matatus, dalalas, minibus taxis, colectivos, diablos rojos, micros, etc.—but all have one thing in common: they are either hardly regulated… or not regulated at all. Although buses play a critical role in the daily life of many urban dwellers, there are a variety of complaints that have spurred calls for improvement and reform.

However, we are now witnessing a different, more organic kind of change that is disrupting the world of informal buses using ubiquitous cheap sensors and mobile technology. One hotbed of innovation is Nairobi, Kenya’s bustling capital. Two years ago, Nairobi made a splash in the world of urban transport by mapping all the routes of informal matatus. Other countries have sought to replicate this model, with open source tools and crowdsourcing supporting similar efforts in Mexico, Manila, and beyond. Back in Nairobi, the Magic Bus app helps commuters use sms services to reserve and pay for seats in matatus; in September 2016, MagicBus’ potential for easing commuter pain in the Kenyan capital was rewarded with a $1 million prize. Other programs implemented in collaboration with insurers and operators are experimenting with on-board sensors to identify and correct dangerous driver behavior such as sudden braking and acceleration. Ma3Route, also in Nairobi (there is a pattern here!) used crowdsourcing to identify dangerous drivers as well as congestion. At the same time, operators are upping their game: using technology to improve system management, control and routing in La Paz, and working with universities to improve their financial planning and capabilities in Cape Town.

Against this backdrop, the question is then: can these ongoing experimental initiatives offer a coherent alternative to formal reform? …(More)”.

The Paradox of Community Power: Cultural Processes and Elite Authority in Participatory Governance

Curated on February 21, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy R. Levine in Social Forces: “From town halls to public forums, disadvantaged neighborhoods appear more “participatory” than ever. Yet increased participation has not necessarily resulted in increased influence. This article, drawing on a four-year ethnographic study of redevelopment politics in Boston, presents an explanation for the decoupling of participation from the promise of democratic decision-making. I find that poor urban residents gain the appearance of power and status by invoking and policing membership in “the community”—a boundary sometimes, though not always, implicitly defined by race. But this appearance of power is largely an illusion. In public meetings, government officials can reinforce their authority and disempower residents by exploiting the fact that the boundary demarcating “the community” lacks a standardized definition. When officials laud “the community” as an abstract ideal rather than a specific group of people, they reduce “the community process” to a bureaucratic procedure. Residents appear empowered, while officials retain ultimate decision-making authority. I use the tools of cultural sociology to make sense of these findings and conclude with implications for the study of participatory governance and urban inequality….(More)”.

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data….

We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us.

Yet much of the most valuable data resides with the private sector—for example, in the form of click histories, online purchases, sensor data, and call data records. This limits its potential to benefit the public and to turn data into a social asset. Consider how data held by business could help improve policy interventions (such as better urban planning) or resiliency at a time of climate change, or help design better public services to increase food security.

Data responsibility suggests steps that organizations can take to break down these private barriers and foster so-called data collaboratives, or ways to share their proprietary data for the public good. For the private sector, data responsibility represents a new type of corporate social responsibility for the 21st century.

While Nepal’s Ncell belongs to a relatively small group of corporations that have shared their data, there are a few encouraging signs that the practice is gaining momentum. In Jakarta, for example, Twitter exchanged some of its data with researchers who used it to gather and display real-time information about massive floods. The resulting website, PetaJakarta.org, enabled better flood assessment and management processes. And in Senegal, the Data for Development project has brought together leading cellular operators to share anonymous data to identify patterns that could help improve health, agriculture, urban planning, energy, and national statistics.

Examples like this suggest that proprietary data can help improve and save lives. But to fully harness the potential of data, data holders need to fulfill at least three conditions. I call these the “the three pillars of data responsibility.”…

The difficulty of translating insights into results points to some of the larger social, political, and institutional shifts required to achieve the vision of data responsibility in the 21st century. The move from data shielding to data sharing will require that we make a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data. We must incorporate new levels of pro-activeness, and make often-unfamiliar commitments to transparency and accountability.

By way of conclusion, here are four immediate steps—essential but not exhaustive—we can take to move forward:

Data holders should issue a public commitment to data responsibility so that it becomes the default—an expected, standard behavior within organizations.
Organizations should hire data stewards to determine what and when to share, and how to protect and act on data.
We must develop a data responsibility decision tree to assess the value and risk of corporate data along the data lifecycle.
Above all, we need a data responsibility movement; it is time to demand data responsibility to ensure data improves and safeguards people’s lives…(More)”

The chaos of South Africa’s taxi system is being tackled with open data

Curated on February 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lynsey Chutel at Quartz: “On any given day in South Africa’s cities the daily commute can be chaotic and unpredictable. A new open source data platform hopes to bring some order to that—or at least help others get it right.

Contributing to that chaos is a formal public transportation system that is inadequate for a growing urban population and an informal transportation network that whizzes through the streets unregulated. Where Is My Transport has done something unique by finally bringing these two systems together on one map.

Where Is My Transport has mapped Cape Town’s transport systems to create an integrated system, incorporating train, bus and minibus taxi routes. This last one is especially difficult, because the thousands of minibuses that ferry most South Africans are notoriously difficult to pin down.

Minibus taxis seat about 15 people and turn any corner into a bus stop, often halting traffic. They travel within neighborhoods and across the country and are the most affordable means of transport for the majority of South Africans. But they are also often unsafe vehicles, at times involved in horrific road accidents.

Devin De Vries, one of the platform’s co-founders, says he was inspired by the Digital Matatus project in Nairobi. The South African platform differs, however, in that it provides open source information for others who think they may have a solution to South Africa’s troubled public transportation system.

“Transport is a complex ecosystem, and we don’t think any one company will solve it, De Vries told Quartz. “That’s why we made our platform open and hope that many endpoints—apps, websites, et cetera—will draw on the data so people can access it.”

This could lead to trip planning apps like Moovit or Transit for African commuters, or help cities better map their public transportation system, De Vries hopes…(More)”