Big data is adding a whole new dimension to public spaces – here’s how


 at the Conversation: “Most of us encounter public spaces in our daily lives: whether it’s physical space (a sidewalk, a bench, or a road), a visual element (a panorama, a cityscape) or a mode of transport (bus, train or bike share). But over the past two decades, digital technologies such as smart phones and the internet of things are adding extra layers of information to our public spaces, and transforming the urban environment.

Traditionally, public spaces have been carefully designed by urban planners and architects, and managed by private companies or public bodies. The theory goes that people’s attention and behaviour in public spaces can be guided by the way that architects plan the built environment. Take, for example, Leicester Square in London: the layout of green areas, pathways and benches makes it clear where people are supposed to walk, sit down and look at the natural elements. The public space is a given, which people receive and use within the terms and guidelines provided.

While these ideas are still relevant today, information is now another key material in public spaces. It changes the way that people experience the city. Uber shows us the position of its closest drivers, even when they’re out of sight; route-finding apps such as Google Maps helps us to navigate through unfamiliar territory; Pokemon Go places otherworldly creatures on the pavement right before our eyes.

But we’re not just receiving information – we’re also generating it. Whether you’re “liking” something on Facebook, searching Google, shopping online, or even exchanging an email address for Wi-Fi access; all of the data created by these actions are collected, stored, managed, analysed and brokered to generate monetary value.

Data deluge

But as well as creating profits for private companies, these data provide accurate and continuous updates of how society is evolving, which can be used by governments and designers to manage and design public spaces.

Before big data, the architects designed spaces based on mere assumptions about how people were likely to use them. Success was measured by “small”, localised data methods, such as post-occupancy evaluations, where built projects are observed during their use and assessed against the designers’ original intentions, as well as fitness for purpose and performance. For the most part, the people who used public spaces did not have a say in how they were designed or managed….(More)”

‘Access Map’


Lisa Stiffler at GeekWire: “Waze, HERE, Apple Maps, Google Maps. The list of sites and apps to help you navigate the fastest driving route keeps growing. If you’re hoofing it, however, you’ve largely been on your own to figure out a safe and speedy pedestrian path.

But now walkers are starting to catch up to cars in the realm of mapping apps thanks to the University of Washington’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology.

The group today is releasing an online tool called Access Map that will allow Seattle pedestrians to enter addresses and generate customized walking directions. Users can request maps that include only routes with sidewalks with sloped “curb cuts” that allow strollers and wheelchairs to easily pass, and that bypass construction sites and exclude the steepest streets.

The UW researchers are additionally creating tools to help other cities and communities build their own maps. They’re also working on a project with Seattle Public Schools to help families crowdsource and discover safer routes for kids walking to school….

In an attempt to make it easier for others to follow in their footsteps, the UW researchers recently launched their OpenSidewalks project, which will create a set of standards for mapping pedestrian routes….(More)”

Participatory budgeting in Indonesia: past, present and future


IDS Practice Paper by Francesca Feruglio and Ahmad Rifai: “In 2015, Yayasan Kota Kita (Our City Foundation), an Indonesian civil society organisation, applied to Making All Voices Count for a practitioner research and learning grant.

Kota Kita is an organisation of governance practitioners who focus on urban planning and citizen participation in the design and development of cities. Following several years of experience with participatory budgeting in Solo city, their research set out to examine participatory budgeting processes in six Indonesian cities, to inform their work – and the work of others – strengthening citizen participation in urban governance.

Their research looked at:

  • the current status of participatory budgeting in six Indonesian cities
  • the barriers and enablers to implementing participatory budgeting
  • how government and CSOs can help make participatory budgeting more transparent, inclusive and impactful.This practice paper describes Kota Kita and its work in more detail, and reflects on the history and evolution of participatory budgeting in Indonesia. In doing so, it contextualises some of the findings of the research, and discusses their implications.

    Key Themes in this Paper

  • What are the risks and opportunities of institutionalising participation?
  • How do access to information and use of new technologies have an impact onparticipation in budget planning processes?
  • What does it take for participatory budgeting to be an empowering process for citizens?
  • How can participatory budgeting include hard-to-reach citizens and accommodate different citizens’ needs? …(More)”.

The City as a Lab: Open Innovation Meets the Collaborative Economy


Introduction to Special Issue of California Management Review by , and : “This article introduces the special issue on the increasing role of cities as a driver for (open) innovation and entrepreneurship. It frames the innovation space being cultivated by proactive cities. Drawing on the diverse papers selected in this special issue, this introduction explores a series of tensions that are emerging as innovators and entrepreneurs seek to engage with local governments and citizens in an effort to improve the quality of life and promote local economic growth…Urbanization, the democratization of innovation and technology, and collaboration are converging paradigms helping to drive entrepreneurship and innovation in urban areas around the globe. These three factors are converging to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in cities and have been referred to as the urbanpreneur spiral….(More)”figure

Open-Sourcing Google Earth Enterprise


Geo Developers Blog: “We are excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Google Earth Enterprise (GEE), the enterprise product that allows developers to build and host their own private maps and 3D globes. With this release, GEE Fusion, GEE Server, and GEE Portable Server source code (all 470,000+ lines!) will be published on GitHub under the Apache2 license in March.

Originally launched in 2006, Google Earth Enterprise provides customers the ability to build and host private, on-premise versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. In March 2015, we announced the deprecation of the product and the end of all sales. To provide ample time for customers to transition, we have provided a two year maintenance period ending on March 22, 2017. During this maintenance period, product updates have been regularly shipped and technical support has been available to licensed customers….

GCP is increasingly used as a source for geospatial data. Google’s Earth Engine has made available over a petabyte of raster datasets which are readily accessible and available to the public on Google Cloud Storage. Additionally, Google uses Cloud Storage to provide data to customers who purchase Google Imagerytoday. Having access to massive amounts of geospatial data, on the same platform as your flexible compute and storage, makes generating high quality Google Earth Enterprise Databases and Portables easier and faster than ever.

We will be sharing a series of white papers and other technical resources to make it as frictionless as possible to get open source GEE up and running on Google Cloud Platform. We are excited about the possibilities that open-sourcing enables, and we trust this is good news for our community. We will be sharing more information when we launch the code in March on GitHub. For general product information, visit the Google Earth Enterprise Help Center. Review the essential and advanced training for how to use Google Earth Enterprise, or learn more about the benefits of Google Cloud Platform….(More)”

Quantifying scenic areas using crowdsourced data


Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe, Helen Susannah Moat and Tobias Preis in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science: “For centuries, philosophers, policy-makers and urban planners have debated whether aesthetically pleasing surroundings can improve our wellbeing. To date, quantifying how scenic an area is has proved challenging, due to the difficulty of gathering large-scale measurements of scenicness. In this study we ask whether images uploaded to the website Flickr, combined with crowdsourced geographic data from OpenStreetMap, can help us estimate how scenic people consider an area to be. We validate our findings using crowdsourced data from Scenic-Or-Not, a website where users rate the scenicness of photos from all around Great Britain. We find that models including crowdsourced data from Flickr and OpenStreetMap can generate more accurate estimates of scenicness than models that consider only basic census measurements such as population density or whether an area is urban or rural. Our results provide evidence that by exploiting the vast quantity of data generated on the Internet, scientists and policy-makers may be able to develop a better understanding of people’s subjective experience of the environment in which they live….(More)”

Policy Diffusion at the Local Level: Participatory Budgeting in Estonia


 and  in Urban Affairs Review: “The existing studies on participatory budgeting (PB) have paid very limited attention to how this participatory tool has spread across local governments (LGs), what kind of diffusion mechanisms have played a predominant role, and which actors and factors have influenced its adoption. Our article seeks to address this gap in the scholarly discussion by exploring the diffusion of PB across LGs in Estonia, where it is a rather new phenomenon. Our qualitative study demonstrates that the diffusion of PB in Estonia has so far been driven by the interaction of two mechanisms: learning and imitation. We also find that an epistemic go-between, information-technological solutions, and the characteristics of the initial adopter played a significant role in shaping the diffusion process….(More)”

Tinder for cities: how tech is making urban planning more inclusive


 at The Guardian: “Imagine if next time you saw a plan for an oversized monster tower block proposed for your street, you could get out your smartphone and swipe left to oppose it? Or see a carefully designed scheme for a new neighbourhood library and swipe right to support it?

Tinder for urban planning might sound far-fetched, but it is already being trialled in the sun-kissed Californian city of Santa Monica. City authorities are trying to gauge public opinion on everything from street furniture and parking, to murals and market stalls for their forthcoming urban plan, using a digital tool modelled on a dating app.

CitySwipe presents local residents with images of potential scenarios and simple yes/no questions, encouraging people to swipe through the options, as if assessing prospective partners. For the time being, it’s fairly basic: a photo of some street art appears with a caption asking: “Do you want more of this?” Folding cafe tables and chairs are shown next to pink park benches, asking: “Which do you prefer?”

It might sound superficial, but the questions move on to attitudes towards walking, bike lanes, housing and beyond. It makes the consultation process effortless, compared with the usual feedback mechanisms of filling in lengthy mailed-out response forms, downloading wordy PDFs, or being accosted by a chirpy volunteer with a clipboard.

It is one of the many tech tools cropping up in the world of town planning, in a bid to make what has always been an opaque and notoriously confusing system more transparent, inclusive and efficient for the public, planners and developers alike….

US platform Flux Metro has taken the idea a step further and built a 3D model that integrates zoning information with financial viability algorithms, to predict the likely profitability of a scheme in any given scenario. It allows developers to visualise a site’s context and constraints, including building heights and shadows, to inform what might be possible to build….(More)”

Urban Exposures: How Cell Phone Data Helps Us Better Understand Human Exposure To Air Pollution


Senseable City Lab: “Global urbanization has led to one of the world’s most pressing environmental health concerns: the increasing number of people contributing to and being affected by air pollution, leading to 7 million early deaths each year. The key issue is human exposure to pollution within cities and the consequential effects on human health.

With new research conducted at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, human exposure to air pollution can now be accurately quantified at an unprecedented scale. Researchers mapped the movements of several million people using ubiquitous cell phone data, and intersected this information with neighborhood air pollution measures. Covering the expanse of New York City and its 8.5 million inhabitants, the study reveals where and when New Yorkers are most at risk of exposure to air pollution – with major implications for environment and public health policy… (More)”

The Hackable City: Citymaking in a Platform Society Authors


Martijn de Waal, Michiel de Lange, and Matthijs Bouw in Special Issue on 4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Toolkit for the Open-Source City of Architectural Design: ” Can computer hacking have positive parallels in the shaping of the built environment? The Hackable City research project was set up with this question in mind, to investigate the potential of digital platforms to open up the citymaking process. Its cofounders Martijn de Waal, Michiel de Lange and Matthijs Bouw here outline the tendencies that their studies of collaborative urban development initiatives around the world have revealed, and ask whether knowledge sharing and incremental change might be a better way forward than top-down masterplans….(More)”