Itziar Aspuru et al in Noise Mapping: “The purpose of this research was to design and deploy tools that apply the concept of citizen observatories and empowering citizens in the assessment of acoustic comfort in public places. The research applies an iterative cycle of design and this article presents the results of a demonstrative experiment carried out in situ using the first products developed. This work was undertaken as part of the CITI-SENSE project. A viable technical and procedural solution was designed and tested in a field demonstration, where 53 people were engaged to provide 137 observations in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, using environmental sensors connected to a smartphone. The results have been analyzed and discussed in terms of the product’s attractiveness for engaging citizens in the evaluation of acoustic comfort in urban places, the accuracy of the noise levels measured by the acoustic app service integrated into the smartphone, and its ability to obtain simultaneous acoustic and perception data. The results presented in this article are considered a step forward in the research into developing solutions for assessing acoustic comfort. Limitations of the proposed solution are discussed, as are suggestions for further research….(More)”
Crowdsourcing a Collective Sense of Place
Jenkins A., Croitoru A., Crooks A.T., Stefanidis A. in PLOS: “Place can be generally defined as a location that has been assigned meaning through human experience, and as such it is of multidisciplinary scientific interest. Up to this point place has been studied primarily within the context of social sciences as a theoretical construct. The availability of large amounts of user-generated content, e.g. in the form of social media feeds or Wikipedia contributions, allows us for the first time to computationally analyze and quantify the shared meaning of place. By aggregating references to human activities within urban spaces we can observe the emergence of unique themes that characterize different locations, thus identifying places through their discernible sociocultural signatures. In this paper we present results from a novel quantitative approach to derive such sociocultural signatures from Twitter contributions and also from corresponding Wikipedia entries. By contrasting the two we show how particular thematic characteristics of places (referred to herein as platial themes) are emerging from such crowd-contributed content, allowing us to observe the meaning that the general public, either individually or collectively, is assigning to specific locations. Our approach leverages probabilistic topic modelling, semantic association, and spatial clustering to find locations are conveying a collective sense of place. Deriving and quantifying such meaning allows us to observe how people transform a location to a place and shape its characteristics….(More)”
Drones Marshaled to Drop Lifesaving Supplies Over Rwandan Terrain
From a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, aloud pop signals the catapult launch of a small fixed-wing drone that is designed to carry medical supplies to remote locations almost 40 miles away.
The drones are the brainchild of a small group of engineers at a SiliconValley start-up called Zipline, which plans to begin operating a service with them for the government of Rwanda in July. The fleet of robot planes will initially cover more than half the tiny African nation, creating a highly automated network to shuttle blood and pharmaceuticals to remote locations in hours rather than weeks or months.
Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest nations, was ranked 170th by gross domestic product in 2014 by the International Monetary Fund. And so it is striking that the country will be the first, company executives said, to establish a commercial drone delivery network — putting it ahead of places like the United States, where there have been heavily ballyhooed futuristicdrone delivery systems promising urban and suburban package delivery from tech giants such as Amazon and Google….
That Rwanda is set to become the first country with a drone delivery network illustrates the often uneven nature of the adoption of new technology. In the United States, drones have run into a wall of regulation and conflicting rules. But in Rwanda, the country’s master development plan has placed a priority on the use of the machines, first for medicine and then more broadly for economic development….
The new drone system will initially be capable of making 50 to 150 daily deliveries of blood and emergency medicine to Rwanda’s 21 transfusing facilities, mostly in hospitals and clinics in the western half of the nation.
The drone system is based on a fleet of 15 small aircraft, each with twin electric motors, a 3.5-pound payload and an almost eight-foot wingspan.The system’s speed makes it possible to maintain a “cold chain” —essentially a temperature-controlled supply chain needed to provide blood and vaccines — which is often not practical to establish in developing countries.
The Zipline drones will use GPS receivers to navigate and communicate via the Rwandan cellular network. They will be able to fly in rough weather conditions, enduring winds up to 30 miles per hour….(More)”
Data Mining Reveals the Four Urban Conditions That Create Vibrant City Life
Emerging Technology from the arXiv: “Lack of evidence to city planning has ruined cities all over the world. But data-mining techniques are finally revealing the rules that make cities successful, vibrant places to live. …Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.
Jacobs’s conclusions have become hugely influential. Her ideas have had a significant impact on the development of many modern cities such as Toronto and New York City’s Greenwich Village. However, her ideas have also attracted criticism because of the lack of empirical evidence to back them up, a problem that is widespread in urban planning.
Today, that looks set to change thanks to the work of Marco De Nadai at the University of Trento and a few pals, who have developed a way to gather urban data that they use to test Jacobs’s conditions and how they relate to the vitality of city life. The new approach heralds a new age of city planning in which planners have an objective way of assessing city life and working out how it can be improved.
In her book, Jacobs argues that vibrant activity can only flourish in cities when the physical environment is diverse. This diversity, she says, requires four conditions. The first is that city districts must serve more than two functions so that they attract people with different purposes at different times of the day and night. Second, city blocks must be small with dense intersections that give pedestrians many opportunities to interact. The third condition is that buildings must be diverse in terms of age and form to support a mix of low-rent and high-rent tenants. By contrast, an area with exclusively new buildings can only attract businesses and tenants wealthy enough to support the cost of new building. Finally, a district must have a sufficient density of people and buildings.
While Jacobs’s arguments are persuasive, her critics say there is little evidence to show that these factors are linked with vibrant city life. That changed last year when urban scientists in Seoul, South Korea, published the result of a 10-year study of pedestrian activity in the city at unprecedented resolution. This work successfully tested Jacobs’s ideas for the first time.
However, the data was gathered largely through pedestrian surveys, a process that is time-consuming, costly, and generally impractical for use in most modern cities.
De Nadai and co have come up with a much cheaper and quicker alternative using a new generation of city databases and the way people use social media and mobile phones. The new databases include OpenStreetMap, the collaborative mapping tool; census data, which records populations and building use; land use data, which uses satellite images to classify land use according to various categories; Foursquare data, which records geographic details about personal activity; and mobile-phone records showing the number and frequency of calls in an area.
De Nadai and co gathered this data for six cities in Italy—Rome, Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Palermo.
Their analysis is straightforward. The team used mobile-phone activity as a measure of urban vitality and land-use records, census data, and Foursquare activity as a measure of urban diversity. Their goal was to see how vitality and diversity are correlated in the cities they studied. The results make for interesting reading….(More)
“Streetfight” by Janette Sadik-Khan
Review by Amrita Gupta in Policy Innovations of the book Streetfight: “Janette Sadik-Khan was New York City’s transportation commissioner from 2007-2013. Under her watch, the city’s streets were reimagined and redesigned to include more than 60 plazas and 400 miles of bike lanes—radical changes designed to improve traffic and make spaces safer for everybody. Over seven years, New York City underwent a transportation transformation, played out avenue by avenue, block by block. Times Square went from being the city’s worst traffic nightmare to a two-and-a-half acre outdoor sitting area in 2009. Citi Bike, arguably her biggest success, is the nation’s largest bike share system, and the city’s first new transit system in over half a century. In Streetfight, Sadik-Khan breaks down her achievements into replicable ideas for urban planners and traffic engineers everywhere, and she also reminds us that the fight isn’t over. As part of Bloomberg Associates, she now takes the lessons from New York City’s streets to metropolises around the world.
The old order vs the new order
The crux of the problem, she explains, is that until recently, cities of the future were thought to be cities built for cars, not cities that encouraged human activity on the street.
Understanding what city-building used to mean is key to understanding how our cities are failing us today. Sadik-Khan offers a quick recap of New York City through recent decades. The historical lesson holds; in many ways, cities in every continent grew along a similar trajectory. Streets were designed to keep traffic moving, but not to support the life alongside it. The old order—which Sadik-Khan writes is typified by Robert Moses—took the auto-centric view that pedestrians, public transit, and bike riders were all hindrances in the path of cars.
Sadik-Khan calls for a more equitable and relevant city, one that prioritizes accessibility and convenience for everybody. Her generation of planners aims to transform roads, tunnels, and rail tracks—the legacy hardware of their predecessors—and repurpose them into public spaces to walk, bike, and play.
The strength of the book lies in just how effectively it dispels the misconceptions that most citizens, and indeed, urban planners, have held onto for decades. There are plenty of surprises in Streetfight.
Sadik-Khan shows that people’s ideas about safety can be obsolete. For instance, bike lanes don’t make accidents more likely, they make the streets safer. The statistics show that bike riders actually protect pedestrians by altering the behavior of drivers. Sadik-Khan states that bike ridership in New York City quadrupled from 2000-2012; and as the number of riders increases, so too does the safety of the street.
The assumption, for instance, that reducing lanes or closing them entirely creates gridlock, is entirely wrong. Sadik-Khan’s interventions in New York City —providing pedestrian space and creating fewer but more orderly lanes for vehicles—actually improved traffic. And she uses taxi GPS data to prove it….
In fact, Sadik-Khan makes the claim that the economic power of sustainable streets is probably one of the strongest arguments for implementing dramatic change. Cities need data—think retail rents, shop sales, travel speeds, vehicle counts—to defend their interventions, and then to measure their effectiveness. Yet, she writes, unfortunately there are few cities anywhere that have access to reliable numbers of this kind….
Sadik-Khan emphasizes time and again that change can happen quickly and affordably. She didn’t have to bulldoze neighborhoods, or build new bridges and highways to transform the transportation network of New York City. Planners can reorder a street without destroying a single building.
Streetfight is a handbook that prioritizes paint, planters, signs, and signals over mega-infrastructure projects. We are told that small-scale interventions can have transformative large-scale impacts. Sadik-Khan’s pocket parks, plazas, pedestrian-friendly road redesigns, and parking-protected bike lanes are all the proof we need. For planners in developing countries, this should serve as both guide and encouragement.
Innovation doesn’t need big dollars behind it to be effective, and most ideas are scalable for cities big and small. What it does need, however, is street smarts. Sadik-Khan makes it clear that the key to getting projects to move ahead is support on the ground, and enough political capital to pave the way. Planners everywhere need to encourage participation, invite ideas, and be more transparent about proposals, she writes. But they also need to be willing to put up a fight….(More)”
Pigeon patrol takes flight to tackle London’s air pollution crisis
Adam Vaughan at The Guardian: They’ve been driven from Trafalgar square for being a nuisance, derided as rats with wings and maligned as a risk to public health.
But now pigeons could play a small part in helping Londoners overcome one of the capital’s biggest health problems – its illegal levels of air pollution blamed for thousands of deaths a year.
On Monday, a flock of half a dozen racing pigeons were set loose from a rooftop in Brick Lane by pigeon fancier, Brian Woodhouse, with one strapped with a pollution sensor to its back and one with a GPS tracker.
But while the 25g sensor records the nitrogen dioxide produced by the city’s diesel cars, buses, and trucks and tweets it at anyone who asks for a reading, its real purpose – and the use of the pigeons – is to raise awareness.
“It is a scandal. It is a health and environmental scandal for humans – and pigeons. We’re making the invisible visible,” said Pierre Duquesnoy, who won a London Design Festival award for the idea last year.
“Most of the time when we talk about pollution people think about Beijing or other places, but there are some days in the year when pollution was higher and more toxic in London than Beijing, that’s the reality.”
He said he was inspired by the use of pigeons in the first and second world wars to deliver information and save lives, but they were also a practical way of taking mobile air quality readings and beating London’s congested roads. They fly relatively low, at 100-150ft, and fast, at speeds up to 80mph.
“There’s something about taking what is seen as a flying rat and reversing that into something quite positive,” said Duquesnoy, who is creative director at marketing agency DigitasLBI.
Gary Fuller, an air quality expert at King’s College London, said it was the first time he had heard of urban animals being put to such use.
“It’s great that unemployed pigeons from Trafalgar Square are being put to work. Around 15 years ago tests were done on around 150 stray dogs in Mexico City, showing the ways in which air pollution was affecting lungs and heart health. But this is the first time that I’ve heard of urban wild animals being used to carry sensors to give us a picture of the air pollution over our heads.”
The release of the pigeons for three days this week, dubbed the Pigeon Air Patrol, came as moderate to high pollution affected much of the city, with Battersea recording ‘very high’, the top of the scale.
Elsewhere in the UK, Stockton-on-tees and Middlesbrough recorded high pollution readings and the forecast is for moderate and possibly high pollution in urban areas in northern England and Scotland on Tuesday. Other areas will have low pollution levels….(More).
Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection
Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”
Ideas Help No One on a Shelf. Take Them to the World
Tina Rosenberg at The New York Times: “Have you thought of a clever product to mitigate climate change? Did you invent an ingenious gadget to light African villages at night? Have you come up with a new kind of school, or new ideas for lowering the rate of urban shootings?
Thanks, but we have lots of those.
Whatever problem possesses you, we already have plenty of ways to solve it. Many have been rigorously tested and have a lot of evidence behind them — and yet they’re sitting on a shelf.
So don’t invent something new. If you want to make a contribution, choose one of those ideas — and spread it.
Spreading an idea can mean two different things. One is to take something that’s working in one place and introduce it somewhere else. If you want to reduce infant mortality in Cleveland, why not try what’s working in Baltimore?
Well, you might not know about what’s working because there’s no quick system for finding it.
Even when a few people do search out the answer, innovative ideas don’t spread by themselves. To become well known, they require effort from their originators. For example, a Bogotá, Colombia, maternity hospital invented Kangaroo Care — a method of keeping premature babies warm by strapping them 24/7 to Mom’s chest. It saved a lot of lives in Bogotá. But what allowed it to save lives around the world was a campaign to spread it to other countries.
The Colombians established Fundación Canguro and got grants from wealthy countries to bring groups of doctors and nurses from all over to visit Bogotá for two or three weeks. Once the visitors had gone back and set up a program in their hospital, the foundation loaned them a doctor and nurse to help get them started. Save the Children now leads a global partnership to spread Kangaroo Care, with the goal of reaching half the world.
In short, this work requires dedicated organizations, a smart program and lots of money.
The other meaning of spreading an idea is creating ways to get new inventions out to people who need them.
“When I talk to college students or anyone who’s thinking about entrepreneurship or targeting global poverty, the gadget is where 99 percent of people start thinking,” said Nicholas Fusso, the director of D-Prize (its slogan: “Distribution is development”). “That’s important — but the biggest problems in the poverty world aren’t a lack of gadgets or new products. It’s figuring out how people can have access to them.” So D-Prize gives seed money, in chunks of $10,000 to $20,000, to tiny new organizations that have good ideas for how to distribute useful things.
This analysis may be familiar to regular readers of Fixes. Indeed, the first Fixes column, more than five years ago, focused on distribution: getting health care to people in rural Africa by putting health care workers on motorcycles and keeping the bikes running….
Philanthropists and government aid agencies are only starting to get interested in the challenges of distribution — one new philanthropy that does have this focus is Good Ventures. As for academia, it still rewards invention almost exclusively. “There’s a lot of attention and award-giving and prize-giving and credit to people who come up with fancy new ideas instead of reaching people and having impact,” said Brodbar. “The incentives aren’t aligned. The culture of social entrepreneurship needs to change.”
Recognizing the true value of spreading an idea would also allow people who aren’t inventors (which is most of us) to get involved in social change. “The notion that if you want to engage in [social entrepreneurship] you have to have the big idea does a disservice to this space and people who want to play a role in it,” said Brodbar. “It’s a much wider front door.”…(More)
Facebook Is Making a Map of Everyone in the World
Robinsion Meyer at The Atlantic: “Americans inhabit an intricately mapped world. Type “Burger King” into an online box, and Google will cough up a dozen nearby options, each keyed to a precise latitude and longitude.
But throughout much of the world, local knowledge stays local. While countries might conduct censuses, the data doesn’t go much deeper than the county or province level.
Take population data, for instance: More than 7.4 billion humans sprawl across this planet of ours. They live in dense urban centers, in small towns linked by farms, and alone on the outskirts of jungles. But no one’s sure where, exactly, many of them live.
Now, Facebook says it has mapped almost 2 billion people better than any previous project. The company’s Connectivity Labs announced this week that it created new, high-resolution population-distribution maps of 20 countries, most of which are developing. It won’t release most of the maps until later this year,but if they’re accurate, they will be the best-quality population maps ever made for most of those places.
The maps will be notable for another reason, too: If they’re accurate, they ‘ll signal the arrival of a new, AI-aided age of cartography.
In the rich world, reliable population information is taken for granted. But elsewhere, population-distribution maps have dozens of applications in different fields. Urban planners need to estimate city density so they can place and improve roads. Epidemiologists and public-health workers use them to track outbreaks or analyze access to health care. And after a disaster, population maps can be used (along with crisis mapping) to prioritize where emergency aid gets sent….(More)
The 4 Types of Cities and How to Prepare Them for the Future
John D. Macomber at Harvard Business Review: “The prospect of urban innovation excites the imagination. But dreaming up what a “smart city” will look like in some gleaming future is, by its nature, a utopian exercise. The messy truth is that cities are not the same, and even the most innovative approach can never achieve universal impact. What’s appealing for intellectuals in Copenhagen or Amsterdam is unlikely to help millions of workers in Jakarta or Lagos. To really make a difference, private entrepreneurs and civic entrepreneurs need to match projects to specific circumstances. An effective starting point is to break cities into four segments across two distinctions: legacy vs. new cities, and developed vs. emerging economies. The opportunities to innovate will differ greatly by segment.
Segment 1: Developed Economy, Legacy City
Examples: London, Detroit, Tokyo, Singapore
Characteristics: Any intervention in a legacy city has to dismantle something that existed before — a road or building, or even a regulatory authority or an entrenched service business. Slow demographic growth in developed economies creates a zero-sum situation (which is part of why the licensed cabs vs Uber/Lyft contest is so heated). Elites live in these cities, so solutions arise that primarily help users spend their excess cash. Yelp, Zillow, and Trip Advisor are examples of innovations in this context.
Implications for city leaders: Leaders should try to establish a setting where entrepreneurs can create solutions that improve quality of life — without added government expense. …
Implications for entrepreneurs: Denizens of developed legacy cities have discretionary income. …
Segment 2: Emerging Economy, Legacy City
Examples: Mumbai, São Paolo, Jakarta
Characteristics: Most physical and institutional structures are already in place in these megacities, but with fast-growing populations and severe congestion, there is an opportunity to create value by improving efficiency and livability, and there is a market of customers with cash to pay for these benefits.
Implications for city leaders: Leaders should loosen restrictions so that private finance can invest in improvements to physical infrastructure, to better use what already exists. …
Implications for entrepreneurs: Focus on public-private partnerships (PPP). …
Segment 3: Emerging Economy, New City
Examples: Phu My Hung, Vietnam; Suzhou, China; Astana, Kazakhstan; Singapore (historically)
Characteristics: These cities tend to have high population growth and high growth rates in GDP per capita, demographic and economic tailwinds that help to boost returns. The urban areas have few existing physical or social structures to dismantle as they grow, hence fewer entrenched obstacles to new offerings. There is also immediate ROI for investments in basic services as population moves in, because they capture new revenues from new users. Finally, in these cities there is an important chance to build it right the first time, notably with respect to the roads, bridges, water, and power that will determine both economic competitiveness and quality of life for decades. The downside? If this chance is missed, new urban agglomerations will be characterized by informal sprawl and new settlements will be hard to reach after the fact with power, roads, and sanitation.
Implications for city leaders: Leaders should first focus on building hard infrastructure that will support services such as schools, hospitals, and parks. …
Implications for entrepreneurs: In these cities, it’s too soon to think about optimizing existing infrastructure or establishing amusing ways for wealthy people to spend their disposable income. …
Segment 4: Developed Economy, New City
Examples and characteristics: Such cities are very rare. All the moment, almost all self-proclaimed “new cities” in the developed world are in fact large, integrated real-estate developments with an urban theme, usually in close proximity to a true municipality. Examples of these initiatives include New Songdo City in South Korea, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and Hafen City Hamburg in Germany.
Implications for city leaders: These satellites of existing metropolises compete for jobs and to attract talented participants in the creative economy. ….
Implications for entrepreneurs: Align with city leaders on services that are important to knowledge workers, and help build the cities’ brand. ….
Cities are different. So are solutions….(More)