urban planning

Testing governance: the laboratory lives and methods of policy innovation labs

Curated on October 15, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Williamson at Code Acts in Education: “Digital technologies are increasingly playing a significant role in techniques of governance in sectors such as education as well as healthcare, urban management, and in government innovation and citizen engagement in government services. But these technologies need to be sponsored and advocated by particular individuals and groups before they are embedded in these settings.

I have produced a working paper entitled Testing governance: the laboratory lives and methods of policy innovation labs which examines the role of innovation labs as sponsors of new digital technologies of governance. By combining resources and practices from politics, data analysis, media, design, and digital innovation, labs act as experimental R&D labs and practical ideas organizations for solving social and public problems, located in the borderlands between sectors, fields and disciplinary methodologies. Labs are making methods such as data analytics, design thinking and experimentation into a powerful set of governing resources.They are, in other words, making digital methods into key techniques for understanding social and public issues, and in the creation and circulation of solutions to the problems of contemporary governance–in education and elsewhere.

The working paper analyses the key methods and messages of the labs field, in particular by investigating the documentary history of Futurelab, a prototypical lab for education research and innovation that operated in Bristol, UK, between 2002 and 2010, and tracing methodological continuities through the current wave of lab development. Centrally, the working paper explores Futurelab’s contribution to the production and stabilization of a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ of the future of education specifically, and to the future of public services more generally. It offers some preliminary analysis of how such an imaginary was embedded in the ‘laboratory life’ of Futurelab, established through its organizational networks, and operationalized in its digital methods of research and development as well as its modes of communication….(More)”

Governments’ Self-Disruption Challenge

Curated on October 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mohamed A. El-Erian at Project Syndicate: “One of the most difficult challenges facing Western governments today is to enable and channel the transformative – and, for individuals and companies, self-empowering – forces of technological innovation. They will not succeed unless they become more open to creative destruction, allowing not only tools and procedures, but also mindsets, to be revamped and upgraded. The longer it takes them to meet this challenge, the bigger the lost opportunities for current and future generations.
Self-empowering technological innovation is all around us, affecting a growing number of people, sectors, and activities worldwide. Through an ever-increasing number of platforms, it is now easier than ever for households and corporations to access and engage in an expanding range of activities – from urban transportation to accommodation, entertainment, and media. Even the regulation-reinforced, fortress-like walls that have traditionally surrounded finance and medicine are being eroded.

…In fact, Western political and economic structures are, in some ways, specifically designed to resist deep and rapid change, if only to prevent temporary and reversible fluctuations from having an undue influence on underlying systems. This works well when politics and economies are operating in cyclical mode, as they usually have been in the West. But when major structural and secular challenges arise, as is the case today, the advanced countries’ institutional architecture acts as a major obstacle to effective action….Against this background, a rapid and comprehensive transformation is clearly not feasible. (In fact, it may not even be desirable, given the possibility of collateral damage and unintended consequences.) The best option for Western governments is thus to pursue gradual change, propelled by a variety of adaptive instruments, which would reach a critical mass over time.
Such tools include well-designed public-private partnerships, especially when it comes to modernizing infrastructure; disruptive outside advisers – selected not for what they think, but for how they think – in the government decision-making process; mechanisms to strengthen inter-agency coordination so that it enhances, rather than retards, policy responsiveness; and broader cross-border private-sector linkages to enhance multilateral coordination.
How economies function is changing, as relative power shifts from established, centralized forces toward those that respond to the unprecedented empowerment of individuals. If governments are to overcome the challenges they face and maximize the benefits of this shift for their societies, they need to be a lot more open to self-disruption. Otherwise, the transformative forces will leave them and their citizens behind….(More)”

Opening City Hall’s Wallets to Innovation

Curated on September 25, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times: “Six years ago, the city of San Francisco decided to upgrade its streetlights. This is its story: O.K., stop. This is a parody, right? Government procurement is surely too nerdy even for Fixes. Procurement is a clerical task that cities do on autopilot: Decide what you need. Write a mind-numbing couple of dozen pages of specifications. Collect a few bids from the usual suspects. Yep, that’s procurement.But it doesn’t have to be. Instead of a rote purchasing exercise, what if procurement could be a way for cities to find new approaches to their problems?….

“Instead of saying to the marketplace ‘here’s the solution we want,’ we said ‘here’s the challenge, here’s the problem we’re having’,” said Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission. “That opened us up to what other people thought the solution to the problem was, rather than us in our own little world deciding we knew the answer.”

The city got 59 different ideas from businesses in numerous countries. A Swiss company called Paradox won an agreement to do a 12-streetlight pilot test.

So — a happy ending for the scrappy and innovative Paradox? No. Paradox’s system worked, but the city could not award a contract for 18,500 streetlights that way. It held another competition for just the control systems, and tried out three of them. Last year the city issued a traditional R.F.P., using what it learned from the pilots. The contract has not yet been awarded.

Dozens of cities around the world are using problem-based procurement. Barcelona has posed six challenges that it will spend a million euros on, and Moscow announced last year that five percent of city spending would be set aside for innovative procurement. But in the vast majority of cities, as in San Francisco, problem-based procurement is still just for small pilot projects — a novelty.

It will grow, however. This is largely because of the efforts ofCityMart, a company based in New York and Barcelona that has almost single-handedly taken the concept from a neat idea to something cities all over want to figure out how to do.

The concept is new enough that there’s not yet a lot of evidence about its effects. There’s plenty of proof, however, of the deficiencies of business-as-usual.

With the typical R.F.P., a city uses a consultant, working with local officials, to design what to ask for. Then city engineers and lawyers write the specifications, and the R.F.P. goes out for bids.

“If it’s a road safety issue it’s likely it will be the traffic engineers who will be asked to tell you what you can do, what you should invest in,” said Sascha Haselmayer, CityMart’s chief executive. “They tend to come up with things like traffic lights. They do not know there’s a world of entrepreneurs who work on educating drivers better, or that have a different design approach to public space — things that may not fit into the professional profile of the consultant.”

Such a process is guaranteed to be innovation-free. Innovation is far more likely when expertise from one discipline is applied to another. If you want the most creative solution to a traffic problem, ask people who aren’t traffic engineers.

The R.F.P. process itself was designed to give anyone a shot at a contract, but in reality, the winners almost always come from a small group of businesses with the required financial stability, legal know-how to negotiate the bureaucracy, and connections. Put those together, and cities get to consider only a tiny spectrum of the possible solutions to their problems.

Problem-based procurement can provide them with a whole rainbow. But to do that, the process needs clearinghouses — eBays or Craigslists for urban ideas….(More)”

Algorithm predicts and prevents train delays two hours in advance

Curated on September 23, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Transport apps such as Ototo make it easier than ever for passengers to stay informed about problems with public transport, but real-time information can only help so much — by the time users find out about a delayed service, it is often too late to take an alternative route. Now, Stockholmstag — the company that runs Sweden’s trains — have found a solution in the form of an algorithm called ‘The Commuter Prognosis’, which can predict network delays up to two hours in advance, giving train operators time to issue extra services or provide travelers with adequate warning.
The system was created by mathematician Wilhelm Landerholm. It uses historical data to predict how a small delay, even as little as two minutes, will affect the running of the rest of the network. Often the initial late train causes a ripple effect, with subsequent services being delayed to accommodate new platform arrival time, which then affect subsequent trains, and so on. But soon, using ‘The Commuter Prognosis’, Stockholmstag train operators will be able to make the necessary adjustments to prevent this. In addition, the information will be relayed to commuters, enabling them to take a different train and therefore reducing overcrowding. The prediction tool is expected to be put into use in Sweden by the end of the year….(More)”

The era of “Scientific Urban Management” is approaching

Curated on September 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Francesco Ferrero: “As members of the Smart City Strategic Program at Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, we strongly believe in the concept of Scientific Urban Management. This concept means that through new ICT trends such as the massive diffusion of sensors, wireless broadband and tools for data collection and analysis, the administration of urban spaces can get closer to being an exact science, i.e. urban decision-makers can exploit these technologies for practicing evidence based decision making. We are spending quite some efforts in doing research on Decision Support Systems integrating different Modelling & Simulation (M&S) techniques, to better predict and measure the impact of alternative Smart City initiatives on the path towards the social, economic and environmental sustainability target.

We believe that these tools will allow urban decision makers, solution providers and investment managers to predict, on the basis of a scientific approach, what initiatives will better contribute to implement the local Smart City strategies, and to satisfy the real needs of the citizens, thus reducing the risks associated with the deployment of large-scale innovations in the urban context.

Following this research roadmap, we have reached a paramount result on the theme of urban mobility simulation, by means of open-source software and open-data. Our work, done in collaboration with the CNR-IEIIT, University of Bologna and EURECOM has been recently published on IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

Simulation is an important technique to analyse the complex urban mobility system and to develop tools for supporting decision-making on top of it. However the effectiveness of this approach relies on the truthfulness of the mobility traces used to feed the traffic simulators. Furthermore, there is a lack of reference publicly available mobility traces. The main reasons for this lack are that the tools to generate realistic road traffic are complex to configure and operate, and real-world input data to be fed to such tools is hard to retrieve….(More)”

Using Big Data to Understand the Human Condition: The Kavli HUMAN Project

Curated on September 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Azmak Okan et al in the Journal “Big Data”: “Until now, most large-scale studies of humans have either focused on very specific domains of inquiry or have relied on between-subjects approaches. While these previous studies have been invaluable for revealing important biological factors in cardiac health or social factors in retirement choices, no single repository contains anything like a complete record of the health, education, genetics, environmental, and lifestyle profiles of a large group of individuals at the within-subject level. This seems critical today because emerging evidence about the dynamic interplay between biology, behavior, and the environment point to a pressing need for just the kind of large-scale, long-term synoptic dataset that does not yet exist at the within-subject level. At the same time that the need for such a dataset is becoming clear, there is also growing evidence that just such a synoptic dataset may now be obtainable—at least at moderate scale—using contemporary big data approaches. To this end, we introduce the Kavli HUMAN Project (KHP), an effort to aggregate data from 2,500 New York City households in all five boroughs (roughly 10,000 individuals) whose biology and behavior will be measured using an unprecedented array of modalities over 20 years. It will also richly measure environmental conditions and events that KHP members experience using a geographic information system database of unparalleled scale, currently under construction in New York. In this manner, KHP will offer both synoptic and granular views of how human health and behavior coevolve over the life cycle and why they evolve differently for different people. In turn, we argue that this will allow for new discovery-based scientific approaches, rooted in big data analytics, to improving the health and quality of human life, particularly in urban contexts….(More)”

Who you are/where you live: do neighbourhood characteristics explain co-production?

Curated on September 16, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter Thijssen and Wouter Van Dooren in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Co-production establishes an interactive relationship between citizens and public service providers. Successful co-production hence requires the engagement of citizens. Typically, individual characteristics such as age, gender, and income are used to explain why citizens co-produce. In contrast, neighbourhood-level variables receive less attention. Nevertheless, the co-production literature, as well as social capital and urban planning theory, provides good arguments why neighbourhood variables may be relevant. In this study, we examine the administrative records of citizen-initiated contacts in a reporting programme for problems in the public domain. This co-production programme is located in the district of Deurne in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. A multilevel analysis is used to simultaneously assess the impact of neighbourhood characteristics and individual variables. While the individual variables usually found to explain co-production are present in our case, we also find that neighbourhood characteristics significantly explain co-production. Thus, our findings suggest that participation in co-production activities is determined not only by who you are, but also by where you live.

Points for practitioners In order to facilitate co-production and participation, the neighbourhood should be the first place to look. Co-production benefits may disproportionaly accrue to strong citizens, but also to strong neighbourhoods. Social corrections should take both into account. More broadly, a good understanding of the neighbourhoods in the city is needed to grasp citizen behaviour. Place-based policies in the city should focus on the neighbourhood….(More)”

Smarter as the New Urban Agenda: A Comprehensive View of the 21st Century City

Curated on September 15, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives.…(More)”

(US) Administration Announces New “Smart Cities” Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges and Improve City Services

Curated on September 14, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Factsheet from the White House: “Today, the Administration is announcing a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The new initiative is part of this Administration’s overall commitment to target federal resources to meet local needs and support community-led solutions.

Over the past six years, the Administration has pursued a place-based approach to working with communities as they tackle a wide range of challenges, from investing in infrastructure and filling open technology jobs to bolstering community policing. Advances in science and technology have the potential to accelerate these efforts. An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists, and companies are joining forces to build “Smart Cities” – communities that are building an infrastructure to continuously improve the collection, aggregation, and use of data to improve the life of their residents – by harnessing the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research collaborations, and doing so securely to protect safety and privacy.

As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing:

More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed investments to build a research infrastructure for Smart Cities by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Nearly $70 million in new spending and over $45 million in proposed investments to unlock new solutions in safety, energy, climate preparedness, transportation, health and more, by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
More than 20 cities participating in major new multi-city collaborations that will help city leaders effectively collaborate with universities and industry.

Today, the Administration is also hosting a White House Smart Cities Forum, coinciding with Smart Cities Week hosted by the Smart Cities Council, to highlight new steps and brainstorm additional ways that science and technology can support municipal efforts.

The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on key strategies:

Creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models: Technological advancements and the diminishing cost of IT infrastructure have created the potential for an “Internet of Things,” a ubiquitous network of connected devices, smart sensors, and big data analytics. The United States has the opportunity to be a global leader in this field, and cities represent strong potential test beds for development and deployment of Internet of Things applications. Successfully deploying these and other new approaches often depends on new regional collaborations among a diverse array of public and private actors, including industry, academia, and various public entities.
Collaborating with the civic tech movement and forging intercity collaborations: There is a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits interested in harnessing IT to tackle local problems and work directly with city governments. These efforts can help cities leverage their data to develop new capabilities. Collaborations across communities are likewise indispensable for replicating what works in new places.
Leveraging existing Federal activity: From research on sensor networks and cybersecurity to investments in broadband infrastructure and intelligent transportation systems, the Federal government has an existing portfolio of activities that can provide a strong foundation for a Smart Cities effort.
Pursuing international collaboration: Fifty-four percent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Continued population growth and urbanization will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. The associated climate and resource challenges demand innovative approaches. Products and services associated with this market present a significant export opportunity for the U.S., since almost 90 percent of this increase will occur in Africa and Asia.

Complementing this effort, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is examining how a variety of technologies can enhance the future of cities and the quality of life for urban residents. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program is also announcing the release of a new framework to help coordinate Federal agency investments and outside collaborations that will guide foundational research and accelerate the transition into scalable and replicable Smart City approaches. Finally, the Administration’s growing work in this area is reflected in the Science and Technology Priorities Memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy in preparation for the President’s 2017 budget proposal, which includes a focus on cyber-physical systems and Smart Cities….(More)”