Shawn DuBravac at Re/Code: “Smog, sewage and congestion are three of the hallmarks of contemporary urban living. But these downsides to city living are gradually becoming things of the past. City planners are finding new ways to address these inefficiencies, leveraging connected technology to create smarter hubs that work for city dwellers.
Welcome to the era of “smart” cities. Advances in wireless sensor systems, information and communication technology (ICT), and infrastructure allow cities to collect and curate huge amounts of data capable of sustaining and improving urban life thanks to the new and ever-growing web of connected technology: The Internet of Things (IoT).
Last year, Los Angeles became the first city in the world to synchronize its traffic lights — all 4,500 of them — reducing traffic time on major LA corridors by about 12 percent, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. In Singapore, city authorities are testing smart systems for managing parking and waste disposal to adjust to daily and weekly patterns. In New York City, mobile air pollution monitors help city leaders pinpoint those neighborhoods most affected by smog and pollutants, so residents can modify their commuting paths and preferred modes of transportation to avoid exposure to higher levels of pollution.
And cities across the U.S. — including Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — are hiring chief technology officers to oversee broad implementation of digital systems and technologies. As more and more city functions evolve from analog to digital, it makes sense for municipalities to put the improvement, functionality and security of those systems into one department. These city CTOs will quickly become indispensable cabinet positions….”
Here’s What Happens When Community Input Meets Great Ideas
People4Smarter Cities: “Making Connections for Positive Change in Communities: New York-based Ioby is connecting community change-makers with resources. The organization, which stands for “In our back yard,” offers an online crowd-resourcing platform aimed at matching up people working on neighborhood ecological and environmental projects with citizens who can offer either financial or physical support. Current projects on the online platform include creating urban gardens in Harlem to provide healthful, organic food to children living in the area, while another seeks to build fitness zones for individuals with physical and developmental disabilities.
Aiming to Make the Grade in D.C.: In Washington, D.C., citizens can choose whether the local government passes or fails. Through a program launched by the city called Grade D.C., feedback and comments by residents on their interaction with municipal services and departments are culled from the Grade D.C. website and social-media outlets. A third-party firm then uses an algorithm to convert the feedback into a score and a letter grade ranging from A to F. The grades are posted online each month for about 15 agencies. The city says its goal is to help citizens offer actionable feedback and help government agencies improve the quality of customer care.
When Citizens Want a Piece of the ACTion: For residents of Alexandria, Virginia, who want to improve their community, waiting for local issues to solve themselves isn’t an option. With the citizen-created online platform ACTion Alexandria, they can team up with others to share ideas, debate solutions and take action simply by connecting through the portal. Residents can go to the site’s Challenge section to propose solutions to community problems posted by locals. When an idea receives substantial community support, the website tries to rally others around the idea. Meanwhile, the platform’s Action Center lists projects already underway that need a helping hand….More at People4Smarter Cities”
Test-tube government
The Economist: “INCUBATORS, accelerators, garages, laboratories: the best big companies have had them for years. Whatever the moniker (The Economist once had one called “Project Red Stripe”), in most cases a select few workers are liberated from the daily grind and encouraged to invent the future. Now such innovation units are becoming de rigueur in the public sector too: Boston has an Office of New Urban Mechanics; Denmark has a MindLab; and Singapore has the more prosaically named PS21 Office.
These government laboratories provide a bridge between the public and private sectors. Sometimes governments simply copy what private firms are doing. MindLab is based on the Future Centre, the innovation unit of Skandia, a big insurance firm. Sometimes they get money and advice from private sources: the New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team is partly funded by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York city and one of America’s biggest media tycoons. Whatever the connection, these units plug the public sector into a new world. They are full of people talking about “disruption” and “iteration”.
The units also provide a connection with academia. Britain’s Behavioural Insights Team, originally based in the Cabinet Office, was the world’s first government outfit dedicated to applying the insights of behavioural economics to public policy (it was known as the “nudge unit”, after the book “Nudge”, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein). David Halpern, the group’s head, says that its mission was to point out the “small details” of policy that can have big consequences (see Free Exchange). It persuaded, for instance, HM Revenue & Customs, Britain’s tax collection agency, to tweak the words of a routine letter to say that most people in the recipient’s local area had already paid their taxes. As a result, payment rates increased by five percentage points.
A new report published by Nesta, a British charity devoted to promoting innovation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies shows how popular these government innovation labs have become. They can be found in a striking variety of places, from developing countries such as Malaysia to rich countries like Finland, and in the offices of mayors as well as the halls of central government.
Whatever their location, the study suggests they go about things in similar ways, with a lot of emphasis on harnessing technology. The most popular idea is co-creation—getting one’s customers to help invent and improve products and services. Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics has produced a series of apps which provide citizens with a convenient way of reporting problems such as graffiti and pot holes (by taking a photograph and sending it to city hall, users provide it with evidence and GPS co-ordinates). The staff-suggestion scheme introduced by PS21 in Singapore has produced striking results: one air-force engineer came up with the idea of scanning aircraft for leaks with ultraviolet light, just as opticians scan the cornea for scratches….
The most striking thing about these institutions, however, is their willingness to experiment. Policymakers usually alternate between hostility to new ideas and determination to implement a new policy without bothering to try it out first. Innovation centres tend to be both more daring and happy to test things. Sitra, for instance, is experimenting with health kiosks in shopping centres which are staffed by nurses, provide routine care and stay open late and on weekends. The Centre for Social Innovation in Colombia has developed computer games which are designed to teach pre-teenagers to make sensible choices about everything from nutrition to gang membership. Sitra also tracks the progress of each project that it funds against its stated goals….”
How to Fingerprint a City
at BigThink: “Thanks to Big Data, a new “Science of Cities” is emerging. Urban processes that until now could only be perceived subjectively can finally be quantified. Point in case: two French scientists have developed a mathematical formula to ‘fingerprint’ cities.
Take a good, close look at your fingertips. The pattern of grooves and ridges on your skin there [1] is yours alone. Equally unique is the warp and weft of urban road networks. No two cities’ street grids are exactly alike. Some are famously distinct. The forensic urbanist in all of us can probably recognise a blind map of New York, London and a few other global metropolises.
Rémi Louf and Marc Barthelemy examined the street patterns of 131 cities around the world. Not to learn them by heart and impress their fellow scientists at the Institut de Physique Théorique near Paris – although that would be a neat parlor trick. They wanted to see if it would be possible to classify them into distinct types. The title of their paper, A Typology of Street Patterns, is a bit of a giveaway: the answer is Yes.
Before we get to the How, let’s hear them explain the Why:
“[Street and road] networks can be thought as a simplified schematic view of cities, which captures a large part of their structure and organization and contain a large amount of information about underlying and universal mechanisms at play in their formation and evolution. Extracting common patterns between cities is a way towards the identification of these underlying mechanisms. At stake is the question of the processes behind the so-called ‘organic’ patterns – which grow in response to local constraints – and whether they are preferable to the planned patterns which are designed under large scale constraints”.
There have been attempts before to classify urban networks, but the results have always been colored by the subjectivity of what Louf and Barthelemy call the ‘Space Syntax Community’. That’s all changed now: Big Data – in this case, the mass digitization of street maps – makes it possible to extract common patterns from street grids in an objective manner, as dispassionately as the study of tree leaves according to their venation. …
Read their entire paper here.“
Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology
By Julia Root and Stefaan Verhulst
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of civic innovation was originally published in 2014.
The last five years have seen a wave of new organizations, entrepreneurs and investment in cities and the field of civic innovation. Two subfields, Civic Tech and Government Innovation, are particularly aligned with GovLab’s interest in the ways in which technology is and can be deployed to redesign public institutions and re-imagine governance.
The emerging field of civic technology, or “Civic Tech,” champions new digital platforms, open data and collaboration tools for transforming government service delivery and engagement with citizens. Government Innovation, while not a new field, has seen in the last five years a proliferation of new structures (e.g. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), roles (e.g. Chief Technology/Innovation Officer) and public/private investment (e.g. Innovation Delivery Teams and Code for America Fellows) that are building a world-wide movement for transforming how government thinks about and designs services for its citizens.
There is no set definition for “civic innovation.” However, broadly speaking, it is about improving our cities through the implementation of tools, ideas and engagement methods that strengthen the relationship between government and citizens. The civic innovation field encompasses diverse actors from across the public, private and nonprofit spectrums. These can include government leaders, nonprofit and foundation professionals, urbanists, technologists, researchers, business leaders and community organizers, each of whom may use the term in a different way, but ultimately are seeking to disrupt how cities and public institutions solve problems and invest in solutions.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work – a report that creates a typology for the new innovation offices cropping up in cities and government agencies across the country.
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow – a white paper on the field of civic innovation and how it is defined by different stakeholders in the field.
- Bloomberg Philanthropies – Transform Your City Through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model For Making It Happen – a playbook for implementing an Innovation Delivery Team in your city.
- Jeremy M. Goldberg – Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation – an article that highlights new forms of public/private partnership in the field of civic innovation.
- Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford – The Responsive City – a comprehensive book of case studies from Boston, Chicago, and New York that document how digital technologies are transforming the relationship between city governments and citizens.
- Jessica Mulholland and Noelle Knell – Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map) – an article that maps the new role for innovation officers in municipal government.
- Open Plans – Field Scan on Civic Technology – a 2012 report from Living Cities that provides one of the first overviews and set of recommendations for the civic tech field.
- Mayur Patel, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley and Daniel Houghton – Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology – a report that maps the field of civic tech, charts overall investment, clusters organizations into shared themes and offers robust examples of activity and impact.
- Anthony M. Townsend – Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia – a book exploring the diversity of motivations, challenges and potential benefits of smart cities in our “era of mass urbanization and technological ubiquity.”
Annotated Selected Readings (in alphabetical order)
Books
Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. 1 edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014. http://bit.ly/1zvKOL0.
- The Responsive City, a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age, is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level.
- The “data smart city” is one that is responsive to citizens, engages them in problem solving and finds new innovative solutions for dismantling entrenched bureaucracy.
- The authors document case studies from New York City, Boston and Chicago to explore the following topics:
- Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;
- Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;
- Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
- Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.
Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://bit.ly/17Y4G0R.
- In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
- He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
- He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure; instead, it is how citizens are using ever-changing and grassroots technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient” that will make cities ‘smart.’
Reports + Journal Articles
Black, Alissa, and Rachel Burstein. “The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow.” White Paper. New America Foundation – California Civic Innovation Project, June 2013. https://bit.ly/2GohMvw.
- Through their interviews, the authors determine that civic innovation is not just a “compilation of projects” but that it can inspire institutional structural change.
- Civic innovation projects that have a “technology focus can sound very different than process-related innovations”; however the outcomes are actually quite similar as they disrupt how citizens and government engage with one another.
- Technology is viewed by some of the experts as an enabler of civic innovation – not necessarily the driver for innovation itself. What constitutes innovation is how new tools are implemented by government or by civic groups that changes the governing dynamic.
Patel, Mayur, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley, and Daniel Houghton. “Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology.” Presentation. Knight Foundation, December 2013. http://slidesha.re/11UYgO0.
- This reports aims to advance the field of civic technology, which compared to the tech industry as a whole is relatively young. It maps the field, creating a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector.
- It defines two themes, Open Government and Civic Action, and identifies 11 clusters of civic tech innovation that fall into the two themes. For each cluster, the authors describe the type of activities and highlights specific organizations.
- The report identified more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013.
Open Plans. “Field Scan on Civic Technology.” Living Cities, November 2012. http://bit.ly/1HGjGih.
- Commissioned by Living Cities and authored by Open Plans, the Field Scan investigates the emergent field of civic technology and generates the first analysis of the potential impact for the field as well as a critique for how tools and new methods need to be more inclusive of low-income communities in their use and implementation.
- Respondents generally agreed that the tools developed and in use in cities so far are demonstrations of the potential power of civic tech, but that these tools don’t yet go far enough.
- Civic tech tools have the potential to improve the lives of low-income people in a number of ways. However, these tools often fail to reach the population they are intended to benefit. To better understand this challenge, civic tech for low-income people must be considered in the broader context of their interactions with technology and with government.
- Although hackathons are popular, their approach to problem solving is not always driven by community needs, and hackathons often do not produce useful material for governments or citizens in need.
Goldberg, Jeremy M. “Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation.” Governing, August 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOKnhJ.
- In this piece, Goldberg argues that innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets.
- Organizations and Fellowship programs such as Bayes Impact, Code for America, Data Science for Social Good and Fuse Corps, are creating a new public-private partnership model that is bringing new talent into city hall, increasing innovation capacity and engagement with diverse networks.
Black, Alissa, and Burstein, Rachel. “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work.” IBM Center for the Business of Government, October 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOFZP4.
- In this report, Burstein and Black examine the recent trend toward the creation of innovation offices across the nation at all levels of government to understand the structural models now being used to stimulate innovation—both internally within an agency, and externally for the agency’s partners and communities.
- The authors conducted interviews with leadership of innovation offices of cities that include Philadelphia, Austin, Kansas City, Chicago, Davis, Memphis and Los Angeles.
- The report cites examples of offices, generates a typology for the field, links to projects and highlights success factors.
Mulholland, Jessica, and Noelle Knell. “Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map).” Government Technology, March 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ycArvX.
- This article provides an overview of how different cities structure their Chief Innovation Officer positions and provides links to offices, projects and additional editorial content.
- Some innovation officers find their duties merged with traditional CIO responsibilities, as is the case in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. Others, like those in Louisville and Nashville, have titles that reveal a link to their jurisdiction’s economic development endeavors.
Toolkits
Bloomberg Philanthropies. January 2014. “Transform Your City through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model for Making It Happen.” New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies. http://bloombg.org/120VrKB.
- In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies funded a three-year innovation capacity program in five major United States cities— Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans – in which cities could hire top-level staff to develop and see through the implementation of solutions to top mayoral priorities such as customer service, murder, homelessness, and economic development, using a sequence of steps.
- The Innovation Delivery Team Playbook describes the Innovation Delivery Model and describes each aspect of the model from how to hire and structure the team, to how to manage roundtables and run competitions.
Can Government Mine Tweets to Assess Public Opinion?
What if instead of going to a city meeting, you could go on Twitter, tweet your opinion, and still be heard by those in government? New research suggests this is a possibility.
The Urban Attitudes Lab at Tufts University has conducted research on accessing “big data” on social networking sites for civic purposes, according to Justin Hollander, associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts.
About six months ago, Hollander began researching new ways of accessing how people think about the places they live, work and play. “We’re looking to see how tapping into social media data to understand attitudes and opinions can benefit both urban planning and public policy,” he said.
Harnessing natural comments — there are about one billion tweets per day — could help governments learn what people are saying and feeling, said Hollander. And while formal types of data can be used as proxies for how happy people are, people openly share their sentiments on social networking sites.
Twitter and other social media sites can also provide information in an unobtrusive way. “The idea is that we can capture a potentially more valid and reliable view [of people’s] opinions about the world,” he said. As an inexact science, social science relies on a wide range of data sources to inform research, including surveys, interviews and focus groups; but people respond to being the subject of study, possibly affecting outcomes, Hollander said.
Hollander is also interested in extracting data from social sites because it can be done on a 24/7 basis, which means not having to wait for government to administer surveys, like the Decennial Census. Information from Twitter can also be connected to place; Hollander has approximated that about 10 percent of all tweets are geotagged to location.
In its first study earlier this year, the lab looked at using big data to learn about people’s sentiments and civic interests in New Bedford, Mass., comparing Twitter messages with the city’s published meeting minutes.
To extract tweets over a six-week period from February to April, researchers used the lab’s own software to capture 122,186 tweets geotagged within the city that also had words pertaining to the New Bedford area. Hollander said anyone can get API information from Twitter to also mine data from an area as small as a neighborhood containing a couple hundred houses.
Researchers used IBM’s SPSS Modeler software, comparing this to custom-designed software, to leverage a sentiment dictionary of nearly 3,000 words, assigning a sentiment score to each phrase — ranging from -5 for awful feelings to +5 for feelings of elation. The lab did this for the Twitter messages, and found that about 7 percent were positive versus 5.5 percent negative, and correspondingly in the minutes, 1.7 percent were positive and .7 percent negative. In total, about 11,000 messages contained sentiments.
The lab also used NVivo qualitative software to analyze 24 key words in a one-year sample of the city’s meeting minutes. By searching for the same words in Twitter posts, the researchers found that “school,” “health,” “safety,” “parks,” “field” and “children” were used frequently across both mediums.
….
Next up for the lab is a new study contrasting Twitter posts from four Massachusetts cities with the recent election results.
Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies
Nanette Byrnes at MIT Technology Review: “Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful examples of cities that have used their technology to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cities already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.
To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direction are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep government support.
The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air-conditioning and pneumatic waste disposal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpensive and flexible digital technologies….”
A New Taxonomy of Smart City Projects
New paper by Guido Perboli et al: “City logistics proposes an integrated vision of freight transportation systems within urban area and it aims at the optimization of them as a whole in terms of efficiency, security, safety, viability and environmental sustainability. Recently, this perspective has been extended by the Smart City concept in order to include other aspects of city management: building, energy, environment, government, living, mobility, education, health and so on. At the best of our knowledge, a classification of Smart City Projects has not been created yet. This paper introduces such a classification, highlighting success factors and analyzing new trends in Smart City.”
Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Webcast of Book release by G. Thomas Kingsley Claudia J. Coulton, and Kathryn L. S. Pettit: “Efforts to address the problems of distressed urban neighborhoods stretch back to the 1800s, but until relatively recently, data played little role in forming policy solutions. Published by the Urban Institute with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the new book Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data documents how government and nonprofit institutions have used information about neighborhood conditions to change the way we think about community and local governance in America.”
Get a free copy of Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Spain is trialling city monitoring using sound
Springwise: “There’s more traffic on today’s city streets than there ever has been, and managing it all can prove to be a headache for local authorities and transport bodies. In the past, we’ve seen the City of Calgary in Canada detect drivers’ Bluetooth signals to develop a map of traffic congestion. Now the EAR-IT project in Santander, Spain, is using acoustic sensors to measure the sounds of city streets and determine real time activity on the ground.
Launched as part of the autonomous community’s SmartSantander initiative, the experimental scheme placed hundreds of acoustic processing units around the region. These pick up the sounds being made in any given area and, when processed through an audio recognition engine, can provide data about what’s going on on the street. Smaller ‘motes’ were also developed to provide more accurate location information about each sound.
Created by members of Portugal’s UNINOVA institute and IT consultants EGlobalMark, the system was able to use city noises to detect things such as traffic congestion, parking availability and the location of emergency vehicles based on their sirens. It could then automatically trigger smart signs to display up-to-date information, for example.
The team particularly focused on a junction near the city hospital that’s a hotspot for motor accidents. Rather than force ambulance drivers to risk passing through a red light and into lateral traffic, the sensors were able to detect when and where an emergency vehicle was coming through and automatically change the lights in their favor.
The system could also be used to pick up ‘sonic events’ such as gunshots or explosions and detect their location. The researchers have also trialled an indoor version that can sense if an elderly resident has fallen over or to turn lights off when the room becomes silent.”