That next phase, which some call the Internet of Things and which we call the Internet of Everything, is the intelligent connection of people, processes, data, and things. Although it once seemed like a far-off idea, it is becoming a reality for businesses, governments, and academic institutions worldwide. Today, half the world’s population has access to the Internet; by 2020, two-thirds will be connected. Likewise, some 13.5 billion devices are connected to the Internet today; by 2020, we expect that number to climb to 50 billion. The things that are—and will be—connected aren’t just traditional devices, such as computers, tablets, and phones, but also parking spaces and alarm clocks, railroad tracks, street lights, garbage cans, and components of jet engines.
All of these connections are already generating massive amounts of digital data—and it doubles every two years. New tools will collect and share that data (some 15,000 applications are developed each week!) and, with analytics, that can be turned into information, intelligence, and even wisdom, enabling everyone to make better decisions, be more productive, and have more enriching experiences.
And the value that it will bring will be epic. In fact, the Internet of Everything has the potential to create $19 trillion in value over the next decade. For the global private sector, this equates to a 21 percent potential aggregate increase in corporate profits—or $14.4 trillion. The global public sector will benefit as well, using the Internet of Everything as a vehicle for the digitization of cities and countries. This will improve efficiency and cut costs, resulting in as much as $4.6 trillion of total value. Beyond that, it will help (and already is helping) address some of the world’s most vexing challenges: aging and growing populations rapidly moving to urban centers; growing demand for increasingly limited natural resources; and massive rebalancing in economic growth between briskly growing emerging market countries and slowing developed countries….”
Urban Observatory Is Snapping 9,000 Images A Day Of New York City
FastCo-Exist: “Astronomers have long built observatories to capture the night sky and beyond. Now researchers at NYU are borrowing astronomy’s methods and turning their cameras towards Manhattan’s famous skyline.
NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress has been running what’s likely the world’s first “urban observatory” of its kind for about a year. From atop a tall building in downtown Brooklyn (NYU won’t say its address, due to security concerns), two cameras—one regular one and one that captures infrared wavelengths—take panoramic images of lower and midtown Manhattan. One photo is snapped every 10 seconds. That’s 8,640 images a day, or more than 3 million since the project began (or about 50 terabytes of data).
NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress has been running what’s likely the world’s first “urban observatory” of its kind for about a year. From atop a tall building in downtown Brooklyn (NYU won’t say its address, due to security concerns), two cameras—one regular one and one that captures infrared wavelengths—take panoramic images of lower and midtown Manhattan. One photo is snapped every 10 seconds. That’s 8,640 images a day, or more than 3 million since the project began (or about 50 terabytes of data).
“The real power of the urban observatory is that you have this synoptic imaging. By synoptic imaging, I mean these large swaths of the city,” says the project’s chief scientist Gregory Dobler, a former astrophysicist at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara who now heads the 15-person observatory team at NYU.
Dobler’s team is collaborating with New York City officials on the project, which is now expanding to set up stations that study other parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its major goal is to discover information about the urban landscape that can’t be seen at other scales. Such data could lead to applications like tracking which buildings are leaking energy (with the infrared camera), or measuring occupancy patterns of buildings at night, or perhaps detecting releases of toxic chemicals in an emergency.
The video above is an example. The top panel cycles through a one-minute slice of observatory images. The bottom panel is an analysis of the same images in which everything that remains static in each image is removed, such as buildings, trees, and roads. What’s left is an imprint of everything in flux within the scene—the clouds, the cars on the FDR Drive, the boat moving down the East River, and, importantly, a plume of smoke that puffs out of a building.
“Periodically, a building will burp,” says Dobler. “It’s hard to see the puffs of smoke . . . but we can isolate that plume and essentially identify it.” (As Dobler has done by highlighting it in red in the top panel).
To the natural privacy concerns about this kind of program, Dobler emphasizes that the pictures are only from an 8 megapixel camera (the same found in the iPhone 6) and aren’t clear enough to see inside a window or make out individuals. As a further privacy safeguard, the images are analyzed to only look at “aggregate” measures—such as the patterns of nighttime energy usage—rather than specific buildings. “We’re not really interested in looking at a given building, and saying, hey, these guys are particular offenders,” he says (He also says the team is not looking at uses for the data in security applications.) However, Dobler was not able to answer a question as to whether the project’s partners at city agencies are able to access data analysis for individual buildings….”
Nine Lessons for Bridging the Gap between Cities and Citizens
Soren Gigler at the Worldbank Blog: “…
But what does this mean in praxis? What are some of the bottlenecks and pitfalls of such an approach?
Here are nine lessons learned from our work on Open Government and Citizen Engagement programs 
around the world.
- Open Government is more than just making Government more open and transparent. It is about rebalancing the “governance” and power structure between government institutions, civil society, the private sector and citizens.
- Openness and accountability of government is the basis for building a relationship of trust for effective civic participation. It can fundamentally alter the relationship between government and citizens.
- Open Government programs are not effective if they are not embedded into a much broader institutional and cultural changes within government and fully integrated into the governments overall economic and social development goals.
- New technologies can be powerful enablers to strengthen existing transparency and social accountability mechanisms that empower citizens and traditionally excluded groups. Technologies by themselves, however, are not transformational; they need to be closely embedded into the different local socio-political context and amplify existing social accountability and governance processes.
- Enhancing the capabilities of the urban poor, youth and minorities to engage in policy debates is equally important as strengthening the capacity of government institutions to effectively respond to citizen engagement.
- Effective Open Government programs not only enhance the openness and responsiveness of governments however also fosters the inclusiveness of institutions.
- It’s critical to recognize that Open Government initiatives are not just about learning how to better listen to citizens. It’s also about how to become more responsive to them and their expressed needs.
- Civil society plays a central role in enhancing government accountability. They can form effective bridges between government and citizens. Improved government openness does not translate automatically into the effective uses of information by citizens. CSOs are critical ‘infomediaries’ that can strengthen the capabilities of poor communities to better access information, evaluate and act upon the provided information.
- A genuine process of political and institutional reforms can grow out of an effective alliance between reform-minded policymakers, civil society and private sector leaders. Thus, open governance reforms need to be driven by the local socio-economic, political and cultural context….”
Mapping the Age of Every Building in Manhattan
Kriston Capps at CityLab: “The Harlem Renaissance was the epicenter of new movements in dance, poetry, painting, and literature, and its impact still registers in all those art forms. If you want to trace the Harlem Renaissance, though, best look to Harlem itself.
Many if not most of the buildings in Harlem today rose between 1900 and 1940—and a new mapping tool called Urban Layers reveals exactly where and when. Harlem boasts very few of the oldest buildings in Manhattan today, but it does represent the island’s densest concentration of buildings constructed during the Great Migration.
Thanks to Morphocode‘s Urban Layers, it’s possible to locate nearly every 19th-century building still standing in Manhattan today. That’s just one of the things that you can isolate with the map, which combines two New York City building datasets (PLUTO and Building Footprints) and Mapbox GL JS vector technology to generate an interactive architectural history.
So, looking specifically at Harlem again (with some of the Upper West Side thrown in for good measure), it’s easy to see that very few of the buildings that went up between 1765 to 1860 still stand today….”
From the smart city to the wise city: The role of universities in place-based leadership
Paper by Hambleton, R.: “For a variety of reasons the notion of the smart city has grown in popularity and some even claim that all cities now have to be ‘smart’. For example, some digital enthusiasts argue that advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are ushering in a new era in which pervasive electronic connections will inevitably lead to significant changes that make cities more liveable and more democratic. This paper will cast a critical eye over these claims. It will unpack the smart city rhetoric and show that, in fact, three competing perspectives are struggling for ascendancy within the smart cities discourse: 1) The digital city (emphasising a strong commitment to the use of ICT in governance), 2) The green city (reflecting the growing use of the US phrase smart growth, which is concerned to apply sound urban planning principles), and 3) The learning city (emphasising the way in which cities learn, network and innovate). Five digital danger zones will be identified and discussed. This analysis will suggest that scholars and policy makers who wish to improve the quality of life in cities should focus their attention on wisdom, not smartness. Civic leaders need to exercise judgement based on values if they are to create inclusive, sustainable cities. It is not enough to be clever, quick, ingenious, nor will it help if Big Data is superseded by Even Bigger Data. Universities can play a much more active role in place-based leadership in the cities where they are located. To do this effectively they need to reconsider the nature of modern scholarship. The paper will show how a growing number of universities are doing precisely this. Two respected examples will be presented to show how urban universities, if they are committed to engaged scholarship, can make a significant contribution to the creation of the wise city.”
Quantifying the Livable City
Brian Libby at City Lab: “By the time Constantine Kontokosta got involved with New York City’s Hudson Yards development, it was already on track to be historically big and ambitious.
Over the course of the next decade, developers from New York’s Related Companies and Canada-based Oxford Properties Group are building the largest real-estate development in United States history: a 28-acre neighborhood on Manhattan’s far West Side over a Long Island Rail Road yard, with some 17 million square feet of new commercial, residential, and retail space.
Hudson Yards is also being planned as an innovative model of efficiency. Its waste management systems, for example, will utilize a vast vacuum-tube system to collect garbage from each building into a central terminal, meaning no loud garbage trucks traversing the streets by night. Onsite power generation will prevent blackouts like those during Hurricane Sandy, and buildings will be connected through a micro-grid that allows them to share power with each other.
Yet it was Kontokosta, the deputy director of academics at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), who conceived of Hudson Yards as what is now being called the nation’s first “quantified community.” This entails an unprecedentedly wide array of data being collected—not just on energy and water consumption, but real-time greenhouse gas emissions and airborne pollutants, measured with tools like hyper-spectral imagery.
New York has led the way in recent years with its urban data collection. In 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed Local Law 84, which requires privately owned buildings over 50,000 square feet in size to provide annual benchmark reports on their energy and water use. Unlike a LEED rating or similar, which declares a building green when it opens, the city benchmarking is a continuous assessment of its operations…”
Chicago uses big data to save itself from urban ills
Aviva Rutkin in the New Scientist: “THIS year in Chicago, some kids will get lead poisoning from the paint or pipes in their homes. Some restaurants will cook food in unsanitary conditions and, here and there, a street corner will be suddenly overrun with rats. These kinds of dangers are hard to avoid in a city of more than 2.5 million people. The problem is, no one knows for certain where or when they will pop up.
The Chicago city government is hoping to change that by knitting powerful predictive models into its everyday city inspections. Its latest project, currently in pilot tests, analyses factors such as home inspection records and census data, and uses the results to guess which buildings are likely to cause lead poisoning in children – a problem that affects around 500,000 children in the US each year. The idea is to identify trouble spots before kids are exposed to dangerous lead levels.
“We are able to prevent problems instead of just respond to them,” says Jay Bhatt, chief innovation officer at the Chicago Department of Public Health. “These models are just the beginning of the use of predictive analytics in public health and we are excited to be at the forefront of these efforts.”
Chicago’s projects are based on the thinking that cities already have what they need to raise their municipal IQ: piles and piles of data. In 2012, city officials built WindyGrid, a platform that collected data like historical facts about buildings and up-to-date streams such as bus locations, tweets and 911 calls. The project was designed as a proof of concept and was never released publicly but it led to another, called Plenario, that allowed the public to access the data via an online portal.
The experience of building those tools has led to more practical applications. For example, one tool matches calls to the city’s municipal hotline complaining about rats with conditions that draw rats to a particular area, such as excessive moisture from a leaking pipe, or with an increase in complaints about garbage. This allows officials to proactively deploy sanitation crews to potential hotspots. It seems to be working: last year, resident requests for rodent control dropped by 15 per cent.
Some predictions are trickier to get right. Charlie Catlett, director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data in Chicago, is investigating an old axiom among city cops: that violent crime tends to spike when there’s a sudden jump in temperature. But he’s finding it difficult to test its validity in the absence of a plausible theory for why it might be the case. “For a lot of things about cities, we don’t have that underlying theory that tells us why cities work the way they do,” says Catlett.
Still, predictive modelling is maturing, as other cities succeed in using it to tackle urban ills….Such efforts can be a boon for cities, making them more productive, efficient and safe, says Rob Kitchin of Maynooth University in Ireland, who helped launched a real-time data site for Dublin last month called the Dublin Dashboard. But he cautions that there’s a limit to how far these systems can aid us. Knowing that a particular street corner is likely to be overrun with rats tomorrow doesn’t address what caused the infestation in the first place. “You might be able to create a sticking plaster or be able to manage it more efficiently, but you’re not going to be able to solve the deep structural problems….”
The Role Of Open Data In Choosing Neighborhood
PlaceILive Blog: “To what extent is it important to get familiar with our environment?
If we think about how the world surrounding us has changed throughout the years, it is not so unreasonable that, while walking to work, we might encounter some new little shops, restaurants, or gas stations we had never noticed before. Likewise, how many times did we wander about for hours just to find green spaces for a run? And the only one we noticed was even more polluted than other urban areas!
Citizens are not always properly informed about the evolution of the places they live in. And that is why it would be crucial for people to be constantly up-to-date with accurate information of the neighborhood they have chosen or are going to choose.
London is a neat evidence of how transparency in providing data is basic in order to succeed as a Smart City.
The GLA’s London Datastore, for instance, is a public platform of datasets revealing updated figures on the main services offered by the town, in addition to population’s lifestyle and environmental risks. These data are then made more easily accessible to the community through the London Dashboard.
The importance of dispensing free information can be also proved by the integration of maps, which constitute an efficient means of geolocation. Consulting a map where it’s easy to find all the services you need as close as possible can be significant in the search for a location.
(source: Smart London Plan)
The Open Data Index, published by The Open Knowledge Foundation in 2013, is another useful tool for data retrieval: it showcases a rank of different countries in the world with scores based on openness and availability of data attributes such as transport timetables and national statistics.
Here it is possible to check UK Open Data Census and US City Open Data Census.
As it was stated, making open data available and easily findable online not only represented a success for US cities but favoured apps makers and civic hackers too. Lauren Reid, a spokesperson at Code for America, reported according to Government Technology: “The more data we have, the better picture we have of the open data landscape.”
That is, on the whole, what Place I Live puts the biggest effort into: fostering a new awareness of the environment by providing free information, in order to support citizens willing to choose the best place they can live.
The outcome is soon explained. The website’s homepage offers visitors the chance to type address of their interest, displaying an overview of neighborhood parameters’ evaluation and a Life Quality Index calculated for every point on the map.
The research of the nearest medical institutions, schools or ATMs thus gets immediate and clear, as well as the survey about community’s generic information. Moreover, data’s reliability and accessibility are constantly examined by a strong team of professionals with high competence in data analysis, mapping, IT architecture and global markets.
For the moment the company’s work is focused on London, Berlin, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, while higher goals to reach include more than 200 cities.
US Open Data Census finally saw San Francisco’s highest score achievement as a proof of the city’s labour in putting technological expertise at everyone’s disposal, along with the task of fulfilling users’ needs through meticulous selections of datasets. This challenge seems to be successfully overcome by San Francisco’s new investment, partnering with the University of Chicago, in a data analytics dashboard on sustainability performance statistics named Sustainable Systems Framework, which is expected to be released in beta version by the the end of 2015’s first quarter.
Another remarkable collaboration in Open Data’s spread comes from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of the University College London (UCL); Oliver O’Brien, researcher at UCL Department of Geography and software developer at the CASA, is indeed one of the contributors to this cause.
Among his products, an interesting accomplishment is London’s CityDashboard, a real-time reports’ control panel in terms of spatial data. The web page also allows to visualize the whole data translated into a simplified map and to look at other UK cities’ dashboards.
Plus, his Bike Share Map is a live global view to bicycle sharing systems in over a hundred towns around the world, since bike sharing has recently drawn a greater public attention as an original form of transportation, in Europe and China above all….”
3D printed maps could help the blind navigate their city
Springwise: “Modern technology has turned many of the things we consume from physical objects into pixels on a screen. While this has benefited the majority of us, those with sight difficulties don’t get along well with visual stimuli or touchscreen devices. In the past, we’ve seen Yahoo! Japan develop Hands On Search, a project that lets blind kids carry out web searches with 3D printed results. Now the country’s governmental department GSI is creating software that will enable those with visual impairments to print out 3D versions of online maps.
The official mapping body for Japan — much like the US Geological Survey — GSI already has paper maps for the blind, using embossed surfaces to mark out roads. It’s now developing a program that is able to do the same thing for digital maps.
The software first differentiates the highways, railway lines and walkways from the rest of the landscape. It then creates a 3D relief model that uses different textures to distinguish the features so that anyone running their finger along them will be able to determine what it is. The program also takes into account contour lines, creating accurate topographical representations of a particular area….
Website: www.gsi.go.jp“
Re-imagining Cities
In cities around the world, digital platforms are bringing together citizens and service providers in innovative ways. In a recent post on Medium Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief of R&D and Julia Root, Adjunct Fellow at the GovLab write about the ways in which we observe cities re-imagining themselves. We point to four distinct ways that cities are redefining how they plan, build and invest in their futures. Each way deploys a different set of technologies and tools that when combined with urban thinking and design, is changing not just our urban environments, but the pace of change as well.
Read full article here.