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.”
Seattle Launches Sweeping, Ethics-Based Privacy Overhaul
for the Privacy Advisor: “The City of Seattle this week launched a citywide privacy initiative aimed at providing greater transparency into the city’s data collection and use practices.
To that end, the city has convened a group of stakeholders, the Privacy Advisory Committee, comprising various government departments, to look at the ways the city is using data collected from practices as common as utility bill payments and renewing pet licenses or during the administration of emergency services like police and fire. By this summer, the committee will deliver the City Council suggested principles and a “privacy statement” to provide direction on privacy practices citywide.
In addition, the city has partnered with the University of Washington, where Jan Whittington, assistant professor of urban design and planning and associate director at the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, has been given a $50,000 grant to look at open data, privacy and digital equity and how municipal data collection could harm consumers.
Responsible for all things privacy in this progressive city is Michael Mattmiller, who was hired to the position of chief technology officer (CTO) for the City of Seattle in June. Before his current gig, he worked as a senior strategist in enterprise cloud privacy for Microsoft. He said it’s an exciting time to be at the helm of the office because there’s momentum, there’s talent and there’s intention.
“We’re at this really interesting time where we have a City Council that strongly cares about privacy … We have a new police chief who wants to be very good on privacy … We also have a mayor who is focused on the city being an innovative leader in the way we interact with the public,” he said.
In fact, some City Council members have taken it upon themselves to meet with various groups and coalitions. “We have a really good, solid environment we think we can leverage to do something meaningful,” Mattmiller said….
Armbruster said the end goal is to create policies that will hold weight over time.
“I think when looking at privacy principles, from an ethical foundation, the idea is to create something that will last while technology dances around us,” she said, adding the principles should answer the question, “What do we stand for as a city and how do we want to move forward? So any technology that falls into our laps, we can evaluate and tailor or perhaps take a pass on as it falls under our ethical framework.”
The bottom line, Mattmiller said, is making a decision that says something about Seattle and where it stands.
“How do we craft a privacy policy that establishes who we want to be as a city and how we want to operate?” Mattmiller asked.”
The Future of Cities
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…”