Joel Gurin, The GovLab, at Techonomy: “Start a business. Manage your power use. Find cheap rents, or avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods. Cities and their citizens worldwide are discovering the power of “open data”—public data and information available from government and other sources that can help solve civic problems and create new business opportunities. By opening up data about transportation, education, health care, and more, municipal governments are helping app developers, civil society organizations, and others to find innovative ways to tackle urban problems. For any city that wants to promote entrepreneurship and economic development, open data can be a valuable new resource.
The urban open data movement has been growing for several years, with American cities including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington in the forefront. Now an increasing number of government officials, entrepreneurs, and civic hackers are recognizing the potential of open data. The results have included applications that can be used across many cities as well as those tailored to an individual city’s needs.
At first, the open data movement was driven by a commitment to transparency and accountability. City, state, and local governments have all released data about their finances and operations in the interest of good government and citizen participation. Now some tech companies are providing platforms to make this kind of city data more accessible, useful, and comparable. Companies like OpenGov and Govini make it possible for city managers and residents to examine finances, assess police department overtime, and monitor other factors that let them compare their city’s performance to neighboring municipalities.
Other new businesses are tapping city data to provide residents with useful, practical information. One of the best examples is NextBus, which uses metropolitan transportation data to tell commuters when to expect a bus along their route. Commuter apps like this have become common in cities in the U.S. and around the world. Another website, SpotCrime, collects, analyzes, and maps crime statistics to tell city dwellers which areas are safest or most dangerous and to offer crime alerts. And the Chicago-based Purple Binder helps people in need find city healthcare services. Many companies in the Open Data 500, the study of open data companies that I direct at the GovLab at NYU, use data from cities as well as other sources….
Some of the most ambitious uses of city data—with some of the greatest potential—focus on improving education. In Washington, the nonprofit Learn DC has made data about public schools available through a portal that state agencies, community organizations, and civic hackers can all use. They’re using it for collaborative research and action that, they say, has “empowered every DC parent to participate in shaping the future of the public education system.”…”
When Big Data Maps Your Safest, Shortest Walk Home
Sarah Laskow at NextCity: “Boston University and University of Pittsburgh researchers are trying to do the same thing that got the creators of the app SketchFactor into so much trouble over the summer. They’re trying to show people how to avoid dangerous spots on city streets while walking from one place to another.
“What we are interested in is finding paths that offer trade-offs between safety and distance,” Esther Galbrun, a postdoc at Boston University, recently said in New York at the 3rd International Workshop on Urban Computing, held in conjunction with KDD2014.
She was presenting, “Safe Navigation in Urban Environments,” which describes a set of algorithms that would give a person walking through a city options for getting from one place to another — the shortest path, the safest path and a number of alternatives that balanced between both factors. The paper takes existing algorithms, well defined in theory — nothing new or fancy, Galbrun says — and applies them to a problem that people face everyday.
Imagine, she suggests, that a person is standing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he wants to walk home, to his place on Wharton Street. (Galbrun and her colleagues looked at Philadelphia and Chicago because those cities have made their crime data openly available.) The walk is about three miles away, and one option would be to take the shortest path back. But maybe he’s worried about safety. Maybe he’s willing to take a little bit of a longer walk if it means he has to worry less about crime. What route should he take then?
Services like Google Maps have excelled at finding the shortest, most direct routes from Point A to Point B. But, increasingly, urban computing is looking to capture other aspects of moving about a place. “Fast is only one option,” says co-author Konstantinos Pelechrinis. “There are noble objectives beyond the surface path that you can put inside this navigation problem.” You might look for the path that will burn the most calories; a Yahoo! lab has considered how to send people along the most scenic route.
But working on routes that do more than give simple directions can have its pitfalls. The SketchFactor app relies both on crime data, when it’s available, and crowdsourced comments to reveal potential trouble spots to users. When it was released this summer, tech reporters and other critics immediately started talking about how it could easily become a conduit for racism. (“Sketchy” is, after all, a very subjective measure.)
So far, though, the problem with the SketchFactor app is less that it offers racially skewed perspectives than that the information it does offer is pretty useless — if entertaining. A pinpoint marked “very sketchy” is just as likely to flag an incident like a Jewish man eating pork products or hipster kids making too much noise as it is to flag a mugging.
Here, then, is a clear example of how Big Data has an advantage over Big Anecdata. The SafePath set-up measures risk more objectively and elegantly. It pulls in openly available crime data and considers simple data like time, location and types of crime. While a crime occurs at a discrete point, the researchers wanted to estimate the risk of a crime on every street, at every point. So they use a mathematical tool that smooths out the crime data over the space of the city and allows them to measure the relative risk of witnessing a crime on every street segment in a city….”
The Age of Intelligent Cities: Smart Environments and Innovation-for-all Strategies
New book by Nicos Komninos: “This book concludes a trilogy that began with Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and digital spaces (Routledge 2002) and Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks (Routledge 2008). Together these books examine intelligent cities as environments of innovation and collaborative problem-solving. In this final book, the focus is on planning, strategy and governance of intelligent cities.
Divided into three parts, each section elaborates upon complementary aspects of intelligent city strategy and planning. Part I is about the drivers and architectures of the spatial intelligence of cities, while Part II turns to planning processes and discusses top-down and bottom-up planning for intelligent cities. Cities such as Amsterdam, Manchester, Stockholm and Helsinki are examples of cities that have used bottom-up planning through the gradual implementation of successive initiatives for regeneration. On the other hand, Living PlanIT, Neapolis in Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia intelligent cities have started with the top-down approach, setting up urban operating systems and common central platforms. Part III focuses on intelligent city strategies; how cities should manage the drivers of spatial intelligence, create smart environments, mobilise communities, and offer new solutions to address city problems.
Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.”
Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.”
City 72 Toolkit
“An effective preparedness platform customizable to your city. City72 is an open-source emergency preparedness platform that promotes community resilience and connection. This Toolkit is designed specifically for emergency preparedness organizations and provides the information and resources to create a customized City72 site for any city or region. It includes: how to create localized content, access to the code to build and install your City72 website, and tips for how to manage and promote your site.”
Detroit and Big Data Take on Blight
Susan Crawford in Bloomberg View: “The urban blight that has been plaguing Detroit was, until very recently, made worse by a dearth of information about the problem. No one could tell how many buildings needed fixing or demolition, or how effectively city services were being delivered to them (or not). Today, thanks to the combined efforts of a scrappy small business, tech-savvy city leadership and substantial philanthropic support, the extent of the problem is clear.
The question now is whether Detroit has the heart to use the information to make hard choices about its future.
In the past, when the city foreclosed on properties for failure to pay back taxes, it had no sense of where those properties were clustered. The city would auction off the houses for the bargain-basement price of $500 each, but the auction was entirely undocumented, so neighbors were unaware of investment opportunities, big buyers were gaming the system, and, as often as not, arsonists would then burn the properties down. The result of this blind spot was lost population, lost revenue and even more blight.
Then along came Jerry Paffendorf, a San Francisco transplant, who saw what was needed. His company, Loveland Technologies, started mapping all the tax-foreclosed and auctioned properties. Impressed with Paffendorf’s zeal, the city’s Blight Task Force, established by President Barack Obama and funded by foundations and the state Housing Development Authority, hired his team to visit every property in the city. That led to MotorCityMapping.org, the first user-friendly collection of information about all the attributes of every property in Detroit — including photographs.
Paffendorf calls this map a “scan of the genome of the city.” It shows more than 84,000 blighted structures and vacant lots; in eight neighborhoods, crime, fires and other torments have led to the abandonment of more than a third of houses and businesses. To demolish all those houses, as recommended by the Blight Task Force, will cost almost $2 billion. Still more money will then be needed to repurpose the sites….”
Bloomberg Philanthropies Announces Major New Investment In City Halls' Capacity To Innovate
Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced a new $45 million investment to boost the capacity of city halls to use innovation to tackle major challenges and improve urban life. The foundation will direct significant funding and other assistance to help dozens of cities adopt the Innovation Delivery model, an approach to generating and implementing new ideas that has been tested and refined over the past three years in partnership with city leaders in Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans. …
The foundation has invited over 80 American cities to apply for Innovation Delivery grants. Eligible cities have at least 100,000 residents and mayors with at least two years left in office. Grantees will be selected in the fall. They will receive from $250,000 to $1,000,000 annually over three years, as well as implementation support and peer-to-peer learning opportunities. Newly formed Innovation Delivery Teams will hit the ground running in each city no later than spring 2015.
Innovation Delivery Teams use best-in-class idea generation techniques with a structured, data-driven approach to delivering results. Operating as an in-house innovation consultancy, they have enabled mayors in the original five cities to produce clear results, such as:
Innovation Delivery Teams use best-in-class idea generation techniques with a structured, data-driven approach to delivering results. Operating as an in-house innovation consultancy, they have enabled mayors in the original five cities to produce clear results, such as:
- New Orleans reduced murder in 2013 by 19% compared to the previous year, resulting in the lowest number of murders in New Orleans since 1985.
- Memphis reduced retail vacancy rates by 30% along key commercial corridors.
- Louisville redirected 26% of low-severity 911 medical calls to a doctor’s office or immediate care center instead of requiring an ambulance trip to the emergency room.
- Chicago cut the licensing time for new restaurants by 33%; more than 1,000 new restaurants have opened since the Team began its work.
- Atlanta moved 1,022 chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing, quickly establishing itself as a national leader.
“Innovation Delivery has been an essential part of our effort to bring innovation, efficiency and improved services to our customers,” said Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer. “Philanthropy can play an important role in expanding the capacity of cities to deliver better, bolder results. Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of few foundations investing in this area, and it has truly been a game changer for our city.”
In addition to direct investments in cities, Bloomberg Philanthropies will fund technical assistance, research and evaluation, and partnerships with organizations to further spread the Innovation Delivery approach. The Innovation Delivery Playbook, which details the approach and some experiences of the original cities with which Bloomberg Philanthropies partnered, is available at: www.bloomberg.org …”
Smart cities: moving beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems
Paper by Robert Goodspeed in the Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society: This article makes three related arguments. First, that although many definitions of the smart city have been proposed, corporate promoters say a smart city uses information technology to pursue efficient systems through real-time monitoring and control. Second, this definition is not new and equivalent to the idea of urban cybernetics debated in the 1970s. Third, drawing on a discussion of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center, I argue that viewing urban problems as wicked problems allows for more fundamental solutions than urban cybernetics, but requires local innovation and stakeholder participation. Therefore the last section describes institutions for municipal innovation and IT-enabled collaborative planning.”
City Service Development Kit (CitySDK)
What is CitySDK?: “Helping cities to open their data and giving developers the tools they need, the CitySDK aims for a step change in how to deliver services in urban environments. With governments around the world looking at open data as a kick start for their economies, CitySDK provides better and easier ways for the cities throughout the Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to re-use.
Taking the best practices around the world the project will foresee the development of a toolkit – CitySDK v1.0 – that can be used by any city looking to create a sustainable infrastructure of “city apps”.
Piloting the CitySDK
The Project focuses on three Pilot domains: Smart Participation, Smart Mobility and Smart Tourism. Within each of the three domains, a large-scale Lead Pilot is carried out in one city. The experiences of the Lead Pilot will be applied in the Replication Pilots in other Partner cities.
Funding
CitySDK is a 6.8 million Euro project, part funded by the European Commission. It is a Pilot Type B within the ICT Policy Support Programme of the Competitiveness and Framework Programme. It runs from January 2012-October 2014.”
The city as living labortory: A playground for the innovative development of smart city applications
Paper by Veeckman, Carina and van der Graaf, Shenja: “Nowadays the smart-city concept is shifting from a top-down, mere technological approach towards bottom-up processes that are based on the participation of creative citizens, research organisations and companies. Here, the city acts as an urban innovation ecosystem in which smart applications, open government data and new modes of participation are fostering innovation in the city. However, detailed analyses on how to manage smart city initiatives as well as descriptions of underlying challenges and barriers seem still scarce. Therefore, this paper investigates four, collaborative smart city initiatives in Europe to learn how cities can optimize the citizen’s involvement in the context of open innovation. The analytical framework focuses on the innovation ecosystem and the civic capacities to engage in the public domain. Findings show that public service delivery can be co-designed between the city and citizens, if different toolkits aligned with the specific capacities and skills of the users are provided. By providing the right tools, even ordinary citizens can take a much more active role in the evolution of their cities and generate solutions from which both the city and everyday urban life can possibly benefit.”
Transforming Performance Measurement for the 21st Century
Paper by Harry P. Hatry at the Urban Institute: “While substantial progress has been made in spreading performance measurement across the country and world, much of the information from performance measurement systems has been shallow. Modern technology and the considerable demand for information on progress in achieving the outcomes of public programs and policies are creating major opportunities for considerably improving the usefulness of performance information. This report provides a number of recommendations to help public and private service organizations take advantage of these opportunities, particularly for:(a) selecting appropriate performance indicators and data collection procedures; (b) analyzing and reporting the information; and (c) using the information to improve services. Read complete document: 
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