Cities and APIs, Part 1

5 min readJun 16, 2020

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series. Here is Part 2. Here is my bio.

Cities, Data, and Urban Equity

Today’s cities are not yet inclusive for all. We need new insights driven by accessible urban data to help make cities more equitable.

Cities

As an architecture and global affairs student, I’m very interested where technology and the city intersect.

When I say “the city”, you may picture a random skyline in your head. I rather mean it in a broader sense; perhaps a better word to use is urban space. In fact, the word “city” originates from the Latin civitas, which can be deﬁned as “membership in the community.” Thus urban space refers to a) the built environment of a city, b) its inhabitants, and c) the many relationships negotiated between them.

Before I dive in, here are three examples of various projects and ideas in the realm of urban space to exemplify how broadly (and perhaps un-academically) I am employing the term here.

City Of One Billion by Plan B Architecture + Urbanism: Yale Architecture School dean Bimal Mendis models the world as a single city, a singular urban space of exchanges, flows, and interconnected systems.
Eco Hubs by Green City Force: Brooklyn nonprofit (and my former employer) Green City Force empowering young NYC public housing residents reimagines NYCHA spaces as a nexus of community services, urban farms, and ecosystem services.
The Rise of ‘Urban Tech’ published in CityLab: Urban spaces have become the new tech sector for corporate and venture investment. Think Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Google’s Sidewalk Labs, DoorDash, WeWork, Lime, Instacart.

Data

Another lens through which to view the city is the urban data lens. (As the rise of urban tech portends, Big Tech has already caught on.)

The modern city is inextricably linked to data because nowadays, almost every action and interaction creates data. Examples: A person looking up directions on a phone, a car driving through a traffic light sensor, a system taking in 311 requests. The modern urban space is a blanket of digital information enmeshed with physical space. Thus modern cities need to analyze and respond to urban data in real-time. Around the world, we already see governments making their cities more efficient, livable, and “smarter” by integrating data and digital technology.

To be clear, some data should never be opened to the public. Some data, while useful, should only be available to certain individuals. The question as to what kind of data is acceptable rightly raises ethical concerns such as ownership, use rights, and privacy, and is an important debate for another day.

Urban Equity

If these frustration-laden times offer any silver lining, it has brought into light the inconvenient truth that a reimagining and restructuring of American society is long overdue.

Urban spaces in America were built to oppress and perpetuate racism. “White America has found it all too easy to transpose its capital and beliefs into physical space,” contends architect and design justice advocate Bryan Lee Jr., “allowing the architecture to covertly project power in the name of white supremacy.” Built-in oppression in urban space takes many forms. For example, “Urban renewal” projects of the 1960s gutted non-white communities with highways and steered economic benefits from them. Current poverty rates align with redlined neighborhoods of the 1930s. Today, unreliable access to public transit prevents access to economic opportunities.

Given this reality, as cities become more digitally connected and digitally governed, there is a danger that inequality will deepen as people are left behind. Deploying technology inclusively and generating new insights into urban data can help create more equitable outcomes.

While cities are trying, deep problems persist. Here are some urban equity issues caused by a lack of or little understanding of existing data:

If we can’t predict bottlenecks in election infrastructure in largely minority districts, it can lead to election fraud and disenfranchise voters.
If we don’t have a clear understanding of where urban poverty exists, it can lead to poorly written laws that redirect money intended to lift low-income communities to further gentrify rich neighborhoods.
If we can’t share and make sense of public health data, it can hinder efforts to allocate hospital resources and make sure ambulances are routed to hospitals efficiently. For example, as Elmhurst Hospital was besieged by Covid -19 patients, 3,500 beds were free in other NY hospitals, “some no more than 20 minutes away.”

Data alone cannot erase structural barriers or embolden political will. Yet I hope that better use of existing data can help.

APIs for Cities

API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. Unlike a dataset of values, an API is a piece of software that lets two applications communicate with each other, requesting and receiving data.

APIs matter for cities because they become the invisible infrastructure connecting us to each other and the built urban space, choreographing our daily lives. For example, APIs allow traffic systems and transit lines to communicate with each other and operate in real-time.

Naturally, I went ahead and searched for APIs for urban data…

…and was shocked by the dearth of accessible and publicly available APIs. (While Pokemon, beer, Chuck Norris Facts are real APIs!)

Turns out, this is symptomatic of a persistent problem for cities. These data streams used and generated by APIs sit in separate silos, walled off from collaboration. For example, often, sensor data sitting in a city’s traffic agency never collaborate with data from commonly-used apps like Waze. As is the case for traffic and transit data, similar problems persist across other kinds of urban data like housing and homelessness, voting and civic participation, policing and criminal justice, etc.

Below is a list of some useful APIs and datasets related to cities and urban space. I hope a growing number of city leaders and developers increasingly heed the call for widely accessible data that allow citizens to help communities understand urban equity.

Starter list of APIs!

Census Geocoding API: Returns relevant census information given an address.
GeoDB Cities: Get various data on global city, region, and country.
boundaries-io: Retrieve boundaries of a US Zipcode
Google Civic Information API and AP Elections API can access information about upcoming and ongoing elections
Teleport compiles quality of life data from 250+ cities in the world and builds elegant tools. They also offer APIs for developers.

U.S. cities with open data initiatives with API offerings. Some are robust and some are limited:

Endnotes

Thanks for reading! Any kind of feedback is welcome via email. And special s/o to my awesome instructor Vidhi and TAs Sylvia and Alex!