Purposeful Movement: New Paths through Smart Cities

Beginning this past spring, CoLab began exploring how smart cities can create digital platforms for people, industries, and technologies. We’re interested in how we might create a digital twin of a city, one that parallels its physical and social infrastructures. For inspiration and insights, we spoke with city officials, urban planners, technologists, researchers, and, of course, citizens. Within the extensive history of smart cities, our initial research inspired us to explore four key ways of looking at a city: Movement, Curation, Culture, and Synthesis.

In this post, we’ll explore the first of these themes, Movement.

A screenshot of our Lenscrafter web app prototype, suggesting routes based on prioritized goals in the right-hand column

Chapter 1: Movement

The way people move through cities — commuting, working, playing, exploring, drifting, discovering, shopping — has a huge impact on the cultural and economic health of a city. Many cities look to city planners (or here in Boston, a fictitious bunch of cows) to map out local infrastructure in ways that intend to support that city’s economic, social, environmental, and moral values. They designate residential areas, commercial zones, thoroughfares and side streets, bus routes, public greenways, electricity grids, and more. Each year, city departments analyze historical data to allocate resources and denote plans moving forward. This approach looks to the past in order to predict the future, but new technologies are changing the way people move through cities in real time. Increasingly, we will need new ways to measure, plan, and guide infrastructure usage.

Faster Isn’t Always Better

Today, digital mapping and routing services (such as Google Maps, Uber, and local transportation planning tools) compete via algorithm to help us navigate through a city as quickly, cheaply, and conveniently as possible. At CoLab, we’re curious how these algorithms affect the fabric of our city streets — especially in ways we don’t expect. If Waze can turn a neighborhood side street into a congested commuter route, could another application help people create tranquil pedestrian zones? We’re curious about how we might create our own algorithms to transform city streets in more intentional ways.

To understand this better, we created a (quick and very rough) web app concept that enables people to prioritize elements of their routing algorithm so they can be more thoughtful about how they move through a city.

An early prototype of the Lenscrafter App using mapbox and a snapshot of geoJSON data to inform routing

Temporarily called “Lenscrafter” (yeah, we know), the app captures routing priorities in the form of lenses that the user can stack up in order of priority:

• Love the earth? Lenscrafter finds the route with the lowest carbon footprint.
• Need tranquillity? The app taps into the city’s network of streetlight microphones (used in many cities to detect gunshots) to find the quietest route to your destination.
• Hate crowds? Real-time bus density data can help you find the space you need.
• Want some combination of all these? Stack up lenses in order of priority and let the algorithm find you a custom route that aligns with your values.

We envision these routing lenses being created by a variety of participants: commuters, tourists, city transportation departments, even private companies. Lenses could be posted, shared, subscribed to, and modified by users. Groups of users (or institutions) might put out a set of lenses according to their own goals or points of view. For example, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition might put together a set of lenses that prioritize smooth cycling commutes, safer intersections, or protected bike lanes. A new “Digital Nomad Collective” might prioritize routes that have free public wifi or laptop-friendly cafes. In the hands of these contributors and curators, routes would take on a purpose beyond “fast” or “cheap” and reflect the goals and values of their creators (we’ll return to this idea of curation in the next post in this series).

A mockup of potential “Collectives” that could create and share routing lenses and points of interest according to their shared interests

Here’s the vision. Over time, the new routes Lenscrafter creates could potentially transform our city streets in positive and measurable, but flexible, ways. For example, new bicycle thoroughfares might emerge that provide data the city needs to allocate new bike lanes quickly, based on commute routes that are continually shifting as the economic flow of the city changes. New walking routes might bring foot traffic past a struggling commercial area, transforming a small cafe’s business, potentially justifying a renovation loan from the bank and reinvigorating local commerce.

These new routes and the data can inform a variety of interests:

• City planning departments could track where resources are needed, as they’re needed
• Community organizers could capture real-time snapshots of how streets are being used
• Small businesses could more easily prove their viability to banks and other governmental organizations, getting the additional support they need to thrive

Aligning people’s routes with more inclusive values and goals puts some mission in our movement, and brings meaning to the way we use our city infrastructure.

Big Picture: Cities as Digital Infrastructure

Stepping back from route planning, we’re excited by the potential for smart cities to enable new digital infrastructure for people, organizations, and city departments to engage others with their point of view. In our next segment on smart cities, we’ll look at digital infrastructure through our second prototype theme, Curation, and explore how we might sort and filter the vast amount of data cities can create.