The Neighborhood City

Local Intelligence to Improve City Building

Decisions about where and when to build buildings, open businesses and invest in public infrastructure are big decisions that have profound impacts on cities at the neighborhood scale. Gone are the days when decisions were based solely on top-down, macro considerations of environmental, economic and social factors. Today’s decision makers recognize the importance of understanding neighborhood dynamics and the authentic characteristics of a place. They realize that local intelligence about a neighborhood provides competitive advantages for economic development, and they look for better ways to collect it and analyze it.

New technologies present better ways to collect and analyze data from local sources. Networks of sensors and wireless communications nodes, as well as cameras and image recognition software, can continuously collect troves of data about how people are interacting with places. Portals for “open data” and data from government sources add helpful insight based on city services, property records and land use. And for data analysis, formerly expensive and complex Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) software is moving to online platforms that are more accessible.

At the neighborhood scale, local community organizations across the US and Canada are equipping themselves with these new technologies. These local groups have the sole job of improving a neighborhood by ensuring a high quality of life in their local area. Their goal is to attract more people to live, work and shop there on behalf of the commercial property owners and tenants. They maintain accurate neighborhood-scale knowledge about all properties, contacts and streetscape conditions in order to achieve this and measure their impact on the local economy.

With these advancements in technology and neighborhood-level engagement, a real opportunity to improve the city building process is taking shape. Better cities will emerge from a process of collaborative community engagement and accurate local knowledge driving development from the neighborhood up.

…Read the full research paper here.

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