Cities in the Information Age

The Neighborhood City // 2

Cities are adopting technology to improve public services, but where do we go from here?

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” — Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, speaking at web-summit in 2008

Whether or not you subscribe to Mark Zuckerberg’s predictions about an exponential increase in the amount of information shared, there is no denying that our daily lives are more tied to digital information technologies than ever before. In the real estate industry, more than ninety percent of all homebuyers, renters, and even commercial tenants begin their search for new space using web-based resources.

The way we share information about real estate has a major impact on the city planning and development process. Local market research organizes data to understand the supply and demand for products, goods, and services in a local area. This research is often part of a real estate market analysis, and it ties all of the different groups involved to a common need; a need to know ‘where’.

Location-Based Information

The proliferation of information about place-based elements, such as individual property details, infrastructure, land use, culture, government policies, commercial activities, and socio-economic aspects of an area is leading to better data-driven decision making about specific locations.

A foundational breakthrough in location-based information came in the latter half of the 20th century, with the advent of geospatial data management and map-making technology called a Geographic Information System (GIS). During the 1990’s and 2000’s municipalities of all sizes, as well as other public and private organizations, adopted commercial software called ArcView. ArcView is developed by the technology company ESRI. Local authorities still rely heavily on the desktop platform’s services as a tool to manage location-based information about real estate, city services, and infrastructure.

In addition, new companies such as CARTO, MapBox, MapD, and others, are emerging and improving how mapmakers, consultants, data scientists and government staff approach location-based information. These new companies strive to create more accessible and open source tools for analyzing geospatial data.

“CARTO and Mapbox are the new GIS tech stack. We’re both betting on open data, open source code, and a race to the top for flexibility and functionality.” — Javier de la Torre, Founding CEO of CARTO

The ways city builders and city operators analyze and share information about places in cities are improving as a result of new tools like CARTO and Mapbox. However, these are still inherently technical tools that not all people who build and operate cities are able to make use of. In addition to adoption issues, professionals also need access to accurate data in order for these mapping tools to be useful, and many cities struggle to provide access to high-quality data as a public service.

Open Data

These struggles have not gone unnoticed. There are technology companies focused on improving access to government data, as well as other datasets. Such companies focus on providing “Open Data” portals, or websites designed to make data from government-controlled sources, among others, more accessible and publicly available. A 2013 report on Open Data by the McKinsey Global Institute states, “Open data — public information and shared data from private sources — can help create $3 trillion a year of value in seven areas of the global economy.”

City governments can maintain thousands of datasets, depending on the size of the city. New York City, for example, maintains over 1,600 datasets on the city’s portal as of December 2016. When government datasets are made publicly available online, software engineers and data scientists are able to create useful tools and informative visual aids with the raw data. The interactions that users have with tools built using open data creates new data as a result of user activities.

Many cities now realize the added value of adopting open data policies and maintaining open data portals. As society becomes more reliant on digital interactions, automated services, and cloud-based information technology, cities will continue to create huge amounts of data through the daily operations for government services. Whether they decide to make them public or not may depend on political agendas. Either way, the proliferation of publicly accessible government data sources and better tools to analyze and share the data adds to better information available for the city building process.

Smart Cities

Driving the creation of more government-controlled data at the local level is the Smart Cities movement and the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that support this movement. Physical sensors collecting data on everything from pedestrian and vehicle traffic movements to utility usage rates are influencing how we track the economic and environmental performance of places in urban areas. This insight enables cities to adjust operations accordingly, adding or removing capacity in specific areas. The goal of a “smart city” strategy is to optimize how the city performs. In other words, the goal is to improve our abilities to monitor and control urban systems in order to ultimately provide the best quality of life for citizens in the most efficient and sustainable way possible.

Today, these trends in Open Data and connected Smart Cities devices are perhaps the most relatable trends in the city building process to “Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing”. It isn’t necessarily humans sharing more information each year in this case, but rather all the devices and public services humans are interacting with during their urban lives that are creating more information year over year. And going forward, as cities continue to adopt technology and share more data publicly, this trend is only expected to accelerate.

Technology is enabling cities and local communities to collect new data and information about specific locations. The way we interact with the information and share it is improving. As these trends progress, cities will continue to improve access to data about real estate, public spaces, mobility, and other civic assets and services. Society’s adoption of new technologies like GIS, Open Data portals, and IoT infrastructure supports a better, more open information exchange ecosystem. And it’s at the neighborhood community scale that this new emerging information ecosystem is adding significant value to how people live in cities today.