Green data dashboard for the citizen, by the citizen, of the citizen
MIT Senseable City Lab made a crowd-sourced green infrastructure data dashboard, ‘Treepedia’.
Street trees are not only for simple components improving urban aesthetics but also an infrastructure for enhancing the natural ecosystem, catching rainwater, and decreasing urban temperature [1]. Therefore, building datasets about trees in the urban area is one of the primary and important steps to improve cities’ resilience. However, creating the dataset from scratch sometimes need a lot of human resources and time. Regarding this, ‘Treepedia’ by MIT Sensible City Lab can be the best option for building the dataset.
Treepedia is a project for measuring how cities’ urban area contains green infrastructure based on Google Street View (GSV). Using a computer vision algorithm, Treepedia quantified green infrastructure of specific locations as Green City Index from panorama views in GSV. Now, Treepedia provides a data dashboard about Green City Index for 27 cities. In addition to this, they opened their code as Github Repository to prompt participation of the public realm [1,2].
Because the project is using ‘Google Street View’, it shows the most universal way to build an urban dataset. In a similar case, the Street Store developed by Media Lab also is based on Street view dataset. Also, by releasing the code and building data sets through crowdsourcing, the project itself has created an evolving data dashboard year by year. Moreover, public participation can be facilitated by providing opportunities to contribute directly to urban projects.
References
[1] MIT Senseable City Lab, Treepedia, Retrieved from http://senseable.mit.edu/treepedia/greenindex/cambridge/pSPBuRighmfSqC59VJEwMA
[2] Mittrees, https://github.com/mittrees/Treepedia_Public
[3] Quirke, J. (2018) MIT launches “Treepedia” to map green coverage around the world’s cities, Global Construction Reveiw, http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/mit-launches-treepedia-map-green-coverage-around-w/
[4] Xiaojiang Li. (2018). Treepedia, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDzQ-zbThSg
