Welcome to inCitu!
We accelerate urban development, bringing design out of city hall and into communities.
inCitu’s augmented reality platform brings 3D building models into their urban context, allowing designers, citizens, and elected representatives to see and participate in the process of urban change.
City planning is too slow, too expensive, too non-transparent, and too inaccurate for the pace of change required in cities today. Facing climate change and mass urbanization, cities in the 21st Century must adapt FAST, and EFFECTIVELY. In order to do so, we have to make city planning SMART. Welcome to inCitu: a smart AR city planning accelerator that uses feedback from crowd sourcing through augmented reality to create a complex adaptive system of city planning that is highly efficient, accurate and transparent.
In the next few weeks we will detail our work and progress in this blog. Follow us!
Who we are?
inCitu is a spinoff of DRAW Brooklyn, an innovative design studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, combining architecture, urban planning and urban data to produce change in cities. Alexandros Washburn is the founder of DRAW Brooklyn and the former Chief Urban Designer of the New York City Department of City Planning. Alex is a global expert in how cities can use technology to improve their quality of life while meeting the challenges of growth during climate change. He is the author of The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience.
We bring vast domain knowledge of city planning and data analysis, and integrate innovative technologies and tools to build our process. We work with local communities, academia, complementary startups and city agencies to test, validate and improve our tool in order to best revolutionize city planning worldwide.
Our Process
(1) AR: Transparency and Trust
Why Augmented Reality? Well, for us, architects and planners, the built environment carries so much information. For us, buildings speak. But most people do not naturally translate plans, sketches, maps and zoning codes into a clear understanding of their surrounding. Furthermore, most people do not have the time or resources to effectively participate in city planning. Many people feel that city planning is just bigger than they can perceive, or worse than that — that their voice doesn’t count.
Renowned urban theorist Jane Jacobs called herself “just a mother with big glasses”, though she revolutionized city planning when she stood up in the early 1960’s to Robert Moses and organized her community to fight for their neighborhood’s character. Community planning was born.
Fast forward 50-years… communities face a new challenge, trying to stand up to tech giants and huge developments that they never saw coming. Jane Jacobs and her followers need new, better glasses.
InCitu lets anyone see any project proposed for their neighborhood on site in augmented reality. InCitu lets anyone see the effects of that project on them and their neighbors. Most important, InCitu lets them join in the planning of change. Because as Jane Jacobs said: Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because and only when, they are created by everybody.
(2) Data analytics: Accuracy and Efficiency
Mission #2: Develop a real-time, automated, data-driven framework to assess environmental outcomes and impact of planning proposals. We apply data science to the very core of city planning process to make it iterative, accurate, and highly effective.
DRAW Brooklyn is hosting this Spring (2019) a 10-week long internship for urban data science graduates from NYU CUSP and Cornell Tech to build the digital, smart platform of cities’ environmental assessments .To start, we used the framework of City Environmental Quality Review, or “CEQR,” as our baseline.
CEQR is New York City’s process by which agencies of the City of New York review proposed discretionary actions to identify and disclose the potential effects those actions may have on the environment. The CEQR analysis, including 19 different chapters, is very time consuming; it is done AFTER a zoning proposal is conceived.
By digitizing the analysis of environmental outcomes of a proposal, the environmental assessment can be completed in real time. This has the effect of transforming what was previously a disclosure document into a design tool which can be used to iteratively modify proposals while tracking their predicted outcomes.
Check out our “digital CEQR” github repo.
(3) Combine the two
Eventually, the AR tool and the back-end analytics of planning outcomes would come together into the complete inCitu city planning accelerator tool, used daily by residents, planners and policy makers to build a future that reflects our shared goals as a resilient society.
inCitu is a powerful tool. We don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. The giant tech companies already have their version and they are acting like the Robert Moses of our era. Someone needs to confront them. With inCitu, we hope to empower the next Jane Jacobs, to create a community where everybody feels they have the power to change their neighborhood for the better, in ways big and small.
Next post: inCitu first Demo to Red Hook Community!
Last month, we participated with community members to visualize possible futures for a model block in Red Hook, to see options for change in augmented reality on site and use the experience to evaluate how we reach a goal of a mixed-use, mixed income neighborhood. We teamed up with the awesome Geopogo and Magic Leap to demonstrate inCitu’s AR tool and it’s power in truly engaging the community with city planning. These were two exciting days! Stay tuned.
