People Make Cities Smart Andrew Nash GreenCityStreets.com Conference: Why are cities smart? Miskolc, Hungary November 27, 2014
People Make Cities Smart
Jul 03, 2015
Why are cities smart? Answering means defining what we mean by a smart city. Do smart cities: Use technology to make the city operate more efficiently? Have centralized control centers to monitor and manage infrastructure and services? Or do they use technology to increase public participation? A really smart city does all three. Since most discussion centers on the first two, this presentation focuses on public participation.
The first thing to realize about public participation is that information technologies, especially social media and applications, have vastly increased the ability of people to participate in all types of activities - including almost everything a city does. Public participation includes: providing input, analyzing data, collaborative planning, educating themselves and others, and taking action.
Public participation is especially good because residents have detailed local knowledge and fresh perspective. They can provide political support and the participation process helps create people willing to take action. Many information technology applications have been developed to support public participation. The presentation describes the main categories of public participation applications and illustrates these categories with examples.
So, another way to look at the question might be: How are cities smart? The answer is: when they actively involve the public in managing the city, provide open data to increase understanding, use applications to harness public energy efficiently, and recognize that if they don’t do it, someone else will.
The first thing to realize about public participation is that information technologies, especially social media and applications, have vastly increased the ability of people to participate in all types of activities - including almost everything a city does. Public participation includes: providing input, analyzing data, collaborative planning, educating themselves and others, and taking action.
Public participation is especially good because residents have detailed local knowledge and fresh perspective. They can provide political support and the participation process helps create people willing to take action. Many information technology applications have been developed to support public participation. The presentation describes the main categories of public participation applications and illustrates these categories with examples.
So, another way to look at the question might be: How are cities smart? The answer is: when they actively involve the public in managing the city, provide open data to increase understanding, use applications to harness public energy efficiently, and recognize that if they don’t do it, someone else will.
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People Make Cities Smart
Andrew NashGreenCityStreets.com
Conference: Why are cities smart? Miskolc, Hungary
November 27, 2014
Photo by flowcomm - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/21162417@N07 Created with Haiku Deck
What makes a city smart?
Using technology to make citiesmore efficient e.g., energy saving?
Centralized control centres to monitor and manage infrastructure and services?
Using technology to increase public participation in activities of civic living?
Public participation … because it helps:
• Generate better ideasDetailed local knowledge & fresh perspective
• Provide political support Especially important for tough decisions
• Create committed residentsPeople willing to act
Information technology hasvastly increased the abilityof people to participate.
What is public participation:
A. Providing input
B. Analyzing data
C. Collaborating in activities
D. Supporting decision-making
E. Taking action
Input Analysis Collaboration Output
Support
• Mainstream social media (Twitter, Facebook)
• Reporting applications
A. Collecting Input: efficiency + visibility
Chicago Transit Authority – Twitter Feed
Zurich Public Transport Authority – Facebook Page
Reporting Applications
Traffic Check http://www.trafficcheck.at/
User friendly features needed for mobile phone reporting:• automatic geo location,• logical information flow, • check boxes for data entry.
Reporting Apps + GPS + Sensors
• City data – open data or scraped.
• Citizen data – cheap sensors.
B. Data Analysis: no longer a monopoly
Citizen developed applications and visualizations from open data.Stumble Safely, Washington D.C.
C. Collaboration: Participate efficiently
Shareabouts – geo collaboration openplans.org/work/shareabouts/
GreenCityStreets.com … Facebook-based collaboration
Loomio – public infrastructure for collaborative decision makingwww.loomio.org - please support their crowd funding effort!
• Education – cities are complex
• Better processes – meeting management
• Increased engagement – more is better
D. Support: improved collaboration
Participatory
Chinatown
Boston
Using virtual reality to understand urban planning.
http://www.participatorychinatown.org/
Improve Public Transport wiki … crowd-sourced information about public transport. http://greencitystreets.com
Grr-Grr-Bike … smartphone game foreducation + engagement. www.grr-grr-bike.com
E. Action: it starts getting interesting …
• Information – e.g. transit information
• Clean-up days
• P2P ridesharing – sharing culture
• Casserole – shared meals and socialization
• Crowd-sourced civic works – Kickstarter
Ciclo Rotas Centro project Rio de Janerio, Brazil
So it’s not:Why are cities smart?
But rather …
How are cities smart?
When they …
1. Actively involve the public in managing the city.
2. Provide open data to increase understanding and solving problems (e.g., using new apps).
3. Use apps to harness public energy efficiently.
4. Recognize if they don’t do it – someone else will.
Andrew Nash helps clients develop social media, serious games and crowd sourcing applications designed to improve cities and transport systems. His current projects include Grr-Grr-Bike (www.grr-grr-bike.com), a smart phone game designed to encourage people to get involved in urban bicycle planning and advocacy, and www.GreenCityStreets.com, a project that uses a serious game and a wiki-based best practices website to educate people about public transport operations and a Facebook-based crowdsourcing platform. You can reach him at: [email protected]
References
• Nash, Andrew; A Proposed Structure for Understanding Interactive City Tools; May 2013, http://andynash.com/publications/
• “Interactive City Tool” from Play the City http://www.playthecity.nl/
• Code for America (CfA) http://codeforamerica.org/
• OpenPlans http://openplans.org
• Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
• GovLab Open Governance WIKI http://thegovlab.org/wiki/Main_Page
Reporting Applications
• Seeclickfix http://seeclickfix.org
• Fix My Transport http://www.fixmytransport.com
• Citizens Connect http://www.cityofboston.gov/doit/apps/citizensconnect.asp
• Traffic Check http://www.trafficcheck.at/
• Verbeterdebuurt, Netherlands http://www.verbeterdebuurt.nl/
References - 2
GPS Data Reporting Applications
• CycleTracks, San Francisco – GPS data collection system for bicycling:
http://www.sfcta.org/modeling-and-travel-forecasting/
• Meine Radspur, Vienna http://www.meineradspur.at/
• StreetBump, Boston http://streetbump.org
• Waze roadway GPS data collection www.waze.com
• Moovit public transport GPS reporting app: www.moovitapp.com
Citizen Collected Data
• WayCount traffic counter: http://trafficcom.org
• Air Quality Egg: http://airqualityegg.com
• Cosm sensor data sharing platform https://cosm.com/
• Seeplan – project by Even Westvang from Bengler – http://bengler.no/seeplan
References - 3
Collaboration Applications
• MindMixer www.mindmixer.com
• Shareabouts http://shareabouts.org
• GreenCityStreets.com www.greencitystreets.com
• Loomio – crowd sourced decision making www.loomio.org
• Bogotá – My ideal city http://www.miciudadideal.com/en/citizen_sourced
Citizen Collected Data
• WayCount traffic counter: http://trafficcom.org
• Air Quality Egg: http://airqualityegg.com
• Cosm sensor data sharing platform https://cosm.com/
References - 4
Support and Education
• Community Planit http://communityplanit.org
• BusMeister Game http://www.greencitystreets.com
• Participatory Chinatown http://www.participatorychinatown.org/
• Streetmix.net http://streetmix.net
• Grr-Grr-Bike engagement game http://www.grr-grr-bike.com
• Designing Chicago http://designingchicago.com/
• Plan in a Box http://planinabox.org/
• Simpl Challenge http://www.simpl.co/howitworks
Taking Action
• Everyday Growing Cultures http://everydaygrowingcultures.org
• 596 Acres – New York http://596acres.org/
• Ciclos Rotas Centro – Rio de Janeiro http://events.gsapp.org/event/ciclo-rotas-centro-0
• Networks of Dispossession – Turkey http://mulksuzlestirme.org/index_en.html
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