People Make Cities Smart

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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.

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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

SeeClickFix page for San Francisco http://seeclickfix.com

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

Meine Radspur, Vienna http://www.meineradspur.at/

Street Bump, Boston http://streetbump.org/

• 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.

WayCount vehicle counter and software www.waycount.com

Smart Citizen sensor and software http://www.smartcitizen.me/

C. Collaboration: Participate efficiently

San Francisco Mind Mixer website www.improveSF.com

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

BusMeister … public transport learning http://greencitystreets.com

Participatory

Chinatown

Boston

Using virtual reality to understand urban planning.

http://www.participatorychinatown.org/

http://streetmix.net

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

Plan in A Box – tools for planning http://planinabox.org

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: andy@andynash.com

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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