Funny how we use medical terms to talk about cities. Wide roads are major arteries. Rush hours create congestion. A construction project becomes a headache.
So it’s not surprising that cities regard themselves as patients in search of treatment for current aches and pains, and preventive medicine to hold new ones at bay.
Where do people turn for advice about their health? To their doctors. What do doctors do?
Turn information from scans and tests into knowledge their patients can understand and use.
Open data has huge potential as a diagnostic tool for urban living. It is the means by which ordinary cities will become smart cities.
And smart cities will be the ones to which smart workers are drawn because of the thought that goes into planning residential areas, traffic systems and centres of employment and innovation.
In the 19th century, North American cities often evolved in haphazard ways as people pushed west to settle on cheap land or seek their fortunes in gold rushes. Urban planning and zoning rules are, for the most part, 20th-century, information-based products that manage growth by considering such things as population trends, the draw on local water supplies and the local capacity to treat sewage.
For better or worse, suburban sprawl in the 1950s grew out of the fact that developers and city planners read and understood statistics: more people had cars, could afford a quiet patch of green space and no longer needed to live within a few walking blocks of the factories that employed them.
Open data provides even more information to shape decisions that affect the quality of our lives. Municipalities around the world churn out all kinds of it: traffic patterns, business licenses, the location of markets and coffee shops. It’s a lengthy list.
How deep can you go with data as tool for organizing urban life?
In its pursuit of using and generating open data to become a truly “smart city,” the Dutch city of Amsterdam publishes a variety of online, interactive maps that track (among other things) the location of the city’s honeybees hives and the range of the bees living in them.
Bees may seem like an odd choice, but consider this: the population of European honeybees has been in decline, and the loss of these pollinators could have a significant impact on agriculture.
That would affect the availability and cost of food — a quality-of-life issue, for sure. The welfare of bees could be considered among other factors in land-use policies and urban design.
Clever, those folks in Amsterdam. Their data driven, smart-city initiative certainly has scope, from automobile traffic to bee movements. The Economist wrote extensively in its March 26, 2016 edition about how open data and big data improve the management of cities and influence politics.
In Canada, the Open Cities Index tracks how Canadian cities fare in the open-data movement, using such benchmarks as what’s being made available online, whether it’s current and whether it’s machine-readable.
Open data is at its best when it serves a predictive purpose rather than reactive one; and when it layers a number of elements to tell a story — not just about what is, but what could be.
When flu comes around, we take steps to identify the strain and choose a vaccine. Informed by a wealth of open data, a smart city, should be resistant tornadoes, floods and terrorism.
The trick with open data is to get it into the hands of experts in the private and public sectors. They are the “doctors” in this case; Without the application of analysis and judgment, open data remains just a lot cold, lifeless information.
This is why it is so important for governments that have the data, and people who have imaginative ways of using it, to start trusting each other. Private companies, too, would feel more confident about contributing the data they collect (scrubbed of personal information) into the pool.
Smart cities — the ones people will choose to live in — need that kind of interaction to get the most out of open data. For the long-term health of city living, it may be just what the doctor ordered.
