REPOST: Will Twitter Revolutionize How Cities Plan for the Future?

Justin Hollander, associate professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, believes that Twitter data can be used to understand and plan cities. He explains why in this NextCity.orr article:  

Twitter is nothing if not versatile; it’s been used for everything from procrastination to revolution. Could the data it produces also be used to understand, and even help plan, cities?

Justin Hollander, an associate professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts, thinks it can. About a year ago, he founded the university’s Urban Attitudes Lab, which is devoted to studying how “big data” can inform planning and policy. He and his colleagues have begun developing models to analyze Twitter posts for key words and sentiments, in an effort to harness “the free-flowing ideas and thoughts that people express on social media,” he says.

“A lot of what I’m trying to uncover is, where are people happy? What makes them happy?” says Hollander. “This has the potential to revolutionize how local governments in particular plan for the future.”

The idea sounds uncannily reminiscent of Project Cyberfolk, a 1970s plan by the socialist government of Chile to monitor the real-time happiness of the Chilean people in response to government policy, as chronicled in a new book. Back then, the “algedonic meter,” a mood-measuring device that was supposed to transmit its inputs through the TV networks, sounded like science fiction; now, people constantly inform the world how they feel about lunch and what they think of the latest government snafu.

The challenge is extracting the meaningful information from that torrent of data. So far, Hollander has completed just one study, which attempted to compare the sentiments expressed in Twitter posts with those expressed in civic meetings. He collected 122,187 tweets geotagged to New Bedford, Mass., from February through April of this year, and analyzed them with an automated tool designed to classify sentiments as positive or negative. About 7 percent of the messages were categorized as positive, and 5.5 percent as negative; in the minutes, the corresponding figures were 1.7 percent and .7 percent. Zeroing in on terms related to civic life, he then compared the frequency of 24 key words in the tweets and the minutes. He found some similarity in the rankings of how often Twitter users and meeting participants used the key words, which included “school,” “health,” “safety,” “parks” and “children.”

The study was too preliminary to furnish any conclusions, but the main advance was to develop a systematic way of categorizing sentiments. (This automated method still isn’t perfect; it has trouble detecting sarcasm, for instance.) Hollander and a colleague are currently working on another study examining Twitter posts from four cities in Massachusetts that will be voting on whether to allow casinos. After the election, the professors will analyze the Twitter content in light of the results. At this point, a major objective is to assess how what people say on Twitter matches up — or doesn’t — with what they say and do in other settings.

Hollander is far from alone in his interest in using social media data to analyze cities. After all, it’s a vast trove of data, tantalizingly accessible; Twitter alone generates about 500 million short messages per day. “Some research starts with, here’s this problem we want to solve, and some starts with, here’s this opportunity, let’s see what we can do with it,” says Dan Tasse, a doctoral candidate in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon who authored a recent conference paper titled “Using Social Media to Understand Cities.” “This was kind of the latter … we saw, ‘Well, shoot, we have pretty detailed information, and it’s just publicly available.”

This mode of research offers certain clear advantages. Aside from the sheer quantity of data, there’s the geographic specificity of geotagged posts. (Only a small percentage of posts are geotagged, but the absolute number is still huge.) Indeed, most of the work based on social media has relied exclusively on location data to determine mobility patterns; Hollander is one of the few researchers who is focusing on the message content as well.

Another obvious boon is the speed at which new data appears. The census is conducted every 10 years; the American Community Survey is annual. Tweets, by contrast, provide new data by the second. “You could do it every hour if you wanted,” Hollander says. “You wouldn’t want to do that, but certainly more often than every 10 years.”

The hope, then, is that the data can provide some of the same knowledge as older methods, but much more quickly and cheaply. For example, one recent study examined the venues in Foursquare check-ins to assess a neighborhood’s socioeconomic level. But Hollander sees another benefit: The spontaneous, freely volunteered opinions on social media might be more authentic reflections of public attitudes than what people reveal in the arguably more artificial context of a survey. “There are always going to be power imbalances, when there’s an official at your door,” says Hollander. “There’s a tendency for people to introduce their own biases in the responses.”

Of course, social media data is just as likely to contain biases. There’s “a lot more posturing,” Hollander acknowledges; the awareness that we are presenting our thoughts to the world will inevitably shape what we say. What’s more, certain groups are still more likely to use social media than others. Due to this unrepresentativeness, it’s very risky to extrapolate too much from the data, especially to inform policy.

For these reasons, skeptics have cautioned against relying too heavily on this tempting new resource. Robert Goodspeed, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, wrote a paper last year on the data’s “limited usefulness.” “Data mining social media alone, you only have one data point. You only know where they go but not why, or you know what they’re saying but not what they’re doing,” Goodspeed says. “It’s very large, but no matter how large one perspective gets, it’s still at the end of the day one perspective.”

Still, even Goodspeed believes that social media data can play some role; he advocates combining it with tried-and-true methods. Hollander, too, agrees that this form of information is a supplement, not a replacement: In-person interviews, surveys, focus groups and official data are all essential in patching together an understanding of a city. The intention is that this novel material can add another layer to the picture, and perhaps give us a starting point for asking deeper questions.

Longer term, Hollander believes that not only academics but also city governments should consult this rich source — our present-day algedonic meter — to help make decisions, along with holding meetings and using other planning tools. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t do the survey,” he says, “but look at the social media data as well.”

The Science of Cities column is made possible with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Pete Kampfer is a veteran city manager who has established award-winning economic development and urban planning initiatives. Follow this Twitter account for more community planning and development news.

REPOST: The Future Smart City Will Be Built Around You and the Internet of You

Due to the significant developments in technology in recent years, the concept of smart city has also gained ground. But what exactly are smart cities and how can they benefit the people? The Forbes article below provides a detailed explanation:  

Pssshhhhhhtttt. Like a shot of steam in your morning latte, the sound of train doors opening injects vitality into any urban commute. But imagine that at 7:18 a.m. on Monday in the London Underground the red doors stay open and quiet, and stay, and stay . . .

Inside the rail cars, instead of the familiar sway and howl of a train at pace, there’s just a nervous electrical hum. Londoners sit, yawn, and scroll absently on their phones. Tired of waiting, a couple of would-be passengers make a decision to tuck away their phones and head back out onto the platform.

Now what?

The commuters have no idea why their train is delayed or when or if it will move again. So they’re forced into a scavenger hunt for an alternate way to work.

 

Image Source: geolocation.ws

To be fair to London, this experience is rapidly becoming extinct. The city upon the Thames is growing faster than at any other time in its 2,000-year history. According to the City of London, the core will hit 9 million in population before New York and approach 10 million by 2030. London is on track to become one of 30 megacities that will exist by 2023. So it is necessarily reinventing itself in the digital age as a Smart City.

How does becoming a Smart City save the hapless riders stranded on the train? Imagine you’re a commuter in a different scenario. Sensors monitoring the Tube and its trains detect an irregularity in the brake system of your usual train. The data gets reported in real time to the government agency Transport for London (TfL), checked with a probability heuristic, and confirmed. There’s a 90% chance of brake failure in the next two hours.

No problem. Before you can leave a tip for the barista at your favorite coffee house, a text message alerts you to the delay and offers you an alternative route, as well as a coupon for a discount on your next cup of coffee. All compliments of the City of London and TfL. Apps like Citymapper are already taking the first toddling steps toward this ideal.

That’s why the current model of a Smart City as an extended Internet of Things is inadequate. It leaves out the most critical component—you, the digital citizen. You are not just a thing, but the reason the system exists. There can be no useful vision of a city, smart or otherwise, that doesn’t place you at its center.

So, then, what is a smart city? And what are the implications for the people who live within its bounds? To truly make the most of what a city can be, planners, companies, and urban dwellers need to understand three critical things:

1. You don’t just live in a city; you cross through its layers every day.

In the simplest view, cities have three layers:  the underground level, the surface, and the airspace. In a Smart City there’s a corresponding parallel universe of data-collecting sensors integrated within each stratum.
Take, for example, the underground. Like trees with a massive root system, cities are figuratively and literally supported by a vast subterranean physical complex—transportation, heat, sewers, fresh water, electricity, communications, and structural supports. Today these systems are being augmented with sensors, digital arrays, and hubs to monitor every aspect of their activity. If the earth shakes, whether from a train or a seismic event, the data will be accurately captured.

The next layer is the surface. Think of streets, parks, plazas, and even the retail shops, restaurants, and other buildings or entrances normally accessible from street level. At this layer the parallel digital network includes cameras, location-based services, cellular networks, and sensors monitoring everything from traffic to the pace of pedestrians.

The final layer is airspace. Skyscrapers, bridges, and towers hold aloft sensors that monitor wi-fi, weather, air quality, and perhaps even drone traffic.

So why is it important to think about the strata of the city? Because humans cross through each layer every day. Any technology solution that fails to anticipate and account for people is, at the outset, a hobbled initiative. The truly connected city begins to emerge in how data is managed across all three physical layers. Data analytics becomes the glue that, when managed well, dramatically improves your experience of life.

 

Image Source: pymnts.com

2. You will be the active, mobile center of a vast network.

We’re used to thinking of ourselves as part of a social network, but done right, Smart Cities promise to put each of us at the center of far-reaching civic and commercial networks, too. Points of connection will be everywhere—smartphones, clothing, cars, benches, buildings, parking meters, speed bumps, shop windows, and more. Pass by your favorite clothing boutique and your jacket alerts the store, flashing a special price on the window just for you.

Of course, smart doesn’t just mean opportunistic sales. The kind of porous and flexible connection required for usability argues for a whole new level of data security and privacy. A truly smart city must take into account social policy and how it translates into protection for its citizens. The good news is that as points of connection proliferate, so will your choices about when and how to interact with the network.

3. You will have the power to shape your experience of the city. 

In another futuristic example, imagine acting as a kind of living thermostat to regulate the temperature of your city. On the surface during rush hour, above certain key transit hubs, the temperature of the sidewalk can soar up to 20 degrees higher than the surrounding environment. What if city managers could transfer that heat from underground into the buildings above? Instead of energy escaping into the atmosphere, buildings could reduce their heat consumption and improve their carbon footprint. Take it a step further, and thousands of commuters could voluntarily alter their routes to promote heat exchanges and maybe even receive energy tax credits.

 

Image Source: iceconnect.eletsonline.com

Cities have always shaped their inhabitants. The élan vital can manifest in an accent, the pace of service, or even how much time people spend outdoors. But this may be the first time in history that an individual citizen will have the power to push back on and shape her city in real time. We’re reaching a new level of engagement—a kind of symbiotechna.

In coming articles, we’ll look more closely into the specifics of Smart Cities and the tremendous creative potential for sustainability, livability and commercial impact. Smart means a safer, healthier, cleaner, and even joyful city. Always with you at its heart.


Pete Kampfer is an experienced city manager who has dealt with urban planning and other community initiatives. Visit this blog to learn more about his work, as well as other concepts in city management.

REPOST: Entrepreneurs Tackle Earthquake Safety, Urban Planning Tech In SF’s EIR Program

Meeting in San Francisco's EIR program are city government workers and six tech companies to collaborate in improving safety and city life through urban planning tech.  Read this article from TechCrunch.com for more details.

Image Source: www.techcrunch.com

While heavily funded companies like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber capture the spotlight as companies that controversially shape city life around transportation and space, cities and their governments have a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes needs too.

That’s the premise behind San Francisco’s entrepreneur-in-residence program, which pairs tech founders with city government workers in everything from the planning department to the transit agency. This is “civic tech,” or software that aids local governments in responding to the needs of their citizens. Think of it as a form of enterprise software for governance.

In San Francisco’s EIR program, six startups voluntarily work alongside city officials for 16 weeks. (No, there isn’t some kind of equity component where the city invests in companies. Entrepreneurs get the benefit of learning first-hand alongside their prospective government customers.) 

Six companies showed off prototypes or concepts in City Hall this morning: 

Berkeley-based Synthicity would be a pretty cool tool for people who had childhood obsessions with Will Wright’s SimCity. It’s a software tool for urban planners that lets them test all kinds of scenarios on the fly around building heights and setbacks. It factors in existing regulations and market factors that may or may not make a project pencil in financially for developers. 

“It’s a complex problem because market forces, regulations and design all interact in very complicated ways with economic, environmental and social impacts,” said Jason Oliveira, a product manager who presented Synthicity. “We ask what the impacts are if height limits are changed, whether rents go up or down, whether construction or financing costs change, whether green space is needed or whether more affordable units are needed.” 

The company was founded by UC Berkeley’s current chair of the city and regional planning department Paul Waddell. 

MobilePD is an app for city police officers, that lets them pull up interactive crime maps or field interviewing records on the fly. 

“Now officers walking around the streets of San Francisco carrying mini-police departments in their pocket,” said the startup’s vice president of business development Jamieson Johnson.” 

Birdi is an Internet-of-things detector that measures air quality and poisonous fumes like carbon monoxide. It tracks temperature, humidity along with pollen and particulate counts. 

Co-founder Mark Belinsky said that while people perceive outdoor air to be full of pollution like car exhaust, indoor air is usually less healthy. 

“Indoor air is often two to eight times more polluted. The question is what can we do about it?” he said. 

BuildingEye could be a NIMBYist’s dream (except that’s not the intent.) They’re a software startup that makes permit and noticing information about construction and development easier to discover through a mapping interface. 

Indoo.rs worked with the San Francisco International Airport on enhanced navigation and location-based services. They are set to launch an app tomorrow that will help the blind and visually impaired passengers make their way through an airport terminal to their right gate. Indoo.rs’ technology can also be used to take in real-time sensor data about flows of people and congestion through an indoor space. 

Lastly, ReGroup worked on emergency group messaging that could give people up to a minute’s notice about an impending earthquake based on sensor data. They worked with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management to create something akin to those federal AMBER alerts that you see on your phone when a minor goes missing. In this case, you’d get a message about an earthquake that sensors have detected tens or hundreds of miles away before it reaches you, giving anywhere from a few seconds to two minutes to find shelter.

Pete Kampfer is an award-winning city manager who has more than five years of experience as an economic development executive. Follow this Twitter page for interesting discussions on urban planning and development.

REPOST: Old World, New Tech: Europe Remains Ahead of U.S. in Creating Smart Cities

Despite the region's economic doldrums, analysts say that Europe has embraced the concept of smart cities more than the U.S., a move that has inspired alliances for sustainable habitat and alternative technologies across the Atlantic. The New York Times contributor Mark Scott looks at the technologies and services that offer newfound promise for the future of cities.

Llibert Serra, head gardener of the Parc del Centre de Poblenou in Barcelona, uses an iPad mini to demonstrate “smart” watering. Image Source: nytimes.com

BARCELONA, Spain — The streets here offer a glimpse of what the future may have to offer.

Alongside the city’s world-famous architecture and pristine sandy beaches, sensors attached to trash cans now alert workers when they need to be emptied.

The irrigation systems built into Barcelona’s parks monitor soil moisture and turn on sprinklers when water is needed. And drivers can use a smartphone application to find the nearest available parking spot in the labyrinthine streets.

“It’s crucial that these new technologies are useful to our citizens,” Xavier Trias, Barcelona’s mayor, said in his stately offices, which date from the 15th century. “It’s an important change. We have to create a sustainable system.”

Barcelona is among a number of European cities adopting new forms of technology aimed at improving services. More important, the investments, including neighborhoodwide high-speed Internet connections and electricity charge points for cars and motorbikes, offer ways to cut energy use and generate income.

READY FOR PICKUP A “smart” waste collection system saves space and sends a signal when containers are full.
Image Source: nytimes.com

The push mirrors efforts in cities including San Francisco and Boston, which have spent millions of dollars to upgrade their infrastructure. Other projects have appeared elsewhere, notably Masdar City, a planned high-tech habitat created from scratch in Abu Dhabi.

Yet analysts say Europe, despite being hard hit by the recent financial crisis — and in part because of it — remains a step ahead of the United States in creating efficient, so-called smart cities that combine traditional services like electricity networks with 21st-century technology like Internet-connected home appliances.

“Europe has embraced the concept more than the U.S.,” said Bas Boorsma, a director at Cisco Systems who helps cities upgrade their infrastructure. “It will always require partnerships between the private sector and government, and Europe does that better.”

Given Europe’s economic doldrums (which bring the mixed blessing of less industrial pollution), many of the Continent’s governments have shifted from an emphasis on big renewable energy projects to saving money, while enlisting the private sector and exploiting the growing business possibilities of smartphones and tablets.

Mayors in places including Copenhagen and Hamburg hope to cut their cities’ energy and water use and waste by upgrading municipal services so they can monitor how services are delivered and pinpoint where savings can be found.

In Barcelona, where the unemployment rate remains above 20 percent, the city expects to cut its water bill by 25 percent this year after installing sensors in local parks. The annual savings are expected to total almost $60 million.

“We were wasting a lot of water,” said Julia Lopez, coordinator of Barcelona’s smart city program. “We can now control the system directly from an iPad.”

The infrastructure upgrades have led to agreements between cities and some of the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and General Electric. By deploying their technology in citywide pilot projects, these companies say they can test new business models and other services that might have worldwide appeal.

In January, Google reached a $3.2 billion deal to buy Nest Labs, which makes energy-saving devices like Internet-connected thermostats and smoke detectors. Nest says its products, designed by former Apple engineers, can cut household heating and cooling bills by around 20 percent by monitoring people’s habits and adjusting the thermostat automatically.

Growing corporate interest is inspiring new alliances across the Atlantic.

The European technology companies Philips and Ericsson, for example, are working with Verizon Wireless on a pilot project in the United States that will combine energy-efficient street lighting with mobile phone infrastructure. This year, Philips and Ericsson plan to start selling their new product to city governments. The idea is to provide cities a source of income through rentals of streetlights to carriers that want to expand their cellphone coverage. The companies also expect that the energy-efficient streetlights will offer savings of about 50 percent compared with traditional lighting.

“We’re trying to solve the problem of how to make cities more sustainable,” said Hans Vestberg, Ericsson’s chief executive. “These projects are key for cities that want to remain globally competitive.”

While cutting electricity use and garbage collections has environmental benefits, policy makers say that economic returns, not carbon dioxide reductions, are now driving many cities’ plans.

Two years ago, for example, Amsterdam’s planners changed how they funded technology projects intended to improve city services.

Amsterdam had previously subsidized upgrades in the local electricity network and other infrastructure but had seen little improvement in city finances. In response, its policy makers started investing in local start-ups that were creating businesses using advanced technical infrastructure, through a 70 million euro, or $96 million, fund.

They also fostered partnerships among local businesses to take advantage of previous investments. Among them were Ajax, a soccer team, which paid a nearby hospital to generate electricity for its home matches by installing solar panels on the hospital roof.

“The financial crisis helped us to think differently,” said Ger Baron, Amsterdam’s chief technology officer. “We don’t subsidize anymore. We invest.”

Across Europe, cities are opening their infrastructure to companies eager to offer new services that provide revenue for the city and offer potential environmental benefits.

In London, the start-up Citymapper used access to the city’s transport data to create a smartphone application that helps people navigate the complicated bus and subway networks. Azmat Yusuf, the company’s founder, said that since Citymapper started in 2011, usage of London’s iconic red buses jumped significantly, creating additional revenue for local government and cutting the number of cars on the streets. The app is now available in New York, Berlin and Paris. And last year in Barcelona, Jaume Mayor, a local entrepreneur, created WeSmartPark, a service aimed at making it easier for drivers to find parking spaces.

Mr. Mayor said drivers spent up to 20 percent of their time looking for places to park, even as many spaces across the city remained empty during the day when residents were at work.

With his 10-person team, Mr. Mayor created a system to allow individuals to rent out their private parking spaces by installing sensors that record when they are available. The information is transmitted in real time over local mobile networks, and customers can book the spaces hourly through a smartphone app.

So far, Mr. Mayor has signed up 1,500 parking spaces across the city, including some at shopping malls and hospitals. He also has almost 100,000 users, or roughly 6 percent of Barcelona’s total population.

“We’re using the resources that we already have, but getting more use out of them,” Mr. Mayor said. “Because people are driving less to find parking spaces, Barcelona as a city is getting a direct benefit.”

Pete Kampfer worked as an economic development executive in a tourist destination community before serving as a city manager of Raton, N.M.,where he gained recognition for his contribution for the region’s economic and urban planning development. Follow this Twitter page for more links to insightful discussions on urban design, city management, and economic planning.

REPOST: Why Education Spending Doesn't Lead to Economic Growth

In his article for Businessweek.com, Charles Kenny discusses whether or not investments in all education levels could benefit societies as a whole.

Image Source: preventionaction.org

It is college acceptance season, and letters with financial aid offers attached are dropping on doormats nationwide. Many students and an even greater number of parents are facing the sticker shock associated with tertiary education. As college prices rise—the average annual cost hit $18,497 in 2010-11, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—the question inevitably arises: Is it worth it? For the average student in the U.S. and worldwide, the answer is affirmative: Education remains a fantastic investment for individuals. The tougher question is whether education at all levels is such a great investment for societies as a whole.

In the U.S., education leads to higher wages. Median weekly earnings in 2013 were $472 for someone with less than a high school diploma, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number rises to $1,108 for those with a bachelor’s degree and $1,714 for those with a professional degree such as an MBA or J.D. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggested that the educational payoff for “marginal” college students—the ones who might not attend if it weren’t for government support, for example—may be a lot lower. Still, for most students, the high cost of college is well worth it.

That’s true worldwide as well. Recent estimates (PDF) for Ghana, for example, suggest that each additional year a child stays in school translates into an average annual income 7 percent higher. In China, that figure is 12 percent.

Image Source: huffingtonpost.com

But does that private return on investment in education translate into benefits for the national economy? In the U.S., public education expenditure accounts for more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. (Private spending is about the same size.) In developing countries, including Kenya and Uganda, education takes up 15 percent or more of the government expenditures. Public education spending is justified in part by the idea that it has considerable spillover effects—not only the student, but society as whole benefits when a kid goes to school. The data suggest a more complex story, however.

Analysis by Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin suggests that increased educational attainment among Americans from 1915 to 1999 might account for 10 percent of the growth in U.S. GDP over that time. Some commentators contend that this an underestimate (PDF). But at the global level, no relationship has been found between a more educated population and more rapid economic development. There has been an explosion in schooling in developing countries, but many show nothing like explosive growth in GDP per person. By 2010, the average Kenyan had spent more years in school than the average French citizen had in 1985. But Kenya’s GDP per capita in 2010 was only 7 percent of France’s GDP per head 25 years earlier.

What explains the limited impact of increased education on economic growth? A possible answer is that education acts as a filter rather than an investment. A recent study (PDF) in Italy found that test scores had a significant impact on the earnings of employees—but none on the earnings of self-employed people. One interpretation of that result is that schooling signals persons with intelligence and ambition, rather than actually imparting or indicating skills that make them better at their jobs over the long term. Signaling helps as a screening tool for employers, but makes no difference to people who work for themselves. Presumably, they already know how smart and ambitious they are. (Think Bill Gates: Harvard let him in, signaling smarts, but he didn’t finish his studies before going off to become the world’s richest man; apparently Gates didn’t feel he needed to complete the course load to succeed).

 Image Source: quickanded.com

It looks as if the developing world may may have a similar problem: As primary schooling has become universal and its signaling power has weakened, analysis in the journal Development Policy Review suggests that the returns to primary schooling have dropped since the 1950s from a near 30 percent wage premium toward a 5 percent wage premium today. That’s in part because lots of kids aren’t learning anything at all in school. In India, for example, only around a quarter of children who complete primary school can read a simple passage, do simple math, tell time, and make change. 

Pete Kampfer is a renowned city manager and executive officer who received several recognitions for his work in urban planning and economic development. Subscribe to this Twitter page for more news and information on community and economic development.

REPOST: Cities and their psychology: How neuroscience affects urban planning

Colin Ellard of The Guardian browses through the pages of William Whyte’s book “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” to examine the significance of a psychologically grounded perspective of urban planning in building economically sound cities.

More than 30 years ago, the pioneering urbanist William Whyte was charged by the city of New York with the task of unraveling the mysteries of public space. Why do some such spaces attract crowds of happy visitors whilst others sit barren and empty?

Whyte's research programme, conducted with stopwatches, time-lapse videography, and lots of simple paper charts, was a spectacular success. Based on his findings, he made a series of simple and easily implemented recommendations that the city soon codified into its municipal construction codes.

Today, any visitor to New York might find any number of things to complain about but the wide availability and attractive human affordances of the city's many public spaces is not likely to be among them. Whyte's epiphany was that the way to answer important questions about how to build a commodious and psychologically healthy city lay in careful observation, collection of data and the creative ability to lay aside preconceptions and view a streetscape with a "beginner mind".

Whyte's book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and the short film based on this work, are as fresh and insightful now as the day that they appeared, and are required reading and viewing for any student of urban behaviour.

Fast forward a few decades, and many things have changed, but the fundamentals remain the same. If we want to know how to make a better city, the place to start is at ground level, using observation and measurement, and applying what is known of the human sciences to those measurements to build a psychologically grounded view of the relationship between the physical design of a city and what happens there.

What has changed dramatically is the set of tools that are available to those who would understand the detailed workings of the urban realm. Now we can go well beyond simple observations of the overt behaviour of city dwellers. We can look inside the bodies and minds of those who inhabit urban spaces. We can measure their gaze, their beating hearts, and the state of their autonomic nervous systems as they react to arousing and stressful events.

We can also measure their brainwaves. We can, if we are willing to carry specially designed apps on our mobile phones, record our location and movements, but also our moods, interests, and our patterns of thought. New affordable devices for measurement of a host of brain and body variables are reaching the consumer marketplace every day, and many of them can be paired with phones.

There is even a recipe for a DIY brainwave headset that consumers can print for themselves with a 3D printer and use with openly available software. The wide availability of sensors that measure our physiology, powerful, mobile, computing platforms, and information networks that can connect us to research laboratories with interests in urban behaviour has vaulted the methodologies used by Whyte into a toolbox filled with unprecedented and exciting opportunities to harness huge amounts of psychological data to make sense of how a city works.

 

Image Source: theguardian.com

For a fully realised science of urban psychology though, it isn't enough to have a powerful array of methods for the collection of data. We also need theory and experiment. For a truly scientific approach to the problem of the city, we need to be able to test hypotheses, and compare alternative urban realities. But how can we do this when our subject matter consists of vast constructions of concrete, glass and metal? We can't tear down and rearrange city blocks to see what works. In tandem with our arsenal of tools for measurements, we need a way to build hypothetical city spaces. How do we develop an experimental science of urban design?

In the research laboratory for immersive virtual environments (Relive) at the University of Waterloo, we have turned to simulation methods to help build such a science. Participants are placed into highly immersive simulations of city spaces using sophisticated head-mounted displays and precise motion tracking. They are able to walk freely through photo-realistic simulations of urban spaces that are replete with depth, colour, and motion. We can monitor their gaze and their movements along with their physiology using a set of unobtrusive sensors while they do so. One of our environments is based on Shibuya, a hectic and seemingly chaotic part of Tokyo with its famous scramble crossing – one that allows pedestrians to cross from all directions.

The use of 3D visualisations by architects and planners is not particularly new – design professionals often use simulations to explore the look and feel of a construction. What is new is the capability and will to explore our reactions to such simulations at a fine-grained level of analysis using sophisticated methods of data collection and analysis. Using such methods, we can explore the behaviour of a visitor to a virtual urban setting whose design, because it is built only of pixels, is entirely under our control and can be arranged and rearranged with a few keystrokes on a computer.

For example, in one recent set of experiments, conducted by Kevin Barton of Relive, we designed a stark-looking industrial setting consisting of about 30 city blocks. The streetscapes were so designed to explore the impact of different types of layouts on how we find our way and how the shape of an environment influences attention, cognitive effort, and urban stress. One layout was very orderly, like a Manhattan, Washington or Canberra, while another was more organic and meandering, like New Orleans or London. We discovered that the manner in which such cityscapes were explored, and the psychological reactions to their design, varied strongly with their overall "grammar".

Journeys through the systematic spaces were stereotyped and efficient and accompanied by low levels of arousal and attention. Journeys through the more chaotic spaces were longer, filled with more hesitations, arousal and effortful attention. The value of such findings is that they give us a set of powerful methods by which to predict the psychological effects of an urban design before anything is built.

Although there is no doubting the power of a virtual reality simulation to unearth relationships between the organisation of the built environment and the operation of our minds, we still need to establish that our simulations are close enough to the real thing that findings from our laboratory generalise to the lived-in environment of a city filled with a hubbub of people, noise, smells, and traffic. For this, there is no substitute for experimentation at street level. Our approach has been to lead participants on walks through city spaces while wearing gear that allows us to measure their cognitive and emotional responses to what they experience.

In one such study, conducted as a part of the travelling BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory, we were able to show that views of green space not only caused people to become happier but also changed their physiology – their autonomic nervous systems showed strong signs of relaxation responses. Though such a finding provides good ammunition for those who advocate for the importance of refreshing oases of nature in dense cities, it was hardly a surprise to us. What is more interesting is that we can reproduce these effects in simulations in our laboratory, meaning that we are able to pinpoint exactly what aspects of natural views produce such restoration.

In one such study, conducted by Deltcho Valtchanov of Relive, we were able to produce physiological relaxation using views of virtual nature that was just as dramatic as that seen in visitors to real-world green spaces. In more recent work, we have shown that a part of the relaxation response to natural scenes hinges on specific properties of visual scenes that can be defined mathematically (the relative proportions of finely detailed contours as opposed to the more coarse "blobby" contours that are present in the image).
 
What is exciting about this finding is both that it makes a good match with what is known of the preferences of brain areas known to be involved in reward and environmental preference, and that it provides a tool with which to predict the restorative potential of an urban vista on the basis of its visual properties, regardless of whether it contains trees and grass. This might point the way to methods that could optimise such effects in crowded cities where the space available for parkland is severely limited.

The examples I have described suggest that a marriage of laboratory-based virtual reality simulations with real-world observations using smartphones and physiological sensors could form the basis of a new and powerful discipline of experimental urban design based on sound principles of psychology and neuroscience. As we move into an exciting new era of city design in which engaged citizens have never been more interested in how to make cities better, and in which they can be provided with good tools to contribute to the efforts to do so, we are poised to move into high gear.

We have ambitious plans to move beyond these initial steps to build more comprehensive models of both existing and hypothetical city spaces in our lab, and to provide more tools to determine how to grow great cities. As we face an era of daunting problems including population growth, changing energy balances, urban densification, and climate change, the need for solutions has never been more pressing. But on the positive side, our approach provides a strong window of opportunity to entertain and implement important changes.

Colin Ellard is an experimental psychologist at the University of Waterloo, Canada
 
Peter Kampfer was a city manager of Raton, N.M., who has earned accolades for his strong thrusts for the region’s economic and urban planning development. See his significant contributions in urban planning on this Twitter page.

REPOST: Big Government, will you be my Valentine?

In this satirical article from Slate, Bob Garfield discusses the major events and controversial issues in American history that have shaped the love or detestation of its citizenry.  In a big government like the US, enormous issues exist and people often rationalize things based on their political leanings.

Image Source: slate.com

Seventy-two percent of Americans say big government is a greater threat to the U.S. in the future than is big business or big labor, a record high in the nearly 50-year history of this question. –Gallup Organization, Dec. 13, 2013

You are hulking and awkward, humorless and impatient. You are pathologically regimented and nerdy almost beyond belief. You are penny-wise and pound-freaking-ridiculous. Every now and then your behavior is simply reprehensible. So maybe this is perverse, because also—ewww­—you’re my uncle. But I am so in love with you.

Let me count the ways:

You protect me from terrorists and pathogens and pollution and bigots and foreign armies and racketeers. You enforce a semblance of order in the neighborhood and in the marketplace. You finance stuff that I use all the time, more or less for free: bridges, dams, GPS, federal reserve banks, crash-test dummies (indirectly), and Medicare (soon).

You deliver my mail, plus the odd cruise missile.

Not to mention my land-grant-college education and my graphite and titanium golf clubs—dual-use materials researched and developed by you. Stealth fighter shmealth shmighter, we’re talking 30 extra yards off the tee, baby.

Also you invented the Internet, which is soooo great for global communications and last-minute shopping. Meanwhile, you’ve been ticking off items on the ol’ honey-do list. “End slavery,” check. “Eradicate polio,” check. “Clean Lake Erie,” check. “Elvis stamp,” thank you very much.

Twice in the past 85 years, from the New Deal to TARP, you saved the world from financial Armageddon. In the 20th century you defeated both fascism and communism—because of, not in spite of, your gigantism. So when the haters mock your size and the size of your heart, it breaks mine. When Newt Gingrich flamed you in his book ("The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”) it was like seeing you rank last in “Hot or Not.” All love, it is said, begins with pity.

Big Government, will you be my Valentine? Truthfully, this was love at first sight. You didn’t even have to offer Big Bird or Obamacare. You had me at the Louisiana Purchase—a huge federal expenditure guaranteeing westward expansion. Fifteen states emerged, in whole or in part, from that budget-busting, tax-and-spend initiative—all 15 of them red.

That was a Thomas Jefferson deal. So much for the modest federal aspirations of the founders. In fact, as historian Steven Conn of Ohio State likes to point out, the very first act of Congress after authorizing itself was an economic-stimulus law, Alexander Hamilton’s pet Tariff Act of 1789 protecting domestic manufacturing and paying off debts from the Revolutionary War.

The Postal Act of 1792 did in the 18th century what the Internet has done in modern times: connected a far-flung world and marketplace. The transcontinental railroad joined the coasts via federal land with federal loans. The Homestead Acts lured settlers to the Wild West, a centurylong land redistribution program … conceived by Republicans.

Pretty ironic, eh? Oh, Big Government, not only does conservative dogma ignore the GOP’s proud history, it ignores some bedrock conservative values—such as, just to name one, law and order. The same folks who demand you frisk loiterers want you to leave oil companies and banks unmolested by tyrannical job-killing measures like, whaddya call them … laws.

I feel for you, ya big lug. You’re so ungainly next to the sleek and comely free market, but let’s not forget that the captains of industry, with alarming frequency, go all Bligh on us:

 BP (manslaughter), GlaxoSmithKline (suppressing bad clinical news and illegally marketing unapproved drugs), JPMorgan Chase (subprime recklessness), Philip-Morris (lying merchants of cancer), Archer Daniels Midland (price fixing), HSBC (abetting drug-cartels’ money laundering), Enron (megafraud), Comcast (just plain sucking).

Yes, as I constantly say, among the things the free market is free of is conscience.

Now don’t go getting a big head, my dearest Uncle Sam, because in addition to a century of human bondage you have plenty to answer for. Spying on your own citizens is merely your latest outrage. Who can forget the CIA overthrows? The World War II internment of Japanese Americans. The Trail of Tears. The Vietnam War. The Red Scare. Tuskegee. The Amtrak café car.

And yet I’m prepared to be forgiving. Social Security. Yellowstone. The Sherman Antitrust Act. Dude, memory foam! Yes, plutonium and weaponized bacteria aren’t the only things developed in a government lab. Touch-screen technology, too. Whatever number of $600 hammers went into my ATM and Tempur-Pedic pillow is fine by me.

Anyway, per the corporate crimes and misdemeanors listed above, you have no monopoly on institutional transgression. You do, however, have a monopoly on protecting the public from monopolies. And hostile ICBMs. And salmonella. With all due respect to the rights of individual states, some functions require scale.

New Mexico Division of Antitrust? Arkansas Institutes of Health? Vermont Aviation Administration? Alaska Department of Defense? As somebody once said, thanks but no thanks. Also, some things even private industry isn’t industrious enough for. To whom should we outsource food inspections or air traffic control … Blackwater?

But now there’s a Blue Scare, and they’re hating on you. They loathe your debt and your giveaways to freeloaders like the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, the war-disabled, and the just plain unlucky. They want the unregulated economy’s lucre to simply trickle down, like fracking-lubricated ground water, to the disadvantaged. As Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says, “Free enterprise makes people prosperous, all people prosperous, and big government makes people poorer.”

But, gosh, Big Government, one of the things I so love about you is your generosity—not to welfare queens but to free enterprise itself. On top of the bridges and that other infrastructure you built, the stable society you have sustained through your do-gooder entitlement largesse offers business a dependable, educated workforce and vast affluent consumer base more or less entirely unwiped-out by famine, epidemic, civil strife, or grinding poverty. In other words, the supposed welfare state your enemies so despise is the ultimate trickle-down corporate welfare.

As for spending, it’s so infuriating when folks like House Budget Committee member Bill Flores start running you down. (“Every American family and 49 out of 50 states currently abide by some form of a balanced-budget requirement. If they can make the hard choices to pay their bills and live within their means, then Washington should too.”) But, dearest one, two-thirds of American families do live with huge debt burdens … called “mortgages.” Flores has two of them, totaling about $1.5 million. Last I checked, he hadn’t been strangled.

At business school nobody calls debt a noose. They call it a lever. That’s why corporations indebt themselves to the tune of trillions of dollars. Gee, Unc, you don’t hear Grover Norquist badmouthing bonds.

Yet he blackmails legislators into signing an anti-tax pledge. Why? Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, you tax us so little. In terms of individual tax rates, you are in the middle of the pack. As a percentage of GDP, at 27.3 percent you are near the bottom, 29 spots below Denmark (48 percent), one above Turkey. In a month or two, I’m going to file my tax return, SWAK.

Think of my check this way: sweets for my sweet. Big Government, be mine.


Pete Kampfer is an award-winning city manager and executive officer responsible for various award-winning development projects.  Get timely updates on US governance and leadership from this Twitter page.

REPOST: Using The New Sim City, 6 Urban Planners Battle For Bragging Rights

Throughout its history, the Sim City series has been the domain of serious gamers and is often cited as a good tool to teach people about the basics of urban planning. FastCoExist.com kicks this up a notch by challenging six teams of urban planners in a competition to design the best in-game city.  

MITroit’s volunteer firefighters were bravely extinguishing the string of household fires that had broken out in neighboring Champignon. Champignon, a blue-collar enclave whose economy was built upon the oil and ore beneath its citizens’ feet, was rife with jobs and industry, but lagged in city services.

The selflessness of MITroit’s volunteer firefighters was even more pronounced considering Champignon had recently built a sewage runoff directed at MITroit. While MITroit’s unpaid firefighters were preventing Champignon’s citizens from immolating themselves, Champignon was slowly polluting the benefactor of its overwhelmed fire department. MITroit was using its water to put out Champignon’s fires, and Champignon was sending liquid waste in return.

Image Source: www.fastcoexist.com

This would be a juicier scoop were it real. Although the above events did occur, they took place within the incredibly complex world of the new Sim City, as part of a tournament thrown by Co.Exist that pitted some of the country’s preeminent urban thinkers against each other in a city building tournament. For this competition, in February, Co.Exist and Greg Lindsay--the co-author of the future cities book Aerotropolis and Co.Exist contributor--assembled six teams of urban think tanks to pit their planning chops against each other in the new version of the city planning game.

The thought was that coupling the players’ collective genius with SimCity’s planning dashboard would result in a vision of a potential urban future, a blueprint for the future of cities. That would not turn out to be the case.

“I’d absolutely play the game again,” MITroit Co-Mayor Anna Muessig later said. “But I’d like to play with a different incentive structure, rather than clobbering my colleagues.”

AN URBAN PLANNER’S DREAM

The tournament was like the setup to some high-brow joke you might hear in between speeches at a TED Conference:

Six urbanists, three architects, three journalists, and a video game designer walk into a room…

Image Source: www.fastcoexist.com

SimCity game designer Stone Librande was encircled by some of the foremost thinkers in urban planning. Twenty minutes earlier, Librande was helping children proceed through the game’s tutorial. Now, he was explaining the game’s mechanics to people whose academic and professional lives were dedicated to urbanism. Librande’s urban planning knowledge was quaint by comparison. He built SimCity over the past three and a half years with Netflix documentaries on urbanism as his only academic resource.

“You won’t really be competing against one another, just not cooperating with one another,” Librande said. Everyone laughed. This was urbanism humor.

Urbanists playing SimCity is hardly new. The first edition of SimCity was released in 1989, and the franchise has been credited with inspiring an entire generation of urban theorists. SimCity is “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created,” said a 2006 New Yorker profile of Will Wright, designer of the original SimCity.

But the latest version contains two new wrinkles that have city wonks downright giddy. First, it uses what’s called agent-based modeling. Everything you see on the screen actually occurs in the city. There’s no superficial traffic animations, for instance, like in past versions. If you see a truck transporting oil from the refinery you built, there is actual oil being trucked through your city. Each item on the screen is its own discrete piece of data in your city.

Image Source: www.fastcoexist.com

For the purposes of the tournament, the second new feature of the game was more important: Inter-city interaction. Excess goods or services can be bought and sold between cities in the same region. If the seams of a neighboring metropolis are bursting with trash, send your waste management fleet to clear some space (for a price). If your power grid sputters, buy some energy from the mayor next door who just flipped the switch on a new nuclear power plant.

These features, the game’s slick interface, and its troves of data are the exact tools urbanists need to create the elusive “smart city”--a technocratic utopia where policy is informed by real-time data collection. After Librande’s rudimentary explanation, the crowd broke up into their separate teams for the most elite SimCity game ever conducted (probably).

PLANNING A CITY

Nearly every team planned to create a city independent of finite energy resources and the help of other cities. How each city planned to achieve sustainability and economic prowess differed:

• MIT (MITroit): MITroit would be part industrial city, part tourist destination. “We wanted to do Detroit the right way,” MIT’s Anthony Vanky said.
• KPF (XimCity): XimCity was to be a dense commercial and residential hub. The team researched the game beforehand (i.e. watched YouTube clips of people playing the beta version) and came in with pages of handwritten and typed notes on how to execute its vision. Everyone on KPF wore a suit. “We took the point of view that we should play the part of the professionals,” says KPF director David Malott.
• OpenPlans (Openopolis): OpenPlans director Frank Hebbert planned to crowdsource ideas from off-site employees via Twitter and Google docs to construct a walkable, eco-friendly city with minimal car traffic.
• Studio Gang (Looptopia): A city where function (being a “closed loop,” self-sustaining system) mirrored form (a cultural hub surrounded by concentric circles of roads).
• Fast Company (Fastcotown): Sheer pragmatism. “I’m not trying to assert some kind of urbanist philosophy,” Co.Exist editor Morgan Clendaniel said. “I’m the control group.”
• Studio-X (Champignon): Studio X was the only team that was aggressively disinterested in sustainability. Rather, Studio-X’s was unapologetically opportunistic. “We’re going to build brothels and stadiums, they go well together,” Studio-X Director Nicola Twilley joked. “Actually, we’re going to build a knowledge economy and charge your kids a fortune to study there, because that’s the biggest racket around.”

Every city was solely focused on economic autonomy. There was no talk of creating mutually beneficial partnerships. In fact, teams merely saw one another as potential buyers of their wealth of goods and services. The easiest political philosophy is, apparently, Western European mercantilism.

“I would’ve expected everyone to come together and cooperate,” Librande said. “Instead, they competed. I’m glad they did because it was a lot more fun.”

For the full article, click here.

Pete Kampfer is an experienced city manager. Visit this Google+ page for more news and insights on well-managed cities.