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“I felt the physical city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction.” It’s hard not to see the reasoning behind that quote from the Mondrian-acolyte painter Leon Polk Smith when you learn that he grew up amidst the gridded fields of Oklahoma before moving to New York City. But it’s instructive in another way. The physical city certainly is the expression of abstract things: the desires of its inhabitants, the collective aesthetic of cultures, the movement of goods, the education, safety, and utilities that strengthen or weaken it.
What had been missing, until recently, was a good way to measure and describe that equation. But that is changing today as the systems that support those abstractions become more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Sensors are increasingly embedded in everything from police cars to parking meters and are generating massive amounts of data from every city department and street corner. And new software tools – many of them free and open to the public — are becoming available to help city managers and citizens explore and analyze all that data, compare it to other cities’ data, and develop new understandings about their city. This is how cities can evolve from abstraction to insight.
One example is City Forward, a new interactive tool from IBM that helps reveal such insights. Citizens, government officials and academics can use City Forward to gather, compare, analyze, visualize, and discuss statistical trends that reflect the vibrancy of cities all over the world.
We’re moving beyond data to open tools for working with the data that our cities are publishing. These are tools for asking better questions. What happens to employment in cities before and after they host the Olympic Games? Can we infer crime patterns from city service call requests? What is the relationship between air quality and trucking lanes? What options are available to reducing traffic in high-density city areas?
For example, one City Forward exploration created by a site user attempts to simulate what a congestion pricing system might look like by analyzing traffic patterns into New York City over bridges and tunnels just after tolls are raised. This user also layered in ridership on the New York subway system to look at follow-on effects. Spoiler: there is a dip in traffic in the months following toll increases. Is this proof that congestion pricing works? No. Is it a better, more quantitative way to have a debate about congestion pricing? Absolutely.
Platforms like City Forward can parse disparate sets of urban data, illuminating unforeseen patterns and relationships between different areas of city life and governance. This allows citizens and city officials to form new judgments about how once-controversial and abstract ideas such as traffic congestion pricing might be approached anew, supported by a clearer way to measure and demonstrate the positive effects on the quality of life in their city.
Thanks to a preponderance of data and an expanding ecosystem of applications that make it more useful, insightful and actionable, cities can begin to take the first steps in understanding the abstractions that have always made city life so vibrant. With the right data and the right analytical tools they can develop insights that will lead to better decision making and ultimately benefit the public good.
The demo reel for IBM’s new “urban dashboard” technology: City Forward
John Tolva is the Director of Citizenship & Technology for IBM and is responsible for developing new projects in partnership with non-profits and government agencies.
