Informing Cities from the Ground up

People around the world are sharing more and more data about their experience of the city, through social media, interactive participation platforms, or voluntary projects. Social listening has become a tremendous opportunity for decision-makers to better grasp people’s aspirations and lifestyles. For example, Rosamund Fletcher from the Design Trust for Public Spaces, explained how she conducted participatory workshops throughout in New York City to solicit input and feedback from the community, in order to reclaim public spaces below transit infrastructures. At the Future Cities Laboratory, researchers from the Big Data module gauge the impact of cultural planning initiatives and people’s appreciation of art spaces by analysing the ‘footprints’ of social media. Researchers from the Cognition Perception and Behaviour module invite volunteers to participate in behavioural experiments, in order to understand wayfinding and subjective experience of moving through the busy, bustling and multilevel metropolis.

As we uncovered during the discussion, the use of data should not be only to confirm pre-defined policies but also to explore new directions. The power of data comes fully when we let people ask the questions rather than when we merely seek their validation on well-thought-out plans. For that, we need attractive and out-of-the-box tools. We were very impressed by the Museum of the City of New York’s Future City Lab, an interactive game that encourages visitors to step into the shoes of an urban planner and make design proposals for a specific site. It reminded us about the tools being developed and tested at the Future Cities Laboratory, as in a recent crowdsourcing public campaign for a new development in Singapore, Waterfront Tanjong Pagar.

Finally, we need to bridge the gap between people’s knowledge and experts’ knowledge. This is the tricky part, as the path from data collection to decision-making is paved with many challenges. For that we need open-source and contributive platforms to clarify how the use of data has led to specific decisions and what were the trade-offs. Data should help to shape best practices and avoid repeating known mistakes. For example, Mike Aziz shared how the Project NY initiative is leading efforts to break data-silos and create a platform that gathers urban data across organisations and makes visualisations available to citizens and stakeholders alike. Such approaches are necessary to increase the engagement with informed and evidence-based design.