Urban Data Talks #3
Last week we staged another great evening full of Urban Data Talks and discussions around the topic. Our third edition of the event focused primarily on large scale urban data communities in the UK and around the world.
We had the pleasure to welcome three speakers who were the initiators behind the initiatives or at least involved from early stages and actively engaged in the building of the respective urban data communities. Their stories on how they started and how they evolved were really inspiring and this writeup will hardly do them justice. It’s a pity I will not be able to convey all their narratives here.
Our first presenter of the night was Lukas Mocek from Sensor.Community. What started off as a citizen science initiative in Stuttgart, Germany about 6 years ago with the goal to increase local transparency around air quality, has grown now into a more global movement with contributors from across the world. Back then their region in Germany became known as having the worst air quality in the entire country, however political leadership did not step up to address the issue. Access to air quality (AQ) data was very tricky to obtain. The state government AQ monitoring stations where not accessible online, and data was only available often 3-6 months later in a PDF document. Furthermore, since only few such monitoring stations exist, their readings do not capture actual pollution hotspots due to their sparse deployment. A local team around Lukas went on to design their own low cost AQ monitoring hardware and installed AQ monitoring stations across the city. While the data was not highly accurate it provided them with a good indication of actual pollution levels with much more dense geographic coverage. They setup an online platform where they shared live air quality readings with the population allowing them to put pressure on the local government. They published hardware designs and firmware as open source which allowed other members to easily replicate the measuring device for about 50 Euro and connect the data feeds to their platform. Soon thereafter other communities across their country emerged and joined in and it ended up becoming a global movement with more than 14k sensors deployed across 72 countries. Also apart from particle information, sensors are now emerging on their network to capture environmental parameters and more recently also noise levels.
Lukas highlighted that all this was achieved without any government support or funding, effectively his team and all other community members putting in their spare time and money – an impressive achievement. Despite the scale of his initiative Lukas still struggles for policy maker attention. Only the Netherlands has so far engaged more officially with their data, with some European research centres incorporating it into a national AQ data observatory. Recently the Netherlands has invested in rollouts of more than 1000 Sensor.community sensors, and a deployment of 500 sensors is also underway in Paris.
Our second speaker was Oscar Gonazeles from the Smart Citizen initiative. Smart Citizen started out as a design project in Barcelona’s FabLAB. The key trigger was the observation at that time that all Smart City initiatives focused on the control room vision of a smart city. Data streamed from cameras and IoT sensors provided advanced insights and situational awareness to an operating theatre with the mayor and city authorities as the major focal point of smart decision making. There must be also a way to empower citizens to become smart and allow them to participate in the decision-making process. So instead of building tools for cities and municipalities they focused on tools that empower citizens and equip them with data to generate their own insights and translate these into actions. This led to the birth of a low-cost sensing device called Smart Citizen Kit with environmental sensors that citizens could deploy in their own house or neighbourhoods. This way citizens are able to collect environmental evidence about local issues and use this to stimulate conversations in their community and city leadership.
The FabLab Barcelona team quickly realised that sensing alone does not lead to a Smart Citizen but requires a platform and a community for it to become useful. Through a number of EU projects, the team managed to create necessary online tools, iteratively improve their sensing hardware to make it more robust, and experiment with different methodologies of how communities can utilise the created infrastructure for their cause. While the developed sensing kit cannot compete in terms of accuracy with expensive monitoring stations installed by public authorities, it provides citizens with the opportunity to flexibly deploy it wherever they need it. Oscar presented a case study that took place in the “Placa del Sol” community, a popular neighbourhood in Barcelona. Local residents suffered from disruptive noise issues going deep into the night mainly caused by noisy guests of nearby restaurants and bars. Equipped with Smart Citizens Kits residents were able to monitor and document noise levels in their community and gather evidence, and even made it into national newspapers. The resulting dialogue forced the restaurant/bar owners and local authority to reconsider opening hours and come to agreement with the local community. The resulting learnings from this and other case studies fuels a richer set of methodologies that can be used to facilitate other “Smart Citizen” communities around the world.
Our final talk of the night was delivered by Phil James from the Urban Observatory in Newcastle. Phil and his team at the University of Newcastle set up the UK’s biggest real time data observatory. It brings together thousands of data streams from existing urban infrastructure as well as IoT sensing infrastructure that his team and collaborators have deployed across Newcastle. Phil makes these data feeds accessible via open APIs under an open data license and stores the data in local cloud storage - which now contains over 11 billion city observations captured during the past few years. Inspired by the approach of astronomic observatories, Phil keeps all the historic data so it can used to uncover new insights at a later date, going beyond the current critical questions and explorations that his partners are actively engaged in. The urban observatory now provides an infrastructure backbone for agile policy making for the city and supports future urban planning decisions and interventions. He is actively engaged with the local authorities to gather evidence on metrics such as traffic, footfall and air quality and runs experiments to assess the impact that possible interventions such as road closures, congestion charges or pedestrianisation of parts of the city may have. This provides a more scientific foundation on which to judge the effectiveness of urban policy and planning decisions, and aims to ensure that desired outcomes can be actually achieved. According to Phil, it is nonsense to try to “optimise” a smart city operation due to the complexity of different city eco-systems and how they are interlinked with each other and humans in the loop. Optimising one aspect might lead to adverse effects in others. A smart city is about finding the right balance across different system areas and constantly tuning and adjusting it to get desired outcomes. I couldn’t agree more with him.
The panel discussion that followed these talks was really lively and contrasted different perspectives of how urban data communities can be built and further sustained. While both the urban observatory and SmartCitizen were able to smartly use grant funding to establish their tools and surrounding community, Sensor.Community was bootstrapped from initiators without funding support and has been primarily crowd funded by its own growing community base. Now as Sensor.Community is reaching more maturity; national authorities are playing a role in growing the footprint. Scandinavian countries seem to be more progressive in directly investing further infrastructure rollouts, while their Eastern European peers need more community led efforts for scaling up.
Phil also provided an interesting reflection about the infrastructure costs. While hardware is hard and requires upfront investments, sustainable use of the infrastructure requires equal investments in people and processes. Also not all infrastructure investments have to be permanent installations. There is a need for “popup” sensing infrastructures that can be deployed on an ad-hoc basis in certain areas of a city to support policy experiments or insight gathering activities. This could reduce infrastructure costs. What the urban observatory lacks is access to personal data streams for citizens. For this to happen, relevant data sharing models and enabling mechanisms such as data trusts are important - to allow citizens to donate their data for use in “data for good” initiatives.
This rounded up another super informative evening. If you want to immerse yourself in further details on urban data topics and capture some of the real excitement that our speakers convey, I would really recommend you join our next event live on zoom and become part of the conversation.