Urban Data Talks #4
After a very long winter break, we managed to get the ball rolling for 2022 with another exciting edition of Urban Data Talks. Our fourth community event provided in-depth insights on urban data use from leading initiatives across the UK and the rest of Europe. Three inspiring speakers who work with urban data as part of their daily lives shared first-hand experiences from recent projects.
Our first speaker, Paul Hodgson from the Greater London Authority (GLA) used private sector urban data sets to understand the economic activity and footfall on high streets across different London Boroughs. The use of data allowed participating Boroughs to better understand the behaviour of London’s residents and its work force population during the pandemic and assess the economic recovery of different business sectors on the high streets, as well as guide future policy interventions.
Our second speaker, Jaime Ventura, former lead for digital platforms at Porto Digital, shared his journey of creating an urban data platform for the city of Porto. His talk highlighted how Porto uses urban data for decision and policy making and how his team developed a suitable data infrastructure for the city to enable this.
Our third speaker, Alanus von Radecki, CEO at the German Data Competency Centre for Cities and Regions shared learnings on how German cities and communities are leveraging shared service building blocks and solutions to solve common challenges they are facing.
A deeper dive into each of these talks with some of the key takeaways is presented in the following.
High Street Data Service for London
London has over 600 different high streets which are more than just retail units. They provide a supportive urban ecosystem for a wide range of Londoners in multiple and inclusive ways - from community and cultural spaces to local work hubs and access to essential services.
High Streets have been affected by long-term global and national issues such as the need for more housing, rise in online retail and changing nature of work. The recent pandemic aggravated the challenges, with areas that relied on tourists and/or daytime workers being hardest hit.
Doing more with data was a key recommendation from the High Streets Adaptive Strategies Report. While the GLA holds hundreds of datasets and hosts several interactive maps, there is a lack of timely information updated on a continuous basis (e.g. weekly/monthly). Even the available data has often been difficult to access by officers and lacked insights and summaries into changing trends over time.
As a result, a high street data service partnerships was established together with 24 London Boroughs and the GLA. It allowed the creation of a central funding pot to purchase and analyse commercial datasets, removing the duplication in purchasing of proprietary data and the costs associated with cleaning, preparing and analysing this data.
It also facilitated collaboration among Boroughs, providing access to a London-wide picture of High Streets Activity across London, enabling comparison and knowledge sharing on High Street programmes, policies and initiatives as well as best practises on using such data.
Collectively, the high street data partnership purchased footfall and spend data from commercial players such as telecoms and payment service providers, which combined with other data sources (eg. opening times, vacancy rates and land ownership) provided the basis for answering a number of key questions which changed during the course of the pandemic.
During the first peak of the pandemic, the data was used to understand citizen behaviour - whether they were staying at home, and then starting to leave their homes again. During the second peak the effects of the tiered lockdowns were observed. Later on the data provided insights into economic recovery patterns and changes to domestic and international tourism. The data partnership provided further insights for non-economic high street projects such as the success of business recycling schemes, planning policy and community safety.
Building Porto’s Open Data Platform
Porto Digital is a private non-for-profit organisation who acts as the digital innovation arm of the Municipality of Porto, with the goal to drive forward the digitisation of urban services across the city and service providers.
Jaime and his team have been at the forefront of establishing a suitable data infrastructure for improved access, management, and use of data to enable data driven decision making (day-to-day), policy making (longer term), and open data publishing.
To achieve this goal Jaime’s team put together an urban data platform consisting of open-source components wherever possible, complemented with in-house developments and aligned with emerging standard recommendations such as the Open and Agile Smart City Minimum Interoperability Mechanisms (OASC MIMs).
The platform initially focused on internal stakeholder needs to enable data driven decision and policy making.
The team developed data driven decision support tools for service managers and civil protection services to enable improved decision making in their daily business activities. For example, an issue tracking system allowed service managers to see the volume of issues being reported and their nature, as well as tracking their successful resolution. The system provided more fine grained insights enabled by an integrated data view. Another example was a dashboard to improve management of e-scooter fleets in the city, by allowing service managers to check on alerts from the e-scooter service and track the number of violations to the service policy. Equally, civil protection services were provided with a live dashboard so they could monitor weather conditions and environment conditions.
Urban data driven policy making included a use case for the further scaling of a Municipal Wifi infrastructure, based on past infrastructure usage data. Another use case looked at whether to invest in an EV fleet at a time where EV battery technologies were not supporting longer distance travel. Based on analysis of fleet telematics data, a case for EV transition could be established as typical journey times were short enough for the supported battery range.
Leveraging the platform effect for smart cities
DKSR, Data Competence for Cities & Region is a German centre that focuses on the empowerment of cities through urban data, open source solutions and common service building blocks.
DKSR provides a common urban data platform for cities and supports the development of data centric applications on top that can be shared across different cities.
Alanus presented examples of such shared services that they have developed in collaboration with several German cities.
One such service is a dashboard for managing different mobility service providers such as e-scooters and e-bikes. The service has been developed as part of an engagement with the city of Cologne and has now been shared as open code for other cities to benefit.
Another example is a flood warning system that leverages weather forecast and sensor data to drive real time citizen alarms and control room systems.
Cities who develop urban data solutions can share these in an application marketplace-like environment called “square”. Such sharing is rewarded with specific community credits that the city can later trade for future services from DKSR and its community.
Highlights from the panel
The panel discussion highlighted emerging trends on urban data use in cities. One is the use of data partnerships that allow local authorities to collectively obtain and share relevant data sets to improve decision making and collaboration, especially where data needs to be acquired at significant costs from private sector data providers. While the GLA example sets a promising precedent for it, there are likely to be tensions with such initiatives with private sector data providers whose interest is to monetise data multiple times by selling it to individual organisations rather than once to a partnership. Adequate pricing and licensing models that scale with partnership size might provide an answer to this.
Another interesting trend discussed by the panel was the role of open source based urban data platforms and solutions in future. Porto demonstrated a traditional model where a skilled IT department of the city sets up its own urban data platform based on open source components and customisations. However, this requires the city to have long-term inhouse resources dedicated to the maintenance of the platform and underlying software building blocks. An alternative model adopted by DKSR is where a third party takes on the operation of an open source data platform on behalf of a city. This minimizes inhouse skills required by city departments. In addition DKSR fosters an ecosystem of sharing of solutions on top of a common urban data platform that they develop for individual cities. Whether open source or not, what is exciting is that re-usable urban data-driven solutions for cities can emerge, and once proven successful can be easily replicated at lower cost across cities, without reinventing the wheel.
I am already looking forward to our next Urban Data Talks event after the summer, and to be inspired by the exciting ideas and practices that our expert presenters will share with us.