Open City Data — Mapping the Concrete Jungle
It doesn’t take a brilliant observer to see that the way we live in cities is going to have to change. Indeed, your own urban centre is almost assuredly changing around you as you read this sentence. Some simple facts underpin this observation — more of the world’s population lives in urban areas than ever before, and all projections show that number going up. From there, the logic is elemental. Altering a key component in a system invariably requires additional alterations to maintain the system as a whole, particularly something as delicately balanced as a city inhabited by millions.
With greater and greater population densities, stress points in civic infrastructure start to groan and sag. Sanitation, food, water and housing — these are the keystone elements in a viable urban centre, all typically designed and implemented without the stratospheric modern population numbers in mind. By the same token, replacing the infrastructure wholesale simply isn’t a viable solution. Citizens tend to get unhappy when their sewage system goes offline for an extended retrofit. This limits local governments to either carefully planned retrofits done piecemeal over decades, or the careful adjustment and recalibration of a system already under heavy use. Neither are ideal and doing nothing simply isn’t an option.
Understandably, the modern urbanite might find this all a little concerning. Don’t start doomsday prepping just yet though, the solution is closer than you think.
As with almost any issue, if you want to address the problem, first you’re going to need to understand the underlying data. In the case of the modern city, generating the data isn’t the issue. With smart devices and sensors blanketing most major urban centres, there’s no lack of data being gathered. However, finding a source which provides unbiased access to municipal data can be trickier. A service which streamlines and organizes data from countless sources, into a format which even the most IT adverse citizen can understand.
That’s why open data projects exist, as a means for getting citizens involved in their own cities. Projects like the World Council on City Data (WCCD) Open Data Portal allow for citizens to not only explore their own city’s data, but compare and contrast with other municipal centres around the world. As the tagline says, it is a project created by cities, for cities, nicely dovetailing the open source ethos into the practical benefits of open data.
In essence, it takes a series of civic challenges and turns them into an open marketplace for ideas. If one city pulls ahead of the pack, every aspect of their success can be analyzed and understood. With accessible open data, citizens can laborious and slow process of change.
Think about it — how would you even begin to approach systemic issues in recycling, trash collection, green spaces or any number of other projects in a city whose inhabitants numbers in the millions? Without data to serve as a map, it’s all blind guesswork. Canadian cities like Vancouver have embraced the notion of the “green city” wholeheartedly, but with open data solutions like WCCD’s portal, even smaller municipal centres can begin to reap the benefits of trailblazing metropolises.
Civic collaboration with the click of a button — Just one of the many ways open data is making the world an easier place to live in.
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