City As A Platform

Exploring cities as interfaces—ripe for interaction and hacking. Curated by justadandak.com.

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$80 Million | Is This Bill Gates Attempt At Building A Smart City

Announced in the local real estate weekly and then picked up a week later on state news, it seems Bill Gates is set to become a city builder.

Acquired in a cash sale, the land already has permission for development:

3,800 acres will go towards office, commercial and retail space. Then, 470 acres will be used for public schools. Plus, there's room for 80,000 residential units.

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Google Building Cities | Protecting Against Data Mining

A wonderful and challenging piece exploring how Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name from The Guardian has this arresting bit:

Amid all this platformaphoria, one could easily forget that the street grid is not typically the property of a private entity, capable of excluding some and indulging others. Would we want Trump Inc to own it? Probably not. So why hurry to give its digital equivalent to Alphabet?

The city should be a collection of places and spaces unfettered by leaching data hounds and which vehemently cherishes an protects the idea of the commons. Soemtimes cheap means exactly that. Cheapening an ideal.

Technology is a layer of solutions not an undercutting provider which commodifies a populous. The article goes on:

Who determines the rules by which different companies get access to it? Would cities be saving energy using Alphabet’s own AI systems or would the platform be open to others? Would its self-driving cars be those of Waymo, Alphabet’s dedicated unit, or those of Uber and any other entity that builds them? Would Alphabet support “urban net neutrality” as actively as it supports net neutrality of the conventional type?

There needs to be a legislative response to the above to ensure the safety of its citizens and ensure civics is maintained in lieu of simple saving money.

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How To Create Happy Streets | A Tale of Two Intersections

Using tactical urbanism, the City of Vancouver painted vibrant rainbow crosswalks at a busy intersection. Did it influence the way people feel about themselves and others?

From the Happy Streets Living Lab which explore the link between public space improvements and trust, sociability, and wellbeing.

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The Life-Sized City | How Medellin Is Leading The World

The Life-Sized City is a global urbanism series hosted by Mikael Colville-Andersen highlighting the many amazing things that are happening in cities around the world.

Love the idea of making cities 'life-size' - accessible and considerate.

Here's the producers TEDx talk as well:

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Berlin is Becoming a Sponge City

Berlin is becoming a "Sponge City" designed to tackle two issues - heat and flooding - by imitating nature.

Wow!

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Shadow Mapping | Seeing The Light

A wonderful graphical illustration of Toronto City and it's shadows above (source: Data Is Beautiful Subreddit).

Understanding such things could impact on the 'light' design of a city, to enable planners to decide on where and how such developments could hinder or aid natural sunlight flow. Something explored wonderfully in this Mapping the Shadows of New York City: Every Building, Every Block, NY Times article.

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Trees & Cities | Granular Mapping

The New York City Street Tree Map brings New York City’s urban forest to your fingertips. For the first time, you have access to information about every street tree in New York City.

At the time of writing there are:

Mapped Trees

681,278 mapped trees

226 Number of Species, and

London Planetree is the most common species at (87,479 trees, 13% of trees on the map)

Check out https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org run by the NYC Parks Service.

In a similar type is this map of every tree in Amsterdam (in maintenance of the city), including species, height, trunk diameter and year planted.

And just to round it off, here's a National Geographic article on Nine Cities That Love Their Trees

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How to Fix Traffic Forever | Creating Attention

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Mapping Geo Data | Batchgeo

If you have a bunch of data with geo-locatable information give batchgeo.com a try. It's free up to 250 entries and it's very intuitive in terms of creating your own map. The abave map is taken from this Which trees are protected in Auckland? 2011 article.

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24 Hours Of New York City Subway | Visualised

Simple and wonderful stuff.

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Google Earth Engine Timelapse | Urbanisation Visualised

An illustration of the impact of urbanisation from a unique vantage point via Google Earth:

Working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and TIME, we're releasing more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space, compiled for the first time into an interactive time-lapse experience. We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public. Built from millions of satellite images and trillions of pixels, you can explore this global, zoomable time-lapse map as part of TIME's new Timelapse project. View stunning phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012.

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Wired Future Cities | Shenzhen Featured

Wired Videos has a new three-part 'future cities' documentary focussed on the hardware capital of the world, Shenzhen. Watch all the parts below: 'The Silicon Valley of hardware'

'The Maker Movement'

'A new breed of intellectual property'

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Cities As Productivity Engines | Global Infrastructure Initiative

The Global Infrastructure Initiative is a McKinsey initiative focusses on:

Rethinking infrastructure and offering new solutions to pressing challenges.

Strategising the future of infrastructure in cities provides a basis of flourishing growth. Thinking regionally and even globally also brings new questions and answers as there's an opportunity to learn from our connected world. The project has a great site which houses a quarterly series of videos, podcasts and articles curated to reflect a single topic or idea plus produces an annual report from it's yearly Summit event.

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IOT Manifesto | Downloadable Resource

Introduced as 'guidelines for responsible design in a connected world'—click image above for larger version.

This manifesto serves as a code of conduct for everyone involved in developing the Internet of Things, outlining 10 principles to help create balanced and honest products in a burgeoning field with many unknowns.

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Cities In Europe Illustrated | Interactive Report

The Cities In Europe introduces a lot of the key elements for the upcoming Europe 2020 strategy:

In this ‘urban age’ cities are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibilities as well as their capacities to play their part in addressing issues like poverty, segregation, and climate change adaptation.

A great interactive element is the piece on quality of life in European cities, where you can choose from an array of options to see which places are leaders (or losers): Download the Cities In Europe PDF report for other insights / illustrations.

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Shanghai In 20 Years | Growth Illustrated

Astonishing transforming of Shanghai in the years between 1990 and 2010. Image credit

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Watch, Read, Listen, Think | Inspiration Things

A proposal to turn the city’s disused Underground rail tunnels into a network of electricity-generating bike and pedestrian paths. Open source maps with over 6 million detected traffic signs in the United States and Europe. In China it now takes one day to 3D print a mansion or 50-80% less time to build an entire apartment complex. The analysis of the noise complaints made by New York City has been plotted and mapped by a data scientist (his TEDxNewYork talk). This year at CES there were 900 Internet of Things exhibitors whilst the FTC issues a new report which focusses on governing the new industry.