SMART CITIES FEATURE
CHANGING THE SHAPE OF CITIES Leveraging big data will change how cities are designed, what forms of transport are available, and give us smarter spaces to work with
ities are badly designed. By which we mean they’re archaic. Little consideration has been given to the increasing number of people travelling to ever-sprawling urban areas, even though we all know what that looks like. It looks like congestion. It looks like stationary traffic, and raised blood pressures, and increasingly fragile mental health, because there’s only so long you can endure that situation before it begins to get to you. But proponents of big data have plans for cities that involve leveraging information to alter how traffic affects… well, everything.
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Roads are veins
‘Sitting in traffic’ affects far more than you might expect. It affects the people who constantly navigate it, it affects the productivity of companies (for myriad reasons), it affects the environment, and it affects governments, financially and in other ways. You need to cope with being in traffic, 76
companies have to deal with late workers who are already stressed when they arrive at the office (plus, goods and services need to be delivered), burning fossil fuels have obvious affects, and governments need to manage and maintain those roads, deploying law enforcement as needed. It’s no exaggeration to liken roads to a city’s veins. If they become congested, the life that needs to flow to parts of a city cannot get there, having massive knock-on effects everywhere. Rerouting that traffic via other places stresses systems that would otherwise work with fewer issues, potentially causing even more problems. It’s not just an unpleasant experience, it’s a
potential disaster always waiting to happen. And that’s why governments and companies like Microsoft, Google and others have begun to leverage the data they have at their disposal to try and alter cities.
Improving circulation
WWhether you realise it or not, you already make use of ‘big data’ – Google Maps runs on traffic information gathered from Android phones that are stuck in traffic, letting you know which areas to avoid on your way home. But proper implementation, at a city-planning level, calls for more information than just the stuff stored on various servers. Efficiency information from
