Archinect - News

built: LA maps the age of every building in Los Angeles

2015-05-29T15:41:00-04:00

Construction in Los Angeles may have exploded during the postwar era, but as a new interactive map shows, the wide age range of its buildings might surprise you. Using open data from local governments, built: LA visualizes the age of roughly 3 million buildings across L.A. County constructed between 1890 and 2008. Drag your mouse to explore the vast web of communities and neighborhoods, hover over individual properties to discover birth years, and double click to zoom in further.

Open data's potential & challenges to boost tenants’ rights activism

2015-05-11T17:54:00-04:00

Open data, and the interactive mapping and data visualization that can come of it, has become a de facto engagement and storytelling tool among contemporary journalists, social justice activists, and civic-minded technologists. But despite its allure, open data’s potential for fostering civic engagement and creating transparency and dialogue is plagued by issues of usability, access, and quality control.

How Helsinki mashed up “open data” with regionalism

2014-04-29T15:27:00-04:00

For more than a century, [Helsinki] has funded its own statistics bureaus to keep data on the population, businesses, building permits, and most other things you can think of. [...] Helsinki and three of its neighboring cities are now banding together... Through an entity called Helsinki Region Infoshare, they are bringing together their data so that a fuller picture of the metro area can come into view.

As city governments become stronger drivers of infrastructural change, and the idea of a "connected city" becomes imminent, cities must learn how to manage and wield the vast amount of data collected. Parallel developments in city demographics, creating stronger links between cities within a larger region, means that more people are contributing to and relying on that data. Making it comprehensive and accessible to all is the obvious (and necessary) next step.

To access data for both Helsinki and its greater regional area, check out City of Helsinki Urban Facts and the Helsinki Region Infoshare (both websites in English).

Related: A survey released earlier this month ranks U.S. cities on how accessible their data is, whether or not they have an open data policy. Perhaps not surprisingly, San Francisco is ranked as #1.