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The core issue centers around the idea that creatives will be replaced by super-intelligent robots to design buildings, create art, or design vehicles.
Yet even as AI evolves across other design-related industries, AI could prove to do more good than bad, tackling the mundane so that you can augment your creative process.
— Interesting Engineering
Artificial Intelligence has already changed the nature of industries like manufacturing and cybersecurity. However, where does architecture fit into this mix? A harrowing concern is super intelligent robots may replace the creative practice and take over the design process that architects and... View full entry
Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders. — The Atlantic
Google has launched a new online tool, the Environmental Insights Explorer, which tracks emissions inventory on a city scale. The program is still in beta mode and currently only provides data for five cities (Pittsburgh, PA; Mountain View, CA; Victoria, BC; Melbourne, AU; Buenos Aires, AR) but... View full entry
Justin O'Beirne lays out years worth of research on mapping technologies in his essay Google Map's Moat. O'Beirne reveals,"Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps [...] The biggest difference is the building footprints: Google seems to have them all, while Apple... View full entry
allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step — WIRED
"For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, "restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses". Scores will... View full entry
But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin?
[...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.
— NPR
In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high... View full entry
Uber has A rocky history with city governments—to put it mildly... Now, Uber is making something of a peace offering. The company is launching a new service that could help cities master their traffic. It’s called Uber Movement, and it uses information on the billions of rides Uber has completed. — Wired
Uber Movement is free for the select planning agencies and researchers granted access to it. With it, you can gauge travel times between any two locations. Since, as Uber's chief of transportation policy notes, Uber doesn't actually do any urban planning, they figure they might as well give all... View full entry
Copenhagen has become the first city in the world to attempt to monetize its, and others’, data through a city data market.
Traffic snarl-ups, home break-ins, whether it rained or snowed, and how much electricity the city dwellers use each day is among the data to be traded for cash, city officials announced. Interestingly, the city, which is partnering with Hitachi on the project, also wants to incorporate others’ data.
— Network World
"Not all data will have a price tag—some of it will be free, but it will be anonymized anyway."Relatedly, in a recent conversation with Joseph Grima, co-founder of Space Caviar, the architect suggested, "...the home is becoming a factory of data to the point that one could pay one's rent through... View full entry
Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city.
Why?
Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.
— Cities of the Future
The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place? — theguardian.com
City policymakers will have objective standards to compare their services and performance with other cities around the world. And just as significant, the people of cities — civic, business organizations, ordinary citizens — will be able to access the same new global standards. — Citiscope
This is a big, global deal. The International Organization for Standardization, based in Geneva, has issued a list of standards dictating the precise kind of data cities should be collecting, to gauge performance and character. Previously, comparisons between supposedly identical data points in... View full entry
The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise. — Places Journal
What do corporate smart-city programs have in common with D.I.Y. science projects and civic hackathons? “Theirs is a city with an underlying logic,” writes Shannon Mattern, “made more efficient — or just, or sustainable, or livable — with a tweak to its algorithms or... View full entry
