Urban Big Data

Democratizing the co-creation of urban design

Seoul, Korea

In the history of mankind, cities have proven to be our most enduring and stable mode of social organization. Cities like Athens (Greece), Luxor (Egpyt), Tripoli (Lybia), or Beijing (China) outlasted all empires and nations over the last centuries.

Modern cities have evolved into havens of demographic, technological, cultural, and economic powers and Big Data is about to add a whole new dimension to their urban public spaces.

Most of us are surrounded by urban public spaces, whether it’s a sidewalk, a shopping mall, a bus, an event hall, or a church.

Accelerated by the rise of the smartphone, digital technologies have created a constant measurable interaction between citizens and public areas. Our interactions with the urban environment is not only receiving information when we are searching for an event on drop!in, the next bus schedule, or spend time on social networks, but we generate data as well. All of the data created by these activities is collected, stored, managed, and analyzed.

And in the end, this data can be used for the citizens’ benefit by governments and urban planners to manage and design public spaces.

Before Big Data, the architects had to use many assumptions when they designed spaces. The existence of desire paths’ have shown how wrong they might be at times. Until now, the people who actually used public spaces did not have a say in how they were designed or managed.

Big Data is now democratizing the co-creation of urban public spaces. And citizens have largely access to this data as well.

Cities are creating open data pools for developers, citizens, and city builders to use to co-create better cities.

Examples for Urban Datastores:

It is to us as citizens, supported by startups like Tenqyu to make sense of the data and utilize it to build solutions for our urban public spaces that will ensures that the places we live in are healthy, inclusive, innovative, and thriving.