As Big Data and cutting-edge technologies become more available, urban researchers have started to investigate how new insights can be used to manage the various challenges of urban growth. Urban Informatics, a field that combines urban science, geomatics and IT, is the new approach to understanding urban systems while developing Smart Cities. It’s currently been used to research specific areas with below facets earning major exploits in the field: –

Human Mobility and Travel

In the coming years, planning for seamless travel within cities will be a key issue. It is a proven truth that easy access to valuable locations like hospitals, workplaces, schools, or malls has a significant impact on people’s quality of life. Data-driven analysis of intricate urban systems is drawing the attention of interdisciplinary teams all over the world. This will help inform urban planning in the complex task of regenerating old cities or planning for new ones.

As tracking and sensing technologies are increasingly being used to collect a wide range of urban data, important insights are becoming widely available. This growing abundance of collected data, analyzed with the right methods, will help us with better planning of cities. Leveraging today’s robust computing power and data gathered from sensing technologies, we should be able to efficiently trace and tackle our traffic problems.

Taxi-hailing companies, likes of Uber or Bolt, have gone ahead to innovate and commercialize such capabilities. Google Maps is offering real-time traffic conditions and route planning features. Google Places can now tag various types of establishments, such as restaurants, schools, offices, and hospitals, to act as good indicators of trip attraction/ points of interest. These points of interest (POIs) are then registered on Google Places and used to approximate trip attraction in a city. Such data can then be used to study socio-economic demographics or strategically plan and manage physical land use. Boundless opportunities exist in this space. 

Urban Crime & Security

Studies have shown that crime rates are higher in urban and industrialized areas than in rural areas. Environmental criminologists now commonly accept that environmental factors have considerable influence on criminal behavior and understanding these influences will help to shed light on what measures are effective for crime prevention. Urban security refers not only to crime prevention practices and implementations but also to the public perception of crime. Crime analysis today aims to provide tactical suggestions with respect to criminal planning, assessment and deployment of resources. There are various analytical tools and comprehensive data-driven methods for analyzing and preventing urban crime. For example, network-based crime hot spotting. Crime hotspots are small geographic areas with high rates of criminal activity. Using statistical methods, crime hotspot mapping can readily generate clustered risk surfaces. In this era of big data and AI, some methods are now even capable of forecasting a particular day’s crime potential then enable smart allocation of security resources.

Urban Pollution

Recent advances in sensing technologies and retrieval methodologies have greatly increased the applicability of remote sensing in urban environmental applications. These developments are finding use in urban air quality monitoring or even urban heat islands (caused by the replacement of natural evaporative & porous land surfaces with non-evaporative human-made surfaces) that eventually affect human comfort. Water quality, a common problem in developing countries, is further being exacerbated by unregulated drainage. Agricultural, industrial and urban waste are finding way into water channels, case of Nairobi River, thus causing toxicity. If these occurrences go unchecked, cancer and waterborne diseases are bound to increase. Due to these, active sensor gadgets fitted with IoT capabilities will enable faster reporting of pollutive instances and in turn, remedial measures by relevant authorities.

Urban Energy Systems

Development and maintenance of urban infrastructures is a highly energy intensive exercise. As urban areas continue to grow in expanse and magnitude of population, this heightens the need for increasing environmental awareness. Complex interactions between human dynamics and critical infrastructures have significant implications for energy consumption and emissions. Big Data and Geo AI can now be used to provide insights say, ‘Population and Land-Use Data’. Utilizing such info provides tremendous opportunities to design optimal, resilient urban systems by exploiting the inherent complexity of these interactions. For example, through simulation modeling, the wind flow pattern of a particular location can be mapped then used to effectively design orientation of physical buildings. Shadow-effect from one high rise building can be suited while designing an adjacent building thus reduce the use of cooling equipment. It’s all about designing urban infrastructures that enable cities to reduce energy consumption and related environmental degradation.

Urban Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, Health & Well-being

Advances in technology and miniaturization of wearable devices have facilitated the ability to track activity patterns of individuals. These digital devices not only enable individuals to generate and analyze personalized health data, but also enable them to share this information. The information from these devices provides vital opportunities for researchers and practitioners within the health and well-being arena. Using these advances, health impacts of specific land-cover types or configuration of urban land use, say commercial, residential, recreational areas, green space, agricultural areas can be evaluated. An emerging field in the health arena supported by smartphone technology is Ecological Momentary Assessment. Apps, with the ability to enter current location status via GPS, are used to gather what people are feeling in relation to their immediate environment. This allows researchers to explore real time effects of environmental conditions and the accompanying behavior being witnessed in the population.

Urban Governance 

Cities are large and complex systems. For the average citizen, it can be hard to know where a city’s responsibilities begin or end. In some instances, goals may not be shared between various parts of the city’s administrative structure. In others, Institutional goals may not be shared by the residents of the city and even in some cases, residents may have different priorities from others. Given such organizational complexity, assessing accountability and progress toward goals can be complex.

Transparency may be the critical element in leveraging urban governance. Transparency will encourage civic engagement, ensure decision-accountability of elected officials and limit the potential for corruption. If the right data is made available, citizens can begin to observe the city not just as the space within which their daily activities take place but as an organizational unit.

To achieve transparency in urban governance, a wide range of open data about cities should be made widely available to the public. From administrative jurisdiction portals, data should be visually presented via the internet. Data can also be made publicly accessible to application programming interfaces (API), enabling its integration into a wide variety of software and tools. Such API endpoints and associated document object identifiers (DOIs) will provide permanent and direct links to Open Data. However, to have impact, there must be stakeholders who have skills to transform these data assets into insightful Key Performance Metrics.

Urban Resilience and Disaster Response

As urbanization and populations continue to increase, the safety of rapidly increasing numbers of urban residents lies at risk. The resilience concept acts as a means for understanding how cities prepare for and recover from disaster events. It is clear that weather-related extremes are increasing globally, affecting many of the world’s urban areas. Declining air quality, water scarcity, power blackouts and food insecurity are everyday stressors serving to reduce the coping capacity when shocks occur. Shifting from passive to active sensor data and making low-cost, near-real-time data more accessible, will greatly enhance research on and responses to urban risks.