Cognitive Cities

(Disclaimer: Smart is the official and exclusive sponsor of the Cognitive Cities Conference, but we actually found this video all by our own.)

“A living city is always in Beta. Let’s play.” That is the tagline of Betaville, a new “open source, multi-player environment for real cities” and the mantra of its developer, Carl Skelton, director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) at NYU Poly.

City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.

The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

 

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

The researchers have shown, in fact, that with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is, on average, 15 percent wealthier, 15 percent more productive, 15 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime regardless of the city's geography or the decade in which you pull the data.

Remarkably, this 15 percent rule holds for a number of other statistics as well - so much so that if you tell Bettencourt and West the population of an anonymous city, they can tell you the average speed at which its inhabitants walk.

Scientists call this phenomenon "superlinear scaling." Rather than metrics increasing proportionally with population - in a "linear," or one-for-one fashion - measures that scale superlinearly increase consistently at a nonlinear rate greater than one for one.

"Almost anything that you can measure about a city scales nonlinearly, either showing economies in infrastructure or per capita gains in socioeconomic quantities," Bettencourt says. "This is the reason we have cities in the first place. But if you don't correct for these effects, you are not capturing the essence of particular places."

Using this method, cities like LA, New York, and Houston are average while San Francisco and Boulder are above average.

This PR video is a hard experience, but it does give a rather good view into what can be expected of Songdo. Corporate utopia at it's best.

The Future of Cities: The Shape of Things to Come - Carol Coletta from Design Intelligence on Vimeo.

At the 2010 Design Futures Council Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design, Carol Coletta spoke about the power of cities and the transformational change they are currently undergoing. Carol is the President & CEO of CEOs for Cities and former Executive Director of the Mayor's Institute on City Design, as well as the former host and producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City. For more information on CEOs for Cities, visit ceosforcities.org.

Could the U.S. Postal Service turn its fleet of familiar white trucks into hyperlocal data collectors by equipping them with a variety of sensors?

This intriguing proposition, floated last Friday by Michael Ravnitzky in the pages of the New York Times, should have scientists, researchers and Gov 2.0 advocates cheering at the prospect of massive new streams of data. The pooh-bahs at the Postal Service should be cheering too, as this secondary use of postal assets would likely generate new revenue while adding minimal costs, perhaps giving the beleaguered agency a route to fiscal security. 

Ravnitzky is chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that since 1970 has exercised regulatory oversight over the Postal Service, but his views are his own.

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

Those are some of the conclusions of “The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion,” a 10-year forecast commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and published this morning by the Institute for the Future. “Without this catalyst for cooperation,” the authors conclude, “we may repeat the devastating urban conflicts of the 20th century that pitted central planners like Robert Moses against community activists like Jane Jacobs.” Befitting the Foundation’s focus on the world’s poorest and what it calls “smart globalization,” the report’s emphasis is on smartening up cities in the developing world--cities that lack both data about their swelling populations and the tools needed to make sense of it.