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Dr Suvodeep Mazumdar - How and when will we know if ‘Smart City’ residents are happy?

After a very interesting meeting at the lovely premises of the Connected Places Catapult last week, I am back, researching Urban Planning initiatives, studying outcomes and output measures. Based in London, the Connected Places Catapult is a UK Government-backed urban innovation agency that aims to help UK firms develop innovative products and services to help meet the growing needs of cities across the world. The CPC works with Industry, SMEs, academics, transport and local authorities and provides an excellent setting for my Researcher in Residence project, UrbanMapper. Cities are constantly adapting, changing and innovating to meet the rising demands of increasing populations, constrained resources and increased expectations from residents. With the increased availability and affordability of sensors (IoT), faster connectivity (mobile, broadband and the Internet), smartphones and high computational resources, new opportunities are emerging where large volumes of data can be collected and processed at city scale.

‘Smart cities’, as we perceive from popular discourse, appear to be a vision where everything is connected, collecting large volumes of data, intelligently making and facilitating decisions, digitising every aspect of cities that can possibly be captured. Indeed, this opens up enormous opportunities of understanding how our cities (and communities) behave in response to various stimuli and how decisions can be made to make our cities more efficient. Within the field of urban planning, understanding the impact of planning interventions (e.g. the development of a new railway station or pedestrianising busy streets) is a critical component and has traditionally involved measuring outputs such as increase in greenspace or number of jobs created. Traditionally, this has involved measuring spaces or estimating quantities. However, it has become increasingly more important to answer questions that relate more with social value generated out of such interventions, such as ‘are residents happier?’ or ‘do communities have a greater sense of belonging?’. These questions, in some sense challenges our approach to and assumptions about smart cities, while at the same time offers new opportunities for using alternative forms of data and new technologies.

Coming from a Computer Science background, the field of Urban Planning is very new to me and the UrbanMapper project is a massive learning opportunity. Whilst the project is only in its initial few months, engaging with large volumes of literature, policy documents, planning frameworks and the large number of discussions and meetings have already been extremely interesting. At this stage, I am only grappling with the intricacies of urban planning and it has been a fascinating experience. During the later stages of the project, we will prototype and experiment with low cost sensing and data processing solutions which will explore these social dimensions of planning initiatives. I expect these stages to be exciting and am looking forward to how the project evolves in the next stage.

Dr Suvodeep Mazumdar
Lecturer

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