Cities in the Age of the Platform

Cities in the Age of the PlatformGetting the Deal Right on City Data

Smart Cities and Urban Innovation Forum

UNSW 1 June 2016

Dr. Sarah Barns,Urban Studies FoundationPostdoctoral Fellow Western Sydney University

Director, Esem Projects Future Cities Advisor, Data61/CSIRO

Imagining the Computer of the 21st centuryMark Weiser and colleaguesXerox PARC 1980s.

‘Life on Demand’ Media habits in daily

life

Metcalfe’s Law: value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users to the network

‘A new science of cities’ “New sources of data coordinated with urban policy can be applied following fundamental principles of engineering to achieve new solutions to important age-old urban problems” – Luis Bettencourt, Santa Fe Institute

THE STUDY OF THE CITY AS A SYSTEM…to help it become more productive, livable, equitable and resilient

“Not since the planting of cobblestones, the laying of

water mains, or the roll out of sewage pipes have we installed such a vast and versatile new infrastructure for controlling

and organising our physical world”

Anthony Townsend, Smart Cities, 2013

In 2012, for the first time ever, the TED Prize went not to an individual, but to an idea on

which our planet's future depends: the City 2.0

“[From] 2012 it made less and less sense to talk about 'the Internet’, 'the PC business,' 'telephones,' 'Silicon Valley,' or 'the media,' and much more sense to just study Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image. ”-Bruce Stirling speaking to Kevin Kelly (Wired)

Combine technology layer, data layer and community layer.

APIs build ecosystems of producers and consumers that deliver services to each other on a common platform.

Platforms are software-driven innovation ecosystems

‘The Age of the Platform-Play’

What does the Age of the

Platform mean for smart cities?

Smart Cities in The Age of the Platform

“Nurturing platforms requires thinking at the nexus of software design and business strategy”

“The architecture of a platform is inseparable from how it ought to be governed” —Amrit Tiwana

“Platforms are only as useful as the communities that use them” —Tom Baker

‘The second wave of digital transformation in government – Gov.Uk’

‘Government as a Platform’

Data Services

Constantine Kontokosta & team

“Underlying every other crisis in the city was an information crisis.” – Detroit (Jerry Paffendorf)

CITY DASHBOARDS: COMPARATIVE APPROACHES WORLD COUNCIL ON CITY OPEN DATA PORTAL(ISO 37210)

Integrating open data with performance monitoring and governance?

Governments lack access to essential data to improve data-driven decision making

Dealing with data shadows…

Document & measure impact

Match public challenge areas

& data custodians in

trusted environments

Convene data providers and

usersExperiment and scale

Data Collaboratives

Source: Gov Lab, Verherst

Technology & data

services

Digital Entreprene

urs

City Government

s

Citizens & Researchers

Thank you!s.barns@westernsydney.edu.au

@_sarahbarns