Geo: The Big 5 - Future Cities Story

As promised here is the Future Cities side of the Geo Big 5 write up. The content was kindly provided by our events group manager Rollo Home, I have done some reordering so any comprehension issues are probably my fault.

Glasgow Future Cities Team

The event was opened with a short but well aimed introduction from Councillor Gordon Matheson (leader, Glasgow City Council) who congratulated the AGI on reaching 25yrs "and looking good on it". He stressed the council’s commitment to opening up their data to public access through the portal where 85 data sets are currently published (including planning applications) including data from Ordnance Survey and the MET office. The focus is very much on putting the data into the hands of the citizen, as seen in the example of the customised city dash-board. The Councillor was keen to stress that while technology is great it is simply an enabler and it is the approach and political will that is the key. Glasgow have a clear desire to be a global reference point for future cities.

Andrew Collinge (Assistant Director, Greater London Authority) gave the first key note for the day, and started by outlining how “City Thinking” was now en vogue and thus he’d stress that it wasn’t the case of London vs. UK as currently being portrayed in the media, but “a Tale of, well, lots of cities” each emerging. However London is large, with a population that will exceed New York’s by 2016. Like Glasgow, London has embraced open data, and the portal drives 20% of traffic to the Council site. He then went on to give an example of some of the challenges London faces: 400K new jobs are needed, 40K new homes will required and 4,000 extra classrooms. One practical solution that the Future Cities approach has provided has been the School Atlas that allows authorities across London to see classroom provision and demand and plan accordingly, in the spirit of open data this is a public facing site.

Institute of Future Cities

An interesting point made was that these problems have not just be realised – the concept of Future Cities was identified by 50 urban scientists meeting in 1960's US and outlining the issues of 'regeneration of cities needed to keep pace of demand’.

The plenary led into the Future Cities Steam which was chaired by Graham Colclough. A surprising thing about these sessions was the strength of continuity of the message between speakers. There was limited disagreement about the scope and scale of the problems being addressed by the Future Cities concept nor, the fact that location based data had an important role to play in tackling these problems. What was perhaps more surprising was that the focus of the discussions was entirely on the value of using geospatial thus we did not hear about how an application was developed and deployed, but about the reasons that they were developed, the success of the uptake, and the outcomes.

Steven Revill (Future Cities Glasgow) started the Future Cities session with a fuller review of the work already referenced by Councillor Matheson. The Open data market to “empower Glasgow” was a prominent thread of the discussion. This was achieved through the web portals and out outlets such as the My Glasgow Apps. In regard to adoption of the services, Steven reflected on how useful the branding had been to engage to younger audience, as was the premise of presenting data stories. The platform itself is developed quickly with releases often made in an attempt to maintain momentum to the project. The search for new data is on-going with GCC energy consumption of all public sector and education buildings being the latest. This has enable people to scrutinise energy use putting buildings that use excessive energy in the public eye and driving change

A question from the floor raised the issue of data quality. Apparently operational data from GCC is good, but there is discrepancy and an issue with completeness. However publishing the data is helping address and potentially resolving this problem. Making it public is driving a change in behaviours.

Dr Diarmad Campbell (British Geological Survey) had a very different focus, and that is the sub-surface. BGS have an Urban Strategy for the simple reason that 80% of the population live in such areas, and therefore the activity that requires geological analysis (structures) is concentrated in these areas. While internationally other cities such as Oslo and Amsterdam have huge investment in understanding the underground, in the UK there has not been such a history of investment. BGS are now working with GCC to produce a complete and detailed model of the sub-surface. Many urban areas, not least Glasgow have a complex sub surface environment from legacy industry as well as industrial processes and BGS are driving towards multi channel data availability to allow for better provision and better decision making.

George Kirk from Scottish Power Energy Networks discussed integrated energy planning, that is dealing with power from station to the plug. He explained how low carbon is a key part of Glasgow City development but has so far no being tackled fully. Previously there has been no shortage of data, but a limited understanding of how we use that data to make decision. Now there is an opportunity to inform the profession and public alike through visualisation and data availability

The afternoon session moved the focus of the discussion from Glasgow and the UK to the global context, and this was kicked off by Richard Bellingham (Institute for Future Cities, Strathclyde University) by presenting the issues of the changing world and in particular a growing and aging urban population. These are challenges that cities have no control over but cities are required to respond to them.

The scale of the problem is immense, billions of people moving to cities in the coming decades – which are creating patterns of mega-cities across the world. However we have to consider that this migration is a voluntary process. Cities are desirable places to live. They also act as engines for economic development and offer a solution to our energy crisis in that they are also more efficient per head on almost every measure.

Teresa and the Future Cities Catapult

Finally Teresa Rico Gonzales (Future Cities Catapult) rounded the session off with the work that the TSB is funding through the Catapult in order to mitigate the vast challenge of rural to urban migration. However she was keen to stress that the FCC is not reinventing the wheel but looking to utilise the expertise that is out there and enable collaborative creation of the solutions, a common them across the afternoon’s speakers.

The motivations of the FCC are focused on particular outcomes; the primary is a duty of care (as a remit of the TSB funding), but other more tangible (and commercial) targets are related to generating exportable urban innovations, growing UK market share of the global Future Cities potential and to build a world-class urban cluster.

The session was rounded up with a panel discussion led by Graham Colclough with:

The Panel

Richard, Teresa, Diarmad, Steven and Rollo Home on the stand. Graham encapsulated the discussion as revolving around two basic principles of information/data and collaboration which was re-iterated by the panel speakers, but each presented their own perspective on the problem with the Ordnance Survey and BGS looking at this from the position of having data to offer but needing to work with cities to understand the nature of the requirement, and with cities working with academia to understand the actors driving change and their requirements for data to monitor and support those agents. 

Geo: The Big 5 gets underway!

Not a bad turnout...

Yesterday AGI Scotland hosted Future Cities the first of the Geo Big 5 events series and I'm pleased to say that we've got off to a flying start. Delegate turnout was at pre recession levels, the speakers were fantastic and the venue was pretty spectacular (thanks to Glasgow City Council for that one). Both streams had a really solid line up of presentations and the panel debate in the afternoon was really well received (those can be tricky to pull off).

I spent the day room monitoring in the best practice stream so I will be getting one of my colleagues to write a summary of that soon. In the meantime this’ll be a brief round up of the sessions I saw which included some great pieces of innovation.

The event opened with some very encouraging comments from the head of Glasgow City Council, showing that the local authority has really understood the power of GI to improve services for the citizen. However I will let my colleague cover this more within the context of the future cities stream.

The Main Room/Palace

The morning best practice stream opened with a presentation from the Forestry Commission Scotland on releasing a Scotland wide dataset on native woodland. This was quite an ambitious project in scope with the whole of Scotland surveyed over a period of about six years (some areas surveyed in greater detail based on aerial imagery). After collecting this huge dataset the team then overcame a number of challenges to provide this as open public data easily accessible to non GI users.

This was followed by a very nice presentation/demonstration from Paul Clarke of Esri on designing the future city. This showed City Engine being used on a range of projects as well as a general view on what future cities may look like. Paul also echoed the councillor’s comments about when talking about future cities it is what we are doing today that will define how they look and work.

The following presentation on the use of GI to support the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow gave a very practical demonstration of the challenges a modern city faces and the tools we have to overcome them.

After lunch the best practice stream kicked off with a really interesting project from Ross McDonald and Angus Council. They had successfully evolved their geospatial offering from a truly Byzantine collection of different platforms, datasets and file types into a much more open focused and integrated set up. This has allowed them to free up powerful but expensive proprietary software for users who most need it whilst spreading the power of spatial much wider across the organisation. Their mantra appropriately is ‘spatial isn’t special, its core’.

A presentation by ERM showcasing the use of GI for environmental and social management of major projects was up next. A particularly interesting feature of this solution is that it is accessible via the web and allows users (such as local residents) to comment on features of a project.

Last but not least Scottish Water and Kemeling Consulting presented on an asset visualisation project they have been working on. This project allows much better visualisation of sections of the Scottish Water network allowing the double benefit of improved repair efficiency and also improved transparency with local communities as to why work is being undertaken. The project has so far informed around £1 million worth of repair work.

An overall theme coming out of this stream, particularly the afternoon sessions was that the next step for cementing the role of spatial is to be able to articulate hard financial savings from projects such as these. All the users know there was benefit and the challenge is to be able to express this financially, something that is particularly crucial as the use of spacial spreads into the private sector.

Geo: Education

I've talked a lot about the Big 5 themes for 2014 and of course there are other contenders for big issues in geospatial. I wanted to look at one that is not so much an issue for geospatial now as one for how geospatial grows in the future and that is education.

The geospatial industry is continually growing and broadening to the point that many people are using and even producing data and products that they don’t really realises is geospatial. To support this the next generation of geospatially literate employees is needed. Obviously now this has spread beyond the traditional GIS user to a whole range of developers, software engineers and analysts amongst others. However this diversification just means that an introduction to geospatial is needed at a younger age than ever rather than waiting until university when people are already specialising heavily. It would be a shame to lose out on potentially brilliant developers because they have no concept of spatial or how important and powerful it can be.

At the Future Cities event in Scotland we are running a parallel session from students attending some local colleges. They will get a chance to talk to some of the great speakers from our event and get an understanding of the broad importance of geospatial information and future cities specifically. This is being held in collaboration with RSGS who are organising a visit to the University of Glasgow map library in the morning.

This is something the AGI wants to get more involved in (possibly through collaboration with RGS and their geography in schools programme as per this announcement a few days ago). We have recently moved to engage more with university level students through opening up free membership and we will be looking to create resources for students with the new website.

 This is an important issue both for education and the industry, at a later date I hope to have an article from one of our council members who has a particular interest in education. In the meantime however I would love to hear suggestions for how the AGI, industry and indeed government can help usher through the next generation of geospatial innovators. 

Future Cities – It’s Nearly Time

We’re living in a time of rapid urbanisation, where shifting global demographics (growing in number, age and prosperity as they migrate from rural to urban life styles) are going to have an increasing impact on our activities here in the UK. For London, the population will grow to 9M by 2021 and 10M by 2030. That brings with it considerable pressures – for example, the need for 800K extra house units, capacity for an additional 600K peak-time commuters, and the challenge of dealing with the increased waste and energy consumption.  The Future or Smart City is the collective response to these immense challenges. It is not one thing or one technology, but a proactive approach to managing the urban infrastructure to provide a better level of service and living with less available resources.

It’s just over a week to go until the first of the Geo Big 5 events. This will be the Future Cities conference hosted by AGI Scotland in Glasgow. We’ve got strong delegate numbers and are still getting sponsors joining at this stage. More importantly (to our delegates anyway) we have a great line up of speakers which can be seen here.

Professor Iain Stewart

Highlights from this include a plenary from Professor Iain Stewart, BBC staple and geologies’ ‘rock star’ (Not my pun). In the Future Cities stream we have presentations from the Greater London Authority, the Glasgow Future Cities team and the Institute for Future Cities among others. The case studies stream has some great projects from geospatial in Scotland including the Forestry Commission and the Commonwealth Games (quite appropriate as today is Commonwealth Day). The Future Cities stream also includes a panel debate with some of the day’s speakers and a few special guests.

Anyway with all that in mind I thought I’d give a quick background on Future Cities and why we have picked this as one of our big 5 for 2014.

Andrew Collinge - Greater London Authority

This event, being held in the impressive Glasgow City Chambers, will enable delegates alike to come away with a renewed appreciation of how Geospatial Information and Systems (GIS) can contribute to overcoming the barriers of a City becoming a Future City. To understand a modern city is to understand how its occupants utilise the space over time. However much of the discussion around future solutions to meet the increased and changing demands being placed on a city, are not addressing the inherent geographic nature of the problem. This is perhaps being exacerbated by the GI industry not sufficiently articulating the benefits it can bring. This events aims to provide an awareness to all attendees of the opportunities offered by making GI an integrated part of the Future Cities solution.

It’s going to be a great event and a must attend if you are interested in Future Cities, you can book here. Flights to Glasgow are still pretty cheap and it’s only £49+VAT for members.

Sponsorship and Geo: The Big 5

We have just finalised and released our Sponsorship pack for the 2014 events and corporate membership. Previously membership of the AGI and sponsorship of the events have been handled on a separate and ad hoc basis although there was some change in this last year with the opportunity to sponsor all of the showcase events. The opportunity to mass sponsor a series of events (with associated discounts) proved popular and we have continued and extended this system for 2014.

Geo: The Big 5 is perfect for this as it provides a range of themes and geographic locations meaning those sponsoring the events will get to engage with a wide range of delegates representing a host of different companies and industries. However this year we have decided to go further and create a sponsorship package that includes corporate membership of the AGI alongside the events sponsorship. This allows our members and sponsors to take advantage of their membership and the events series in a coordinated way such as being able to send out mailings before and after events, writing guest blog posts and having their logo on all the events material for a whole year.

Of course we understand that as much as we have chosen topics that are relevant across verticals not all companies would be interested in each category. BIM and Asset Management is likely to attract quite a different set of delegates and therefore sponsors to the Open Geospatial event.

We also wanted to make sure that, like our individual membership having a presence at AGI events would be an option for companies of all sizes. After all the AGI is not a profit making organisation and simply uses the sponsorship money it receives to continue working for the GI industry in the UK. With this in mind the cheapest supporter package for a Geo Big 5 event is only £200+VAT with full exhibitor packages from £600+VAT.

Anyway the first Geo Big 5 event is fast approaching with Future Cities in Glasgow on the 18 March. The programme is excellent with some great speakers and delegate bookings are filling up fast so take a look at the new sponsor pack and seize a chance to be part of a great event series!