Connected Urban Development

We had the exciting opportunity to present the perspectives from Connected Urban Development, Cisco and partner cities at the recent Comparative Genetics of Cities conference hosted at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.

 Arizona State, UCL and Newcastle University hosted the conference to explore key problems of energy, climate, land use and transportation in large cities, using London and Phoenix as exemplars.

The presentations from the conference, comparative datasets from London and Phoenix, and many academic, business, city planning and NGO led initiatives were presented and can be accessed on the website: http://cssa.asu.edu/ucl_may2010

The Connected Urban Development presentation ‘a new approach to urban innovation’, sets out the networked and web based tools for urban citizen engagement and sustainable outcomes which we are advancing across multiple projects in cities across the world.

The lead project we are advancing towards this aim is the Urban EcoMap project. The aim is to develop the platform to compare cities through a wide range of data sources, to enable citizens, business’ and city managers amongst others to understand their community and to enable decisions to be made on an informed basis. Related projects from the Cisco team, in common with the Urban EcoMap include the Planetary Skin Institute, as described in the presentation. Extending the Urban EcoMap proof of concept application, with the cities of Amsterdam and San Francisco, to many different directions, from sustainability, economic, social and livability objectives is an exciting path which we are advancing towards.

The next step in this path will be a showcase session for delegates joining us in Shanghai at the Partnership for Urban Innovation Global Conference. As part of one of the groups visits to the Cisco pavilion at the World Expo on the 18th June, we will present the latest progress towards revealing the layers of the city, enabling decision spaces and assimilating the wide range of data that is emerging through the open data movement, and moves towards sensing the city from municipal, crowdsourced and trusted proxy sources.

Cisco and the city of Amsterdam today announced the rollout of Urban EcoMap, an Internet-based tool that enables cities around the world to provide smarter climate change information for their citizens. A city can use Urban EcoMap to create awareness among its residents of the impact of carbon emissions on their urban environment. It provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by district, and delivers tips on ways to reduce a resident’s carbon footprint.

• The application is an extension of the Urban EcoMap launched in May 2009 in the city of San Francisco. The Amsterdam version of the Urban EcoMap will be progressively expanded over the next six months with real-time information that is linked to data from other agencies.

• Urban EcoMap provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by district. As part of the Cisco® Connected Urban Development (CUD) program, the Urban EcoMap pilot is a cooperative initiative between the city of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM) and Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), the company’s strategic global consulting arm.
• The application now enables comparisons between the two cities of Amsterdam and San Francisco, on an aggregated residential per capita CO2 basis, and proportionally by the categories of Transportation, Energy and Waste.

Join us in the drive towards reducing our individual CO2 emissions to 2 tonnes by 2050, across the world.

This is the next step in the development of the application. Let us know your thoughts and ideas on how the application can develop and continue to innovate and scale globally.