Non-profit Vivre en Ville launched a new rental registry in Ontario last week. It is an extension of the one that they launched in Quebec last spring. The way it works is that it allows anybody to enter how much they're paying in rent. In other words, it's a crowdsourcing platform.

The site then displays this information on a map so that everyone can see current and past rents. The data points are all anonymous and no personal information is linked to them, but the idea is to "preserve affordability in the residential market by providing access to important rent information."

Obviously, the thinking is that greater transparency will lead to more affordable housing. Presumably because you'll now be able to see if you're somehow being bamboozled, among other things.

I'm not 100% convinced that this will be the case, but I am of the general opinion that more transparency and more information is better than less transparency and less information.

I also find it interesting that there seems to be a lot of people willing to take the time to share this kind of information. According to the Toronto Star, they launched in Ontario with over 3,000 rental inputs. And according to their website, the full registry has over 40,000 inputs.

There are 614,387 bridges in the United States and 55,707 of them are thought to be structurally deficient according to the US Department of Transportation (2016). About 188 million people cross “a deficient bridge” every day in the US (also a 2016 figure).

Inspections are often infrequent and only visual, and so MIT Senseable City Lab is currently on a mission to come up with a more scientific approach. They believe that there’s a solution in crowd-sourced data and that it’s possible to create a community-driven maintenance program.

What they discovered through a recent study, called Good Vibrations, is that mobile phone sensors can actually pick up the natural vibrations and oscillations of a bridge. And, that a mobile sensor located within a traveling car is actually 120x more precise than fixed sensors located on the bridge.

Part of the problem is that fixed sensors have poor spatial coverage. They are located in specific locations. Whereas mobile sensors give you data across the entire span of the bridge as someone crosses it. And if you know how a bridge normally vibrates, you can quickly tell when something is off. 

Here’s a quick video overview of the study. And here’s what you should do if you want to get involved.

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

The Market Street Prototyping Festival is just finishing up in San Francisco. The festival, which is now in its 3rd year, is centered around urban interventions that can be rapidly prototyped and tested. The goal is to discover new ideas that could be used to transform and improve Market Street – the city’s civic spine. It is a joint effort of both the San Francisco Planning Department and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Here is a list of all the prototypes. You can “like” projects, but I wish they would have made it easier to filter and see which ones are the most popular.

One project that I liked is Vote With Your Feet. It consists of two doorways and a single crowdsourced YES/NO question above it. You vote by choosing a doorway. Once you walk through, you are then shown the results. Here’s a Boomerang video of it in action. I like it because it provides a frictionless way to acquire lots of ground-up feedback. Imagine placing something like this at the exit of a busy train station or transforming the existing doors.

Tactical urbanism can be a great mechanism for investigating and instigating positive change. This is hugely important considering how slow moving and bureaucratic city building can be. It’s not the same format, but NXT City here in Toronto has similar ambitions. They source new ideas for our public spaces from young people. I am thrilled that both of these initiatives exist.