Tag: urban tech

• The sensing power of taxis

  The latest project out of MIT’s Senseable City Lab examines the “sensing power of taxis” in various cities around the world. Looking at traffic data, they determined how many circulating taxis you would need to equip with sensors if you wanted to capture comprehensive street data across a particular city. This might be useful if you wanted to measure things like air quality, weather, traffic patterns, road quality, and so on.

  What they found is that the sensing power of taxis starts out unexpectedly high. It would only take 10 taxis to cover 1/3 of Manhattan’s streets in a single day. However, because taxis tend to have convergent routes, they also discovered rapid diminishing returns. It would take 30 taxis (or 0.3% of all taxi trips) to cover half of Manhattan in a day, and over 1,000 taxis to cover 85% of it. A similar phenomenon was observed in the other cities that they studied: Singapore, Chicago, San Francisco, Vienna, and Shanghai.

  However, if you look at the percentage of trips needed to scan half of the streets in a city, Manhattan has the lowest rate at 0.3%. Vienna is the highest at 9%. But I’m not sure if this is a function of the utilization rate of their taxis or if it has something to do with urban form. Singapore has a similarly low rate (0.44%), but its street grid looks nothing like that of New York’s.

  Here’s a short video explaining the project:

  2019.06.25

• The scale and scope of urban tech

  “Cities have become the basic platforms for global innovation and economic growth, supplanting the corporation as the fundamental organizing unit of the contemporary economy.” -Richard Florida

  Richard Florida and Patrick Adler of the Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto have been doing some research on what they are calling “urban tech.” They define it as encompassing the following industry sectors: co-living and co-working; mobility; delivery; smart cities; construction tech; and real estate tech.

  Here are the largest urban tech startups based on the amount of VC investment they have received:

  

  Below is how the space breaks down by sector. Mobility / ride hailing is the behemoth, receiving 61% of all VC investment. Food delivery is next. And “proptech” is at the bottom.

  

  Finally, here are the top “urban tech” cities. Beijing is right up there with San Francisco.

  

  For more information on the study, click here.

  Tables: CityLab

  2019.05.31

• Hidden gems in the Tenderloin

  

  I’ve written about the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco before. It’s an infamous neighborhood in the center of the city that has for decades resisted gentrification (which was the topic of my post).

  But as the technology sector continues to urbanize, many fear that it’s only a matter of time before it does eventually gentrify. A new nickname has even emerged for the neighborhood: the Twitterloin.

  However, a local nonprofit called the Wildflowers Institute is trying to ensure that gentrification doesn’t erase the cultural assets currently housed in the neighborhood. Through a project called “Hidden Gems”, the group is literally knocking on doors to find active artists within the community (many of whom live in single rooms) and then supporting them through fellowship programs and other investments.

  What’s fascinating about their approach is that they are actively seeking out the informal activities taking place within the community – activities that would otherwise be hidden and then potentially lost. Once discovered, they then do a number of mapping exercises to keep track of this data.

  As somebody who believes city building will become a lot more data driven in the future, I think this is a really interesting initiative. And as gentrification pressures continue to increase in San Francisco, I’m sure this information will help guide the discussions. You can’t account for something you don’t know exists.

  If you’d like to learn more about this initiative, check out this short 4 minute video from the New York Times. I would then love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2015.01.11