As we move into a post-COVID era, towns, cities and regions across the globe need to reimagine their overall vision and design – exploring new data and thinking about the longer term implications.
Dovetailing on the rapid uptake of technology, many businesses, governments and education institutions will look to change how they work or deliver services.
As businesses and people make decisions about how and where they will work, and possibly live, discussions will take place on topics such as investment in transport infrastructure, centralisation versus de-centralisation of cities, adaption to changing travel and tourism patterns, making pre-COVID projects either redundant, requiring alterations, deferred or accelerated.
The pandemic has created an opportunity to shift to more adaptable, agile solutions that is fully digitally enabled.
Building flexible, responsive cities
The digital age is largely centred on bringing together people and technology. Digitally connected infrastructure is enabling new forms of self-efficiency, mobility and collaboration to facilitate faster, smarter ways to increase the performance and resilience of our towns and communities. This is essentially driving a new way of thinking about how we respond and remain flexible to city needs.
As urban transformation agendas take shape we need to be asking questions such as:
“What would the Uber of waste collection look like?”
“How would automating the management of assets like roads, water and wastewater save money?”
“Is technology an answer to making public transport fun and engaging?”
“How might we re-imagine how residents, tourists and communities experience services traditionally served by libraries or galleries?”
Bringing a digital mindset to community and city challenges will help us to build back better. However, the biggest untapped opportunity is in how we use data to inform the big and small decisions we make every day.
Data shaping the way we respond
Now, more than ever, we need a strong evidence base to support the decisions made by governments, local government and infrastructure investors on priorities and infrastructure needs. When considering the potential for digital tools, the opportunity is to rethink our assumptions and the way we use data to bring insights to decision making.
Our cities and towns have the opportunity to move toward information models that bring together planning, infrastructure, and citizen experience. Allowing cities to measure and realise benefits through community data hubs, will create an environment that is continuously learning and improving. Now is the time to challenge old models or the evidence we have used when making decisions and bring forward the combined power of existing and new datasets that will enable better evidence-based decision making.
As an example, many of the models that have underpinned business cases for transport infrastructure investment pre-COVID-19 are now being revisited; there has been a significant shift in travel patterns and there is an urgent need to reassess these schemes. Using datasets of real-time recovery of movement in cities can provide an efficient means of refreshing the short, medium and long-term demand forecasts.
Insightful outcomes can be attained by bringing together data relating to assets, planning, and service delivery on consumer spend, people movement, user experience, or environment. Examples of this might be environmental data fused with city movement data to inform the Net Zero city emissions strategy, or consumer spend coupled with people movement and asset use data to inform critical city infrastructure investment.
Business intelligence platforms are now commonplace in organisations
There is an opportunity to move towards city intelligence platforms and to visualise city data and insight in an engaging, intuitive and persuasive way, helping to influence stakeholders, including the public, to make better decisions.
The time is now to take advantage of the large amounts of data already available to help us plan, deliver and operate efficient communities and cities. The pandemic has provided us the opportunity to use technology, data and insights to build back for good.
Meet Maurice
Maurice Hoban, Regional Director - New Zealand, has more than 25 years’ experience advising cities, government, and private organisations on strategy, policy, transformation, risk, change management and governance. Maurice specialises in working with groups, multiple stakeholders or communities to define outcomes and pathways to delivery. He has a policy and innovation background mixed with a digital mindset that is focused on customer and business outcomes. Maurice is a Principal of GHD and leads the GHD Digital Asia Pacific business. For more information, contact Maurice at maurice.hoban@ghd.com.
Meet Simon
Simon Babes, Director, leads the Analytics team at Movement Strategies. Collecting and interpreting data relating to the movement and behaviour of people has always been an important element in these projects and it’s only in the last five years that new technologies have generated rich and robust data sets that present an opportunity to work smarter. Simon has led a range of initiatives to exploit these new data sets, extracting the value on behalf of clients through projects and products. For more information, contact Simon at simon.babes@ghd.com.
