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Hi, my name is Arthur and I'm not a blogger. Nor am I a coder, really. But here I sit, writing my first blog about coding.
So how did I get here? If you had asked me 3 months ago, I would not have told you I'd be stateside right now. Last year, I joined an a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs, and took a gap year with a band of Yale seniors who tour over 20 countries performing over 250 shows in white tie and tails. Beyond all that, we like sharing music and bringing people together. Unfortunately, by now you can probably guess it's not a good time—or a responsible time—to be doing exactly just that. At the start of the crisis, one of my mentors suggested I use my last free summer to do something new I find worthwhile, so I decided to enroll in a web development class. Fast forward to today, which marks my third month living in my parent's house and my third week in Flatiron School!
So unfortunately, for those who had higher expectations, I did not wake up yesterday morning struck by an enlightened mid-quarantine let's-be-productive-for-once epiphany. No, actually, all credit goes to my coding bootcamp, where our cohort will present and share these original blog posts as part of the program. (Cue every single one of those "my coding journey" posts on the Interweb eliciting 49.4 million results on Google. Yes, mine is about to be one of them. Welp.) Origin story aside, I do hope to contribute something brief but useful with these couple blog posts!
As an architecture and global affairs student, I'm very interested where the city and technology intersect.
My point today is: responsible deployment and use of accessible urban data is ever so needed, especially to help us understand how cities can achieve equity.
When I say "the city", you may picture a random skyline in your head. I rather mean it in a broader sense; perhaps a better word to use is urban space. In fact the word “city” originates from the Latin civitas, which can be defined as “membership in the community.” Thus urban space refers to a) the built environment of a city, b) its inhabitants, and c) the many relationships negotiated between them.
Before I dive in, here are three examples of various projects and ideas in the realm of urban space to exemplify how broadly (and perhaps un-academically) I am employing the term here.
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City Of One Billion by Plan B Architecture + Urbanism: Yale Architecture School dean Bimal Mendis models the world as a single city, a singular urban space of exchanges, flows, and interconnected systems.
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Eco Hubs by Green City Force: Brooklyn nonprofit (and my former employer) Green City Force empowering young NYC public housing residents reimagines NYCHA spaces as a nexus of community services, urban farms, and ecosystem services.
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The Rise of ‘Urban Tech’ published in CityLab: Urban spaces have become the new tech sector for corporate and venture investment. Think Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Google's Sidewalk Labs, DoorDash, WeWork, Lime, Instacart.
Another lens through which to view the city is the urban data lens. As the rise of urban tech portends, Big Tech has already caught on.
The modern city is inextricably linked to data because nowadays, almost every action and interaction creates data. A person looking up directions on a phone, traffic light sensing traffic, a database taking in 311 requests are all manifestations. Perhaps an accurate metaphor for modern urban space is a blanket of digital information enmeshed with physical space. It's not a static territory but a complex system that demands reaction. Thus, analyzing and responding to urban data in real time is a necessary practice to guide our understanding of urban space.
To be clear, some data, should never be opened for the public. Some data, while useful, should only be available to certain individuals. The question as to what kind of data is acceptable for open use rightly raises ethical concerns such as ownership, use rights, and privacy, and is an important debate for another day.
If these frustration-laden times offers any silver lining, it has brought into light the inconvenient truth that a reimagining and restructuring of American society is long overdue. The shaping of our urban space and cities is no different.
Often times, American urban space were built to oppress and perpetuate racism. "White America has found it all too easy to transpose its capital and beliefs into physical space," contends architect and design justice advocate Bryan Lee Jr., "allowing the architecture to covertly project power in the name of white supremacy."[^https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2020/06/george-floyd-protest-urban-design-history-racism-architecture/612622/] Built-in oppression in urban space takes many forms. For example, "Urban renewal" projects of the 1960s gutted non-white communities with highways and steered economic benefits from those same communities. Current poverty rates align with redlined neighborhoods of the 1930s.[^ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/03/mapping-the-lasting-effects-of-redlining/388333/] Unreliable access to public transit prevents access to certain economic opportunities.[^https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/15/amid-pandemic-public-transit-is-highlighting-inequalities-cities/?arc404=true]
Urban data driven research that generate new insights on entrenched urban inequity that can lead to more inclusive outcomes.Here are some urban equity problems that can arise when there is no data or little understanding of existing data:
- If we can't predict bottlenecks in election infrastructure in largely minority districts, it can lead to election fraud and disenfranchise voters.[^https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/georgia-debacle-shows-were-heading-toward-an-election-disaster-november/]
- If we don't have a clear understanding where urban poverty exists, it can lead to poorly written laws that redirects money intended to lift low-income communities to further gentrify rich neighborhoods.[^https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/trump-tax-opportunity-zones.html]
- If we can't share and make sense of public health data, it can hinder efforts to allocate hospital resources and make sure ambulances are routed to hospitals efficiently.
For example, as Elmhurst Hospital was besieged by Covid -19 patients, 3,500 beds were free in other NY hospitals, "some no more than 20 minutes away."[^https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-hospitals.html]
Data alone cannot erase structural barriers or embolden political will. Yet I hope that better use of existing data can help solve some of these issues.
API stands for "Application Programming Interface". Unlike a dataset of values, an API is a piece of software that lets two applications communicate with each other, requesting and receiving data.
APIs matter for cities because they become the invisible infrastructure connecting us to each other and the built urban space, choreographing our daily lives.[^https://medium.com/city-as-a-service/why-apis-matter-to-cities-c272c44b2ad6] For example, APIs allow traffic systems and transit lines to communicate with each other and operate in real-time.
Naturally, I went ahead and searched for API's for urban data... ...and was shocked by the dearth of accessible and publicly available API's.(while Pokemon, beer, Chuck Norris Facts are real APIs!)
Turns out, this is symptomatic of a persistent problem for cities. These data streams used and generated by APIs sit in separate silos, walled off from collaboration. For example, often, sensor data sitting in a city's traffic agency never collaborate with data from commonly-used apps like Waze. As is the case for traffic and transit data, similar problems persist across other kinds of urban data like housing and homelessness, voting and civic participation, policing and criminal justice, etc.
While highlighting the need for widely accessible APIs that allows citizen developers to help their community understand urban equity, I'll list some helpful APIs and datasets below.
Many cities offer...
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Thanks for reading making it through my rambles! Any kind of feedback is welcome via email. And special s/o to my awesome instructor Vidhi and TAs Sylvia and Alex!