Cities in the Data Economy
What are the new rules of engagement?
Dr. Sarah Barns,
Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney University
Cities Advisor, Data61/CSIRO
What is the data economy and why does it
matter?
What are some of the ways that city
governments and other leaders have begun
to respond to the rise of the data economy?
What are some of the new challenges &
rules of engagement?
“Not since the planting of
cobblestones, the laying of water
mains, or the roll out of sewage pipes
have we installed such a vast and
versatile new infrastructure for
controlling and organising
our physical world”
– Anthony Townsend, Smart Cities
‘Life on Demand’
Media habits in daily life
The Zettabyte era: By 2020 the amount of data being distributed across the internet every two minutes will amount to the gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made (that’s a lot of data!).
Metcalfe’s Law: value of a network is proportional to the square of the number
of connected users to the network
The Data Economy
The emerging economy in which organizations succeed or fail based in large part on their ability to leverage data and analytics to support their goals…
…to improve efficiencies, to make better decisions, to serve citizens or customers, to attract customers, build business models...
Data as a fundamental asset used to shape service design
‘The Age of the Platform-Play’
Combine technology layer, data layer and
community layer.
APIs build ecosystems of producers and
consumers that deliver services to each other
on a common platform.
Platforms are software-driven innovation
ecosystems
“Nurturing platforms requires
thinking at the nexus of software
design and business
[organisational] strategy”
“The architecture of a platform is
inseparable from how it ought to
be governed” —Amrit Tiwana
“Platforms are only as useful as
the communities that use them” —Tom Baker
The Age of the Platform
‘The second wave of digital
transformation in government’
‘Government as Platform’
City of Melbourne Open Data Portal
State of play:
Australian Open Data
Map of local government open data setsmap.opencouncildata.org
The Uses of Open Data
Lots of people said: ‘Open data, this is about
government transparency; we can track who is
committing expense fraud.’ Well, yes, a world
where I have to reveal how I spend public money
is better, but more importantly, that data can be
used elsewhere to run a better economy”
Tim Berners-Lee, The Guardian, 2014
2. What are the implications of the data
economy for city leaders and decision-
makers?
From ‘smart cities’ to ‘data-smart’ cities
From Smart Cities 1.0
….to smart cities 2.0
Smart Cities
1.0?
The role of city governments as
‘data convenors’: curating and
collaborating to build data assets to
support investments of strategic
priority
Smart Cities 2.0!
‘A new science of
cities’
“New sources of data coordinated with urban policy
can be applied following fundamental principles of
engineering to achieve new solutions to important
age-old urban problems” – Luis Bettencourt, Santa Fe Institute
THE STUDY OF THE CITY AS A SYSTEM…to
help it become more productive, livable,
equitable and resilient
Mapping Liveability in Parramatta
3. What are some of the new challenges
& rules of engagement?
Source: ourideaworks
Manchester : Data-smart IoT collaboration
Amsterdam Smart City
Governments lack access to
essential data to improve
data-driven decision making
Dealing with data shadows…
Smart Cities in The Age of the Platform?
Thank [email protected]@_sarahbarns
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