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 yous.barns@westernsydney.edu.au@_sarahbarns