Big data, smart cities and city planning

By Michael Batty. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2013

880 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I define big data with respect to its size but pay particular attention to the fact that the data I am referring to is urban data, that is, data for cities that are invariably tagged to space and time. I argue that this sort of data are largely being streamed from sensors, and this represents a sea change in the kinds of data that we have about what happens where and when in cities. I describe how the growth of big data is shifting the emphasis from longer term strategic planning to short-term thinking about how cities function and can be managed, although with the possibility that over much longer periods of time, this kind of big data will become a source for information about every time horizon. By way of conclusion, I illustrate the need for new theory and analysis with respect to 6 months of smart travel card data of individual trips on Greater London’s public transport systems.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Media Technology, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a98e5856091999922ec7150efefe25bbfeb2aecf

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Citations in the corpus

The role of big data in smart city (2016, background): “Big data for the smart city can transform every sector of a nation’s economy (Batty, 2013).”
Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London (2018, background): “…a ‘real time city’, in which governance is radically transformed by continuous access to big data has been debated by critical ‘smart cities’ scholars (Batty, 2013; Kitchin, 2014) and concerns have been raised about the tendency towards a technocratic mode of governance via information and…”
Smart Cities and Mobility: Does the Smartness of Australian Cities Lead to Sustainable Commuting Patterns? (2018, background): “nologies—whether it is Internet of Things (IoT), social robotics, sharing economy, big data, artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing, drones, or 3D printing (Batty et al., 2012; Batty, 2013; Anthopoulos, 2017).”
A literature survey on smart cities (2015, background): “An increasing number of researchers have begun to deﬁne smart city architectures from the viewpoint of data [34–36].”
Exploring the influence of big data on city transport operations: a Markovian approach (2017, methodology): “Therefore, we contribute to existing theory on related logistic issues such as RFID tags (Zelbst et al., 2012), information infrastructure capability (SookLing et al., 2015); and administrative data collected directly from citizens, traffic management systems and carbon footprints (Batty, 2013).”
Enabling technologies and sustainable smart cities (2020, background): “In (Batty, 2013), the author highlighted the role of big data collected from various sources in an urban city for realizing the concept of a smart city.”
Smart cities with big data: Reference models, challenges, and considerations (2018, background): “developed a model for trustworthy data sharing in smart cities, and Ben Sta (2017) discussed data quality in smart cities.”