Euan Mills, Urban Design & Planning Lead at UK smart city hub Future Cities Catapult, said: “We’ve seen how, in the last 15 or 20 years, the impact of information communication technologies on the way that we live in cities.”
He adds, “We’ve got over 40 billion connected devices worldwide. We’re collecting more data than we’ve ever collected before and with all this data and all this processing power we now have incredibly smart computers. Meanwhile, with all this amazing new technology, the way that we plan cities is still firmly stuck in the 20th Century.”
City Information Modeling or CIM has the potential to change all of that.
How can CIM help?
Collaboration is one of the key, defining elements of BIM and the same potential for collaboration and co-innovation certainly applies to City Information Modeling. CIM can utilize the data harvested by the IoT and smart cities but it can also join together different systems and stakeholders.
Stephen Webb, Head of Projects at Future Cities Catapult, said: “We’re already seeing how some companies allow citizens to view new buildings before they’re built. And we also think there are possibilities to enable people to chat with the planning application of that new building, to understand how much affordable housing it will deliver, how much green space it might deliver.
“We’ve also been working with the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis to understand what combinations of data are most valuable for city planners, to citizens, to people running parks and open spaces.”
Interestingly, CIM is continuing to draw on elements of SimCity gaming and combining them with BIM to produce something we haven’t quite seen before but will undoubtedly see a lot of in future. Improbable Worlds Ltd. is a gaming company that has built simulations of entire UK cities, incorporating everything from telecommunications networks to transport, power grids, sewerage systems and housing demographics.
These can all be accessed and interacted with in real-time, and this type of model will allow planners to test developments and changes before they implement them.
CIM is still in its relative infancy but there’s little doubt that it will have a huge part to play in designing and running the cities of the future.
How can data design transform the planning system in 2050? According to Euan Mills, [in the future] “we can actually start measuring health, wellbeing, and happiness.”
resource: https://lnkd.in/e9HNs2k
