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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Our cities can evolve from abstraction to insight


In an article published today in Wired.com, IBM’s John Tolva poses a fascinating question.  What if we could take all the abstractions of a modern city – the movement of goods, the education, public safety, and utilities that strengthen or weaken it – and turn them into insights?
This is becoming possible thanks new software tools – many of them free and open to the public — that enable city managers and citizens to explore and analyze a city’s data, compare it to other cities, and draw new conclusions that had previously been obscured. One example is City Forward, a new interactive tool from IBM that can be used to gather, compare, analyze, visualize, and discuss statistical trends for cities all over the world.

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more posts about urban theory:

Manuel Castells - Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials For a Theory of Urban-ism in the Information Age - 2004

Anglo-American town planning theory since 1945: three significant developments but no paradigm shifts

Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics

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