Our cities are changing rapidly, thanks to the advent of smartphones, driverless cars, data sensors, connected vehicles, and public Wi-Fi. Thanks to technology, commuters and urban dwellers in general have more options that help them navigate cities and tap into real-time data to find parking and public transport connections. These advances in digital technology in urban environments also allow experts to reinvent cities and optimize their infrastructure.

Google’s latest spin-off, Sidewalk Labs, creates new tech products that will address the problems of city life and improve transportation, social services, health and public safety. Owned by Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, this “smart-city” venture is building an integrated platform for urban innovation that spans technology, data, policy best practices, relationships, and capital. Sidewalk Labs has hired a team of experts – engineers, city planners, and entrepreneurs – to create these digital products and amass a wealth of knowledge that will allow them to analyze and optimize how city dwellers live, work, commute and use public services.

The enterprise plans to create companies in partnership with entrepreneurs, and work with successful management teams seeking public-private partnerships to help take full advantage of the biggest urban opportunities. Through the use of ubiquitous connectivity, real-time sensors, precise location services, distributed trust, autonomous systems, and digital actuation and fabrication, Sidewalk Labs hopes to solve urban problems such as high costs of living, congested commutes, public health crises and fossil fuel dependency.

Some of the main areas will be performance-based code, advanced materials, and new ownership models for modern affordable housing, digital mobility system which will manage limited road space to improve transportation equity and air quality, personalized social services and new business models, renewable energy, and smarter storage for distributed energy management.

In 2015, Sidewalk Labs acquired companies Control Group and Titan forming a subsidiary called Intersection, which operates with city governments to design media platforms that create public assets and offer advertising options to clients. Interserction’s most recognizable product to date is LinkNYC, a first-of-its-kind communications network that will replace over 7,500 pay phones across the five boroughs with new structures called Links. Each Link provides fast, free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions.

Thanks to advertising, LinkNYC is completely free. Its innovative digital OOH advertising network is expected to generate more than a half billion dollars in revenue for New York City and provide clients with an optimized, context-aware platform which can reach more people in New York City.

Another flagship platform, Flow, uses aggregated, anonymous traffic data to help city managers identify bottlenecks or redirect trains and buses to neighborhoods with poor transit. It uses technology to stitch together available parking, reducing the time drivers spend circling and the amount of land devoted to parking. This aims to allow cities to better understand where, how, and why people are traveling in order to plan stronger transit networks, and explores the options people have in transportation, the choices they make, and the information that factors into them.

Sidewalk Labs has also been working with 10 cities in the Smart Cities Challenge organized by the US Department of Transportation, which provided $40 million in federal funds to the winning application to modernize their transportation infrastructure through the use of state-of-the-art digital technology. The challenge received seventy-eight applications in total and last June, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that Columbus, Ohio, has been selected as the winner. Sixteen other applications still received some funding and Sidewalk Labs plans to work with these cities to implement and improve Flow, with the possibility for the cities to buy the product.

“We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles of trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform that will give both the public and private parties and government the capacity to actually understand the data in ways they haven’t before,” Daniel L. Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s chief executive, told The New York Times. Doctoroff is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former chief executive of Bloomberg.

***

The shift towards “smarter cities” is become a more widespread trend, with new technologies and data gathering being tested across the world in order to optimize urban infrastructure. We are excited to see how these solutions affect our daily life.

The post Google’s Sidewalk Labs Aims to Make Cities Smarter appeared first on Archipreneur.

Over the last few decades technology has gone from impacting the way we communicate and work to affecting every aspect of our daily lives. It has started to spill into the physical world and change the appearance and structure of our cities. Architects are no longer free to choose the degree to which they factor in technology in their design processes. Its omnipresence has started to change the way architecture users experience built environment, requiring and expecting an increasing level of responsiveness and interactivity. By putting the power of choice into the hands of ordinary people, technology has forced designers to reevaluate their role and embrace the changes.

Architectural typologies such as multi-family housing, office spaces and urban design have seen drastic changes due to the fast-paced technological evolution. The proximity of living spaces and work, which has marked most of the 20th century, has become a loose concept. Cities are developing and spreading in way that is less dependent on topography and physical connectedness, while our houses are becoming smarter and more energy efficient.

Numerous companies and startups across the globe are recognizing the importance of these phenomena and are at the forefront of a new wave that is flooding city streets. Particularly noticeable is the shift towards the ‘sharing economy’ which allows individuals to become retailers and service providers by cutting out the middleman. Peer-to-peer businesses have crossed over from the virtual world into the physical realm.

Here we categorized the main areas of modern living most transformed by technology and the major companies that channel this change.

#1 – Housing and Real Estate

The “sharing economy” or “collaborative consumption” has had the strongest impact on the housing and real estate market. Similar to Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner which creates no content and Uber, the world’s largest taxi company that owns no vehicles, AirBnB owns no real estate. Instead, it functions as a peer-to-peer online platform which allows people to rent their houses and apartments short-term. By choosing this type of accommodation over hotels and hostels, travelers acquire a wider range of choices, while owners can make profit from underused assets.

A similar scenario is playing out in the work environment. Companies like WeWork provide shared workspaces for entrepreneurs, freelancers and startups by subletting office spaces, along with furniture and Internet. Signing up for an unlimited membership allows people to use WeWork locations around the world and provides an opportunity to chose an environment that suits individual preferences.

WeWork operates by taking out a cut-rate lease on a floor of an office building and reorganizing the space in smaller parts which it then rents out to small business and startups. Because of the higher crowd density-the number of people per square meter-the company boosts its Net Operating Income (NOI), making it easier for them pay higher rents in prime locations compared to conventional companies. This development, connected to the growth of self-employment, telecommuting and freelancing, is redefining the concept of office spaces and threatens to completely overpower large companies in the fight for urban space.

Residential architecture is also being transformed by smart technologies. The introduction of connected appliances and clean energy into both old and new real estate is restructuring the use of domestic spaces. Smart heating systems, energy-efficient thermostats and automatic smoke sensors are among the products offered by Nest, home automation producer of programmable, self-learning, sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled appliances that help save energy.

#2 – Transportation

Billion-dollar transportation company Uber has saturated the private transportation market with on-demand drivers, removing complicated logistics, parking tickets and maintenance hassle from the commuting equation. Hybrid companies like Tesla and Google, mostly operating in automotive and media industries, have already transitioned into different areas of technology.

Google is already testing their self-driving cars, outfitted with cameras and sensors and detailed maps of streets, traffic signals, curb heights and other information required for an unmanned vehicle to operate. It was recently announced that Tesla plans to build fully-functional autonomous cars by 2020, and Uber is planning to buy 500,000 of them.

Meanwhile, Uber has also introduced UberPool-carpooling service that cuts private transportation costs by almost 50%. Commuters are paired through Uber’s logistic engine with other commuters with similar pickup and drop-off locations. By making urban transportation more convenient and less expensive, Uber is making it less attractive for people to buy individual cars and could eventually reduce the number of cars on the road in a city.

Many predict that, because of Uber, millions of people will forgo owning a car in the next few decades. Fewer personal cars would make for less congested, less polluted cities, making taxi cabs, limo services, traffic congestion, accidents and public parking a thing of the past.

#3 – Commerce

eCommerce is slowly removing the need for brick and mortar retail, and threatens to drive the modern shopping mall to extinction. Rising fuel prices, suburban sprawl and worsening automotive traffic increase the rate at which people are turning to online shopping and websites like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and Instacart.

Shoppers can easily find products online instead of dealing with large retail establishments. Reports indicate that over 200 shopping malls across the United States are suffering 35 vacancy rates or higher. Although e-commerce, along with catalogue and direct mail, makes up less than 9% of total retail sales, this new development is expected to create a huge revolution in retail trends over the next decade.

When it comes to the built environment, this would entail the disappearance of an entire architectural typology which has marked the last century. It will also affect inner city areas by putting a great deal of pressure on small retailers. The migration of retail from the physical world to the virtual one will impact the amount of available urban space, creating new opportunities.

***

Private transportation and the real estate market may be experiencing the most immediate effects of technology, but this new trend is becoming increasingly important in the areas of urban planning and mass transport as well. Urban priorities are changing through mobility and the introduction of new frameworks for local and regional governance. Project developers and architects are facing new challenges in creating dynamic, evolving places that respond to the complexities of modern life.

What other companies do you think will impact the future of our cities?

The post Wired City: How Technology is Remapping the Urban Environment appeared first on Archipreneur.