Data now underpins almost every industry and aspect of society, and nowhere is this more apparent than our cities, which are at the forefront of innovation.

Overpopulation and inequality are creating challenges for cities, but data can build a comprehensive jigsaw of our urban life, aiding decision-making on everything from safety to transport to design – making cities better places to live.

While the new data economy raises vital questions over privacy and data ownership, there is a value exchange to be found, with new applications of technology improving our common environment and public participation.

Safer streets

Social media raised awareness of violence against women in recent years, while the #MeToo movement kickstarted a global conversation about harassment and safety.

Several apps have been launched to tackle the issue in urban spaces, using data to amplify people’s experiences and highlight crime blackspots – informing decisions at both an individual and societal level.

HarassMap, founded in Cairo, for example, uses crowd-sourced information to log harassment and sexual violence. While having a clear benefit for individuals and local communities, HarassMap has also had an impact at both national and global level – its success prompted similar initiatives in a number of other countries. As of 2014, sexual harassment is now a crime in Egypt.

Safe & the City, meanwhile, draws on openly accessible official data to give users real-time notifications about crime in London. App users can anonymously report their experiences in various parts of the city to help others plan their routes and stay informed.

“Our primary objective is to demonstrate how people’s perception of safety and incidents of street harassment has an impact on businesses, community and the city and how this visibility can create data-driven decisions and citizen engagement to co-create solutions to improve it,” says Jillian Kowalchuk, founder and chief executive of the start-up.

The company’s partnership with the Metropolitan Police Service allows it to share anonymous insights on crimes that may otherwise stay unreported, such as sexual harassment, and inform police intelligence and future changes to policing, according to Kowalchuk. It has also begun to flag ‘safe sites’ on the app – venues that are part of the ‘Ask for Angela’ scheme (where women can ask bar staff for ‘Angela’, as a code for helping them get out of an unsafe date situation), for example, and nearby businesses who want to support people.

“Open data is the lifeblood of these kinds of apps,” says Matilda Andersson, London managing director at Crowd DNA. “The more data and information shared with them by users, the more complete a picture they can build and then feed into a better user experience. Both apps champion the idea that by sharing data, users can be an integral part of building these services – Safe & the City even uses the word ‘empower’. It creates a sense of ownership – which, in the world of data, is a tricky thing to define.” 

Crowd-sourced data also creates a sense of ownership over cities themselves, improving public participation. In Barcelona, the city used online platform Decidim to ask citizens to participate in decision-making about what should be on the agenda for the local government, helping city planners better understand the impact of their policies on people who live there.

Meanwhile, in New York, JustFix uses open data to map building ownership in the city and identify unscrupulous landlords. The company’s web app allows tenants to notify their landlords of repair issues and log the photographs to present as a case history in housing court.

Going places 

Open and crowd-sourced data have also been transforming the way we move around cities. Google-owned Waze, for example, uses crowd-sourced information to inform mobility and travel planning, while in London, data sharing between Transport for London (TfL) and apps such as Citymapper have improved people’s navigation and experience of the city’s vast transport network.

Insight agency Kadence conducted a study on urban mobility in several countries, finding a more obvious value exchange between individuals and providers when it comes to inner city travel – the more painful the commute, the more appealing the prospect of improvement, with data privacy concerns tending to decrease.

“Our study found that the negative experiences of many urban journeys are causing significant issues in physical and mental wellness; with improvements to an urban journey being so immediate and emotional that citizens view the personal data exchange to be weighted in their favour,” says Greg Clayton, formerly managing director at Kadence.

Additionally, people are more willing to contribute to such crowd-sourced platforms because they acknowledge their individual role within the larger city ecosystem. “They acknowledge their own roles as a data point within a broader dataset that can be optimised in aggregate to benefit the broader crowd,” says Clayton. “Maybe we’ve all seen enough visualisations of worker ants to recognise the parallels between the insect world and the human world.”

For many, the Cambridge Analytica scandal marked a turning point in people’s perceptions of their data, with high-profile data breaches and the more recent debate over the police use of facial recognition in public spaces, there is an ongoing need for a data infrastructure that is robust and trustworthy.

The balance between the rights of the individual versus the collective benefit is a central argument in open data. On the one hand, it has tremendous potential to shift power towards the many as opposed to being in the hands of the few, helping entrepreneurs build better products and services, and democratising participation and making the world more transparent. On the other, there is not yet a “social contract for the digital age”, says Andersson – while people know their data is being shared, they don’t necessarily have a say in how it is used.

Some efforts have been made to tackle this conundrum. In Amsterdam and Barcelona, pilots are under way of Decode, an EU-funded project to give people control over their personal information and decide how it is shared.

Andersson says: “Ultimately, sharing data to enable community-led, evidence-based decision- making offers extremely positive results. However, for it to become ubiquitous, consumers need more transparency and a clearer understanding of where their data is going.”