Enhancing Urban Sustainability with Data, Modeling, and Simulation Proceedings of a Workshop (2019) / Chapter Skim
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2 Framing the Problem
2 Framing the Problem
Pages 4-14
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From page 4... ...
He said that there is a clear and present need for pathways to urban sustainability, including economic development, social progress, and environmental motivators as key indicators. To highlight issues of risk and resilience quantification, he shared examples of climate risk management frameworks from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the emerging resilience paradigm (see Ganguly, Bhatia, and Flynn, 2018)
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Ganguly suggested that the scope of "urban" should move beyond city boundaries to consider the larger connected ecosystem in which cities exist. Urban impacts can carry across regional, national, and international borders and can include interrelated infrastructures and supply chains.
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The Next Generation Digital Earth, which includes a vision for augmented images of city structures and simulations of urban systems, aims to create a digital replica of real systems. Interlinked data systems, physics-guided data science, hybrid physics and data science approaches, and physics-guided uncertainty quantification can all inform decision making.
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There is also an effort to encourage citizen scientists to collect data for the city by playing augmented reality games, such as Agents of Discovery, that allow them to explore city parks. Another partnership, SmartAirLA,6 works to address public health issues that arise from air pollution at the Port of Los Angeles: global positioning system smart inhalers are issued to people who live near the port, and they generate heat maps identifying where people had a difficult time 2 For more information about the Data Science Federation, see https://dsf.lacity.org, ac cessed March 12, 2019.
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10 The Sustainable Development Goals are as follows: no poverty; zero hunger; good health and well-being; quality education; gender equality; clear water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; decent work and economic growth; industry, innovation, and infrastructure; reduced inequalities; sustainable cities and communities; responsible production and consumption; climate action; life below water; life on land; peace, justice, and strong institutions; and partnerships for the goals. For more information about these goals, see United Nations, "About the Sustainable Development Goals," https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals, accessed March 4, 2019.
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Ganguly, Northeastern University Jeanne Holm, City of Los Angeles Bill Fulton, Rice University Data Sharing and Security Ulrike Passe, Iowa State University, asked the panelists how to prevent dystopian views of the impact of data, models, prediction, and analysis on society and how to ensure that infrastructure remains secure. Holm responded that this question is essential to understanding the provenance
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Katherine Bennett Ensor, Rice University, acknowledged that data security and access are crucial and said that the Kinder Institute11 is creating the Urban Data Platform,12 which is a library of past and current data about the Houston area. She added that archiving data (and thus having a record of data provenance)
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Fred Abousleman, Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments, mentioned that developing partnerships can be difficult and wondered how to make information more accessible both nationwide and at the local level. He emphasized that the problem is not a lack of data or resources 14 For more information about the Thriving Earth Exchange of the American Geophysical Union, see https://thrivingearthexchange.org, accessed March 12, 2019.
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She referenced the Federal Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit,19 which is open to the public and connects citizen science efforts to scientific research (i.e., citizens gather data that can be converted to help scientists and ultimately lead to government action)
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Regional planning agencies are another potential vehicle to pool resources, he continued. Holm added that Los Angeles County partnered with the Southern California Association of Governments and now has data science federation projects in a number of the county's other 88 cities, which prompts cities with resources to share the wealth.
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From page 14... ...
Ganguly noted that, even with modern modeling and data capabilities, it might not be easy to address resilience for plausible futures, especially given changing conditions and complex uncertainties. Holm commented on the power of predictive analytics: ideas about a future that would be desirable for communities are based on an ability to understand the past and the present.
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