THE PREMISES OF ‘CITY KNOWLEDGE’: A MIDDLE-OUT APPROACH
TOWARD SUSTAINABLE MUNICIPAL DATA MANAGEMENT.
FABIO CARRERA1 and ADRIAN HEWITT2
1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Worcester Polytechnic Institute - City Lab - Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division
U.S.A.
2
London Borough of Merton, Environment and Regeneration department, Plans and Projects
section, London, U.K..
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces the basic premises that underlie the “City Knowledge
approach” for the gradual and sustainable accrual of urban information in support
of urban maintenance, management and planning decisions and actions. The City
Knowledge approach is founded on the premise that urban change falls almost
entirely under municipal jurisdiction, and specifically under the purview of
individual municipal departments. This paper therefore focuses in particular on
municipal departments, proposing a strategy termed “middle-out” that combines
the benefits of top-down and bottom-up initiatives, while largely avoiding their
respective pitfalls. Instead of proposing a top-down solution to municipal data
management, the paper suggests a distributed scheme whereby each department
would be in charge of the upkeep of its own urban data, leveraging the power of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as the platform for intra- and interdepartmental sharing of information. The novelty in this approach lies in its
pragmatic, yet systematic pursuit of exhaustive, fine-grained, department-level
datasets for each physical structure and dynamic activity in the urban realm, and
in the identification of the implementation tools available to municipal
governments, as well as of the technical and administrative mechanisms for
capturing permanent as well as ephemeral change when it is directly or indirectly
caused by official municipal acts.
The City Knowledge concepts introduced in this paper are reinforced and
illustrated by a case study about the authors’ recent research efforts to help the
London Borough of Merton meet its ambitious carbon reduction goals.
INTRODUCTION
Every single day, municipal governments make maintenance, management, planning and
policy decisions that affect the inhabitants of the city or town as well as its coffers.
Invariably, to support these decisions, a great deal of time is spent gathering information by
scouring the archives of the various departments and by leveraging personal contacts with
those who are the “institutional memory” of the department. Meanwhile, administrative data
are gathered by city offices incessantly for specific purposes, most often connected with
revenue-generation (taxes, fees, etc.) or regulatory compliance (permits, licenses, etc.). Yet
these data are more often treated as “documentation” supporting a specific act or deliberation
rather than as “information” that can be reused over and over in other contexts to support a
variety of municipal tasks.
Current trends indicate a move toward the development of local geographic information
strategies (Craglia and Signoretta, 2000; Tulloch and Fuld, 2001) to capture the finer grain
of urban data that community statistical systems require. As Keating et al. (2003) put it, a
first challenge “lies in striking a balance in the degree of centralization of data storage,
administration, and procedural control while serving the needs of the community […]”.
Moreover, according to the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science
(UCGIS),
“As the variety of geospatial information and data resources increases each
year, the demand for understanding and building sustainable information and
knowledge structures remains a critical research challenge for the geospatial information community.” (Shuler, 2003)
So the problem today is not the availability or capability of technology for planning, but
rather the availability of “good” fine-grained, up-to-date data. What’s also missing is an
active pursuit of the creation of systematic storehouses of urban knowledge. According to the
established “Communicative Action” paradigm (Innes, 1998), the way forward is to embed in
the planning community – and in municipal administration in general – an innate appreciation
for the value and importance of information at any level of urban maintenance, management
and planning. This shift of mindset would enable a sea-change to take place in how cities
collect and organize information (Carrera and Hoyt, 2006).
This paper, as its title implies, addresses directly the aforementioned research priority of the
UCGIS. It specifically introduces the organizational, institutional, technical, logistical and
financial mechanisms whereby appropriate local authorities could systematically build up a
comprehensive set of framework (and later also thematic) datasets and map layers. The
gradual, but systematic compilation of all the disparate datasets accumulated by a wide
variety of government and non-government organizations is called the City Knowledge
approach (Carrera, 2004), which proposes to “grow” this knowledge from the middle-out,
integrating a top-down approach to standardization (as in Craglia and Signoretta, 2000 and
Nedović-Budić and Pinto, 2000), with a bottom-up approach to neighborhood-scale ‘atomic’
data accrual (as in Talen, 1999 and Ferreira, 2002).
This paper illustrates the basic premises that support the City Knowledge concept. For more
details and specific examples about the concept of City Knowledge, the reader should consult
the MIT Ph.D. dissertation, entitled City Knowledge: an emergent information infrastructure
for sustainable urban maintenance, management and planning (Carrera, 2004).
PREMISES OF CITY KNOWLEDGE
The concept of City Knowledge relies on a set of basic premises as well as on a number of
fundamental principles extracted from the academic literature. In a nutshell, the foundations
of the City Knowledge approach are the following:
1. Municipalities are the locus of urban change;
2. Municipalities are composed of two fundamental elements: structures and activities;
3. Urban data are either already “out there” (the so-called “backlog”) or will be produced
in the future by changes to either structures or activities;
4. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to urban data management have pros and cons,
but do not seem to produce sustainable urban information systems;
5. Space is the “glue” that can connect disparate urban datasets;
6. Governments have limited implementation tools to manage and control change.
In the sections that follow, each of these premises is discussed in some detail. Each section is
also accompanied by illustrative examples of how these fundamental propositions can be
applied in the London Borough of Merton.
MUNICIPALITIES ARE THE LOCUS OF CHANGE
The City Knowledge approach stems from the simple realization that municipalities control
most of the change that happens in the public realm. In our experience – admittedly limited to
Europe and North America – municipal governments control most of the transformations that
happen to the places where we live, work, and play. They do so by issuing construction
permits to individual property owners, by approving subdivision plans for multi-unit
residential and commercial developments, by sub-contracting the paving of roads, the
installation of powerlines and the laying out of sewage and water pipes, and in many other
ways. Occasionally, state or federal agencies are directly responsible for some modifications
to the landscape, such as the creation of interstate highways, the construction of bridges, the
creation of reservoirs or the conservation of land in state or national parks. Even in these
sporadic cases, however, local towns still have to approve or at least comment on these supramunicipal projects, whenever they impinge on their municipal territory in some way. With
the exception of illegal acts, and above and beyond the small modifications that property
owners are free to carry out on their land – as of right and without asking for permission – we
can safely assume that all major changes to the “world out there” are vetted, approved or
mandated by municipal administrative or deliberative acts.
It seems logical therefore to focus resources into capacity-building at the municipal level so
that urban and environmental data can be acquired “at the source”, where new information –
in the form of “change” to the existing territory – is produced on a daily basis. Otherwise, we
will be condemned to perpetually chasing after change in true hunter-gatherer fashion, a
punishment reminiscent of some of Dante’s infernal tortures. In particular, within each
municipality, it is really individual departments that in the end exercise control over urban
change, therefore the City Knowledge approach is specifically targeted to department-level
urban data management.
The following sections contain several examples of just such a departmental application of
City Knowledge concepts, derived from ongoing research projects that the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is conducting for the Environment and Regeneration department
of the London Borough of Merton. One of our studies in Merton is attempting to determine
the carbon footprint of all of the public and private buildings in the borough, in order to
develop a quantitative baseline that the council could use to measure its progress toward its
ambitious goal of a 15% reduction in CO2 by 2015. As a demonstration of the re-usability of
City Knowledge, the team will also make it possible for others to use some of the same data,
augmented with other information, to determine the possible size and network routing of a
Combined Heat and Power (CHP) system that would allow Merton to provide hot water and
electricity at below-market rates to public buildings, as well as to local businesses and private
property owners. Meanwhile, another team is investigating all of the ways in which the
borough government is either directly emitting CO2 (e.g. from the exhaust of its garbage truck
fleet) or indirectly “allowing” CO2 to be emitted by “others”, but with tacit or explicit
permission from the government (e.g. when the borough allows a new building to be
constructed).
Interestingly, all of the various precepts of City Knowledge that are discussed in this paper are
somehow present in the projects we are currently conducting in Merton, therefore each
section that follows will end with an illustrative example of how that City Knowledge
principle is being applied in a real situation.
MUNICIPALITIES ARE COMPOSED OF STRUCTURES AND ACTIVITIES
Kevin Lynch – a former professor in the same MIT department where the main
concepts in this paper were developed – who remains, despite his premature death, a role
model for those of us who are interested in the phenomenological aspects of a city in relation
to planning, once said:
“The Fundamental problem is to decide what the form of a human settlement
consists of: solely the inert physical things? Or the living organisms too? The
actions people engage in? The social structure? The economic system? The
ecological system? The control of the space and its meaning? The way it presents
itself to the senses? Its daily and seasonal rhythms? Its secular changes?
Like any important phenomenon, the city extends out into every other
phenomenon, and the choice of where to make the cut is not an easy one”.
His resolution of this dilemma was simple and straightforward:
“[…] the chosen ground is the spatiotemporal distribution of human actions and
the physical things which are the context of those actions […]”. (Lynch, 1982)
A shorthand way of rephrasing Kevin Lynch’s dichotomy is simply that municipalities are
made up of two components: structures and activities.
The Context: Structures
Structures include all of the “containers”, environments, spaces, places and fixed objects that
make up the physical, material municipal landscape, be it urbanized, rural or even wild.
These concrete components of the urban realm include buildings, parks, rivers, roads, trees,
fire hydrants and everything else that’s “out there” in our cityscapes. Structures often lend
themselves to “permanent” inventories since they change ever so slowly and can thus be
captured once and for all through an initial cataloguing effort, only to be occasionally updated
by intercepting administrative acts that signal the changes that do occur – however seldom –
in the physical make-up of the city.
Structures are immovable – like buildings or nature reserves – or at least difficult to move –
like sheds or park benches. Even when they are movable, once in place they tend to stay there
for a while, as is the case for traffic signs. Structures are mostly inanimate, like telephone
poles, though some – trees for instance – are immobile yet alive. Once they come into
existence in the urban landscape, all structures change slowly, often imperceptibly.
Structures are eminently spatial entities, since they tend to occupy space for extended periods
of time, so they easily lend themselves to literal geographical representations in Geographic
Information Systems (GIS). Structures are the context within which activities take place.
The City Knowledge approach leverages the spatio-temporal permanence of structures to
create the foundation of comprehensive municipal information infrastructures.
The Content: Activities
Whereas structures are the context, activities represent the content. They are what
distinguishes lively cities from ghost towns. Activities are made of people, animals, cars,
natural events and many other dynamic phenomena that incessantly take place within the
physical structures of our world.
Activities comprise the actions of mobile, live organisms (people and animals), as well as
natural phenomena such as seasonal plant growth, climate patterns, hydrodynamic currents,
and the like. They include patterns of human mobility (vehicular, airplane, or naval traffic) as
well as socio-economic fluctuations (demography, economic activity, tourism, purchasing
patterns, etc.). Some municipal operations, such as roadway repairs, park maintenance and
water distribution are examples of activities that are strictly connected with physical
infrastructures.
Activities are more difficult to track than structures, because of their ever-changing nature.
Whereas information about structures can be maintained through a piecemeal “transactional”
approach, which is less costly and more manageable on a day-to-day basis, many activities
need to be monitored periodically and regularly, thus they require more resources to produce
“snapshots” of their status quo at a particular moment in time.
By ‘spatializing’ urban activities – i.e. by connecting activities to urban structures – and
through contractual and regulatory practices (Carrera, 2005), it is possible to keep track of
these more ephemeral phenomena using City Knowledge principles (see also Carrera, 2004).
Structures and Activities in the London Borough of Merton
In our projects for the London Borough of Merton, it was essential for us to separate
structures from activities, as is generally the case in many urban projects of this kind. We
would have loved to find out exactly how much energy is consumed by Merton households
for heating and electrical usage. However, we did not expect that energy bills and meter
readings would be provided to us, so we knew that we would have to estimate the demand for
energy in some other way. To do this, first of all we would need to know where all the
buildings are, how big they are, when they were built, how they were constructed, what type
of heating, electrical appliances and lighting is present in the building and how long they are
each used in a given day, week, month or year. Not surprisingly, there is no such database
available in one single place in the borough of Merton. Finding out about the physical
structures in Merton was not at all easy, and many key pieces of information, such as the
quality of construction and insulation of a building, just could not be obtained at all, not even
by proxy. Yet, one would think that information about fairly permanent things like buildings,
could also be collected once and for all at a very fine grain, so we could peruse it for multiple
purposes forever. Permanent features of the urban landscape deserve to be documented with
an equally permanent municipal information system, yet such a system remains a mere dream
for the vast majority of cities and towns.
Even if we knew everything there is to know about the physical make up of all buildings, we
still could not estimate their respective energy demands without knowledge about the
activities that go on in each building. An old vacant building with really poor insulation
consumes less energy than a new state-of-the-art, sustainable and eco-friendly business that
operates on three shifts, 24-hours a day, with over 1000 employees. A building does not
consume much energy if there are no activities taking place in it. The energy intensity of
these human activities is very difficult to measure with precision without having access to
utility bills or meter readings.
It is clear that numerous municipal operations would benefit from a City Knowledge approach
to the sustainable accumulation of information about structures and activities, and the Merton
case is typical of the hunting-and-gathering nature of information acquisition that limits the
re-utilization of fundamental information – such as knowledge about buildings – despite the
fact that buildings are possibly the most visible and familiar features of our urban
environments. It is easy to imagine that many (if not all) departments in a municipality have
probably something to do with buildings in one way or another, yet none of the cities we have
worked with has had a truly exhaustive and accessible dataset about such fundamental
ingredients of our daily life. The sections that follow include some ideas of how this situation
could be remedied through the application of City Knowledge principles.
FROM HUNTERS-GATHERERS TO FARMERS: THE ‘BACKLOG’ VS. FUTURE CHANGE
Cities are complex and multi-faceted, but luckily they are also spatially finite (by definition),
being either bounded by fixed city limits or restricted in their expansion by growth rings or by
natural or administrative boundaries. The information town administrators, city managers and
urban planners need to use is also finite and mostly uniform across similar municipal
departments all around the world. Fortunately, the task of accumulating a comprehensive and
high-resolution electronic repository of municipal information is conceivable with today’s
technology, and it is not as tall a task as it may have seemed only a few years ago. Starting
today, such an undertaking is achievable in both space and time. Space-wise, we can slowly
but surely span the entire geographical extent of a municipality and know about every slice of
reality that each city department needs to know about. Time-wise, we can minimize waste
and redundancy by continually updating the data as change happens within the municipal
realm, instead of letting change happen under our nose and then catching up with it again in a
few years, with costly and redundant inventories and surveys.
Logic dictates that the natural tendency for towns would be to keep track of change as it
happens under their watch, and in fact they do. Unfortunately, until now such recordkeeping
has been primarily carried out in order to abide to regulatory requirements, or to document
deliberations and administrative decisions, or to provide the basis for the calculation of fees
and taxes. Most of these urban data have been used for single purposes and kept in parochial
“vaults”, single-mindedly dedicated to specific functions. Most are still in paper form and
decaying away in musty archives. Computer technology, thus far, has only modified the
medium, but not the essence of municipal recordkeeping. Instead of shelves full of record
books, town halls are now beginning to fill up hard drives and are also accumulating boxes
full of floppies and CDs, slowly becoming unreadable due to physical malfunctions or to
technological obsolescence.
Those of us who try to re-utilize archived municipal data to conduct analyses that go above
and beyond the data’s original intended purpose end up hunting-and-gathering such data in a
manner not too dissimilar to the way our primeval ancestors foraged for food. What the City
Knowledge approach suggests instead is a switch from hunting-and-gathering data to farming
municipal information, on purpose and systematically (Carrera and Hoyt, 2006).
The first task a town faces, in its switch to “modern farming methods”, is that of repackaging, re-constructing and possibly even re-capturing information about urban elements
that are already “out there” in the real world. The documentation about most of this existing
structures has probably already been filtered by municipal offices, but it is equally likely to
have become largely inaccessible or at least difficult to peruse. In parallel with this effort,
towns ought to also transform the way they manage new urban data whenever change occurs
in the municipal landscape.
In summary, every town that is trying to manage its urban data is faced with two primary
tasks:


Catching up with the backlog of urban data
Capturing future changes in the city
A City Knowledge approach would exploit the fact that change happens primarily with the
consent of local government, by fostering the gradual emergence of a comprehensive urban
and environmental information infrastructure that can be re-used for multiple purposes in
municipal maintenance, management and planning. We think that today’s technology has
passed the cost-benefit threshold that has prevented such an approach from being
implemented until now. The costs of such an endeavor today are outweighed by the benefits
that such a system would provide in terms of efficiency and efficacy for day-to-day town
operations (Carrera, 2004).
Catching up with the “Backlog”
Inventorying the physical urban infrastructure already in existence is an imposing task.
Before the advent of personal computers and relational databases, systematic and exhaustive
tracking of city assets was very cumbersome and consequently not very flexible. Paper
records were maintained (and often still are) in file cabinets, using a variety of ad-hoc
indexing schemes suited to the mission of the office where the records resided. Re-indexing
and cross-referencing were simply not available options if one wanted to re-utilize an existing
archive for practical or analytical reasons that differed from the original intended purpose of
the documentation. Enriching the archive with complementary information that augmented
the core collection of indispensable data was not even contemplated, given how unwieldy
these paper stores were, even when the bare minimum of necessary information was retained.
Nowadays, the widespread adoption of computerized databases for many municipal
operations has greatly reduced the cost of keeping the records organized, and of making them
accessible for multiple purposes. The gradual and systematic archival of city knowledge
makes practical and economic sense today due to the declining costs of computer archival,
and thanks to the technological evolution that has brought databases and geographic
information systems (GIS) into the mainstream of municipal operations, even in smaller
towns.
The London Borough of Merton (pop. 188,000) was the first city in the world to officially
adopt a ‘City Knowledge’ approach to the management of its municipal information.
Therefore, in Merton one can begin to detect an appreciation for the futility of the current
‘hunt-and-gathering’ mode of operation and a propensity for the desirable alternative of
“farming” the data in perpetuity and harvesting them systematically and exhaustively so that
multiple departments can base their decisions on the same information, reliably and
sustainably.
Our efforts to estimate energy consumption in public and private buildings is suggesting
numerous ways to acquire reliable information about a wide variety of facets of the borough’s
building stock. However, our efforts in cobbling together a composite relational database
about public and private buildings – containing a rich set of attributes about their physical
characteristics, ownership status, primary use, and administrative history – will have been
done in vain unless they are followed by equally thorough efforts to maintain the information
in the long run. Although some measure of hunting-and-gathering detective work may be
inevitable when dealing with ‘the backlog’, these arduous tasks are only worth their while if
‘farming methods’ are rapidly established to sustain the reliable flow of city knowledge from
this point forward.
In addition to being the obvious choice for intercepting future change, farming can even be
used to catch up with the backlog. For instance, construction and restoration permits are
clearly a promising vehicle through which a town could extract useful informational returns
about buildings that are currently not retained in the town’s archives. A properly designed
permit process can not only intercept new buildings “at birth”, but it also has the potential to
gradually allow the town to catch up with the information about buildings as they undergo
modifications or restorations, even though it may take decades for all of them to come up for
a permit application. If there is no compelling urgency to accelerate this slow but certain
progress toward full knowledge about buildings, then Merton may be well-served to invest
some resources into revamping the permitting process, so that all of the rich data about
buildings that the various departments need will be gradually and systematically captured into
a web-based municipal information system accessible to all in perpetuity.
Intercepting Future Change
As the existing state of things is being recorded and organized in databases and GIS layers,
we should begin to intercept change on a day-to-day basis, so that there will never be the need
to catch up with backlogs again in the future. If done carefully, this constant upkeep of
information should cost very little additional money. The difference between the current
procedures and those that will be put in place in the future is really minimal in terms of
resources. The main difference is one of focus.
For example, the aforementioned revision of Merton’s permitting system could
simultaneously keep track of new information, while chipping away at the backlog. By
focusing on this key administrative transaction, Merton could close the information loop so
that rich and reliable information about buildings can be easily and dependably obtained by
all departments in need of such information.
In general, a focus on informational returns can yield many surprisingly simple ways to
acquire updates with minimum effort, as the authors have experienced time and again. By far,
the most promising way to keep the knowledgebase up-to-par – insofar as change is produced
by human acts and not by natural dynamics – is to actively work to intercept and process the
administrative paperwork that accompanies such change, since almost all anthropogenic
modifications to the world we live in are decided, requested, required, approved or authorized
by some level of government. In fact, this approach can be used to farm both structures and
activities (Gage et al., 2003; Hart et al., 2004). In Merton, for instance, the same permit
system discussed above could track activities such as building use, economic activity (at least
in the construction business), possibly demographics and more.
Merton Council could set the example by extracting useful informational returns about its
own buildings directly from its own sub-contractors. One way to achieve this would be to
clearly specify content and format of the required informational returns in the tender and in
the subsequent contract. The company hired to erect a new public building (Leisure Center,
School, Public Housing, etc.) would simply be required – by contract – to submit detailed
construction information and drawings in a mandatory format suitable to be immediately
incorporated into the borough’s growing buildings knowledgebase (Carrera, 2005).
We are also exploring additional transaction-based mechanisms for intercepting information
about Merton’s commercial and industrial sectors, so that an up-to-date registry of businesses,
including their typology, number of employees, hours of operation and other multi-use
information may be farmed into existence. Such data were essential to our project, since
businesses of a certain size would consume a certain amount of energy, depending on the
nature of the business and the size of the facilities. More importantly, only businesses could
legally sign a binding 15-year contract with the Merton power company, once a CHP network
was put in place by the borough council. Being able to satisfy the energy demand from
specific non-domestic buildings in the vicinity of a planned CHP plant would make a
difference in the sizing of the plant itself, as well as on its financial viability. Sadly, once
again the data we were able to obtain had to be ‘triangulated’ from a variety of disparate
sources, including published business directories, partial surveys of specific business sectors,
health and safety inspection records, garbage contracts (‘duty of care’), fire certificates, and
so on. It is our hope that the borough will invest appropriate resources to close this
information gap as well, so that business information may be as reliably available as
information about buildings is going to be once City Knowledge principles are applied in this
arena as well.
MIDDLE-OUT: INTEGRATING THE BEST ASPECTS OF TOP DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP
Middle-out is the methodological framework which allows City Knowledge systems to
emerge. It is a consciously unobtrusive strategy which guides the choice of common-sense,
low-impact tactics that gradually translate the promising concept of City Knowledge into an
achievable reality (Carrera, 2004). The “middle-out” approach assumes that municipal
officials are motivated by a desire to improve their own performance at their daily tasks
related to the maintenance of city property, the management of city services, or the planning
of city futures. The “middle-out” approach to City Knowledge combines the self-serving
ingenuity and energy of bottom-up initiatives and the coordination and standardization of topdown approaches. This hybrid approach empowers the more peripheral branches of the
municipal hierarchy and gives front-line civil servants a stake over the upkeep of the
information that they themselves require.
Both top-down and bottom-up are fundamentally unsustainable in their pure incarnations and
both frequently lead to a waste of energy, time and money. Pure top-down approaches to the
diffusion of information systems in organizations are generally poorly received because they
fail to engage the rank and file. After huge initial investments, they struggle to achieve the
fully-integrated coordination and seamless operation that they promised, especially when the
task is not easily automated and the organizational structure is not very hierarchical (Reeve
and Petch, 1999).
Grass-roots, bottom-up schemes, on the other hand, work well for a while as long as some
“champions” keep the efforts going, but the resulting information systems eventually fall by
the wayside because they refuse to “grow up” or are unable to connect with other systems, or
simply fail to keep up with technological or organizational changes (Klosterman, 2001 and
Singh, 2004). Bottom-up efforts frequently fail because of lack of sustained support by a
dedicated core of users/developers and because of the related lack of adequate funds to keep
the effort alive through changes in personnel, equipment, and software tools.
The middle-out method is predicated on striking a careful balance between the potentially
oppressive and unwelcome rigor of a typical top-down hierarchical system and the practical
ineffectiveness of isolated bottom-up efforts, which almost inevitably fail to scale up or to
integrate with other similar systems. It represents a pragmatic compromise that taps into the
positive aspects of the two competing approaches, leveraging the energy and self-interest that
power bottom-up endeavors, and endowing them with the structure, reliability and sustained
financial support that accompanies top-down enterprises.
The bottom-up component of middle-out exploits the all-too-human self-interest that civil
servants undoubtedly harbor, like the rest of us. Everyone wants to do a good job and receive
praise and recognition from peers and superiors. Enlightened self-interest will therefore be
the motor that will feed the information infrastructure described herein.
To rein in the bottom-up anarchy that might ensue if each civil servant with a modicum of
computer savvy were to create an information system from the ground up – as has been
somewhat the case in the last decade of the XX century after the advent of personal computers
and the mainstreaming of databases and geographic information systems (Geertman and
Stillwell, 2004; Brail and Klosterman, 2001) – the middle-out approach also incorporates a
degree of top-down coordination and management. Information systems will be indeed
developed in bottom-up fashion by the front-line departments, where the action really happens
and where information is produced and consumed on a daily basis, but these efforts will be
managed and coordinated at the departmental or divisional level and will include a
teleological (forward-looking) approach to avoid unbridled duplication of efforts and
overlapping of jurisdictions that will otherwise hamper the sustainability of the City
Knowledge enterprise in the long run.
Some development paths being recommended today resemble this middle-out approach
(Ferreira, 1998; Campbell, 1999; Yeh, 1999; Talen, 1999; and Reeve and Petch, 1999).
Ferreira (1998), in particular, has championed a technological analog of the middle-out
approach when he proposed the use of lookup tables to correct on-the-fly the “stubborn”
standardization errors that regularly appear in municipal datasets. Dr. Carrera’s department at
MIT is developing software tools, called façades, that will enable the middle-out approach to
be seamlessly adopted by various municipal departments (Brookings, 2006).
Since Merton is the only municipality so far to have formally embraced the City Knowledge
approach, the next step would entail figuring out how to “spread” the concept around so that it
is adopted in all departments and divisions as an information-aware modus operandi aimed at
capturing complete and detailed datasets about the structures and activities of the borough that
fall under their purview. A middle-out approach could be instigated by the borough’s top
executives by – for instance – requiring all department heads to adopt City Knowledge
principles in order to develop exhaustive and fine-grained data repositories about all
structures and activities that are under their respective jurisdictions. After this initial topdown impetus, each department could begin to accumulate its own knowledgebase from the
bottom-up, starting from the ‘low-hanging fruits’ represented by ‘ripe’ applications such as
the aforementioned ones for buildings and businesses in Merton.
SPACE IS THE ‘GLUE’
The dearth of geographic references in city-owned datasets has made it difficult to integrate
the information available in different departments and has therefore impeded the development
of a distributed City Knowledge system. The advent of GIS in the eighties began to change
things a bit, though real progress has been slow since the power for spatial analysis that GIS
provide has been misunderstood and underused in favor of more mundane uses of these
powerful tools as glorified mapping and plotting applications, serving the needs of planning
commissions and the like. This underutilization of GIS is a pity, but it has had the beneficial
effect of at least making the tool a household word in most mid-to-large-size communities in
the world.
Just as networking has only recently come of age, GIS has also reached a critical mass in
terms of its widespread adoption in municipalities worldwide, making this decade ripe for the
next step, namely the final tapping of GIS’s real power as a tool that will enable disparate
pieces of the municipal information puzzle to be glued together through the space that they
share. In fact, it would be better if we all referred to G.I.S. as “Geographic Indexing
Systems” instead of the current meaning of the acronym. By simply re-training ourselves to
use the new moniker, we would be reminded of the exceptional indexing power of space.
This mental switch, together with a more educated application of City Knowledge principles
for the automatic creation (“at birth”) of unique codes for all objects in the real world – which
assures that databases can be linked to maps – will enable the emergent qualities of city
knowledge to become evident to all (Carrera, 2004).
Merton has a very good G.I.S. department that has managed to accumulate impressive
amounts of data and geographic information about the borough. But the full power of
‘geographic indexing’ has not been achieved yet. Although we were able to immediately
obtain very accurate Ordnance Survey maps of all the buildings and topological features of
the borough, the datasets behind the geometries were either non-existent or very difficult to
link to the rest of the data – because of the notorious problems one always encounters when
trying to use street addresses as the “best” way to link disparate databases. A possible
middle-out scenario to move Merton toward a more aggressive approach to information
“farming” would be to challenge (and fund) each department and division to identify the data
that they “produce”, either through administrative acts, or through direct actions. As long as
there is a consensus over the fact that the Environment and Regeneration department has
jurisdiction over knowledge about “energy consumption”, the Building Control and the Plans
and Projects sections of that department could begin to think about all the different and
ingenious ways which would allow Merton departments to take the first step in their
transformation from hunter-gatherers of urban data to farmers of City Knowledge.
To support these middle-out efforts, City Lab at WPI is developing a web-based urban
information tool, nicknamed LOUIS (Local Online Urban Information System), which is an
open-source, java-based geographic information system based on OLIVER (On LIne data
ViewER), supported by the Massachusetts state authority for GIS (MassGIS). LOUIS
demonstrates how spatial tools can be used to index and correlate a number of datasets –
residing even on separate servers – thanks to a common underlying geographic reference
platform. A tool like LOUIS would enable the Borough of Merton to successfully farm its
various “data plots”, by distributing the onus of creating and maintaining data inventories to
the department or division that has the clearest ‘paternity’ over them. A primary duty of the
‘parent department’ (or division) will consist in the institution of formal ‘birth certificates’ to
clearly identify each urban element with its ‘baptismal name’, i.e. a unique code that allows
other datasets to refer to the same physical object unequivocally (Carrera, 2004).
The next section describes the tools that municipal governments can use to sow the seeds of
city knowledge in the various departments, and to extract informational returns from a variety
of sources, often at no cost.
THE FIVE (OR SIX) TOOLS OF GOVERNMENT ACTION
When it comes to implementing the City Knowledge approach, using the middle-out tactic,
cities will be limited to the tools they have at their disposal to affect change in the municipal
realm. Schuster et al. (1997) convincingly assert that governments only have five choices to
ensure that a certain policy or action is properly carried out:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
to do it themselves (Ownership and Operation)
to make us do it (Regulation)
to entice us into doing it (Incentives and Disincentives)
to convince us to do it (Education and Information)
to negotiate with us to do it together (Rights)
To which one could add a possible sixth choice, which is:
6. to compensate us for the negative consequences of doing it (Mitigation and
Compensation)
Ever since Dr. Carrera was exposed to the 5 tools in an MIT seminar conducted by Prof.
Schuster and Prof. DeMonchaux, which lead to the book that is cited above, he was struck by
the utter simplicity of this implementation framework. The authors really think it captures
everything a government can really do to put knowledge into action, with the possible
exception of mitigation measures, which Dr. Carrera is considering as a provisional sixth tool.
As it turns out, the same tools, especially when used in concert with each other, are also the
only levers that governments can pull in order to acquire the knowledge that informs their
policy decisions – as well as being the only tools available to implement those policies
through specific actions.
A careful blend of the five tools – perhaps with a sprinkle of the sixth tool as well – can create
a virtuous cycle that will gradually but systematically cultivate the gardens of knowledge
from which all departments will be able to reliably and sustainably harvest the information
they need to operate.
The following sections discuss how these simple choices could be used in combination in our
London example to create a powerful toolkit with which the borough of Merton can acquire
the necessary city knowledge and then transform this knowledge into successful policy
actions.
1) Ownership and Operation - whereby municipalities are free to do whatever they decide
to do on structures and activities that they directly own and operate.
Returning to our running example from the London Borough of Merton, when we began to
estimate the carbon footprints of all buildings within the town borders, we purposely focused
first on public buildings. We made this choice because we assumed that the hunting-andgathering of the needed information about energy consumption in municipally owned and
operated structures would be easier, since we could possibly actually gain access to the holy
grail of actual utility bills, with exact energy consumption figures.
2) Regulation - whereby municipalities can tell citizens what they must do.
Next, in order to intercept future change as it happens, we proposed that Merton should
mandate that all new construction permits be submitted through an on-line system that will
extract a rich set of building and business data that lend themselves to multiple reutilizations,
including the estimation of carbon footprints. Thanks to a simple regulation such as this, the
data will be stored in backend databases and will be re-usable by many Merton departments
and divisions in perpetuity.
3) Incentives (and Disincentives) - whereby municipalities can induce citizens to do the right
thing, while deterring them from doing the wrong thing.
To expedite the switch away from traditional means of documenting construction permits, the
borough may – for instance – quadruple the current submission fees for all new permits,
unless they are submitted through the new electronic system, in which case the new fee is
actually 50% less than the current. This “carrot and stick” approach is an example of a smart
combination of incentives (the 50% discount for compliance) and disincentives (the 400%
increase if traditional documentation is submitted).
4) Education and Information - whereby municipalities can instill into its citizens knowledge
about what they ought to do based on an informed and educated position, acquired over time.
Using the Education and Information tool, Merton council could inform citizens about the
new permit system and about the rationale for the enriched data-gathering and, in the process,
educate them about CO2 emissions. School programs may be designed to go hand-in-hand
with this initiative, so that, for instance, school children may be taught how to conduct a
carbon audit of their own schools, which in turn could further enrich the City Knowledge
storehouse about municipally owned and operated buildings (as in Pavan, 2004).
5) Rights - whereby municipalities can re-negotiate extensions of the rights of individuals
and organizations in exchange for a desired outcome.
Merton city planners have introduced intelligent mechanisms that grant private owners or
developers additional rights above and beyond those granted to them by current zoning
regulations, as long as they agree to construct new buildings that meet specific carbon
emission targets. Merton’s Forward Planning department pioneered what they refer to as a
“Development Density Matrix” for realizing this initiative. The city has in place a basic
residential unit density guideline of 80 homes per hectare. However, if developers agree to cut
the carbon footprint of the development by designing energy-efficient buildings, installing
renewable energy infrastructure or Combined Heat and Power (CHP), and promote
sustainable transport options by reducing the number of parking spaces, then Merton will
increase the number of homes allowed per hectare. If they reduced the carbon footprint by
60% below the legal construction standard baseline, then they would be allowed to build 100
homes per hectare (hph). For an 80% reduction in CO2, they would be granted 110 hph, and
for a carbon-neutral development (100% reduction, i.e. a zero energy development, or ZED),
the density bonus would allow 120 hph. The logic being that the additional construction costs
to achieve the carbon reduction would be offset by the sales of additional homes. This
example from Merton clearly demonstrates the real power of the underutilized Rights tool. As
part of this negotiation, Merton could also require the developer to provide fine-grained
information about the new construction, thus furthering the emergence of City Knowledge.
6) Mitigation and Compensation - whereby municipalities can mitigate the consequences of
municipal actions and compensate those affected by them.
There may be another form of government action, not mentioned by Schuster et al. (1997),
that could qualify as a possible sixth tool, provisionally called mitigation and compensation.
An example of this tool in action can be the re-utilization of the extra fees paid by applicants
who are reluctant to adopt the new submission formats (see item #2 Regulation), in order to
defray the costs incurred by municipal personnel in order to manually transfer the noncompliant submissions into the electronic system ex-post. This may be one of the possible
uses of the 6th tool, since the extra fees are used to compensate for the extra work needed to
computerize the paper submissions, which directly enhances the City Knowledge process.
Perhaps a clearer example of this sixth tool would be if Merton decided to mitigate the
negative consequences of the density bonus mentioned in item #5 (Rights), by providing
compensation in the form of even cheaper (or free) heat and power to the owners of
surrounding buildings whose sunlight or view was affected by the extra density allowed by
the aforementioned negotiations around development rights. By eliminating some of the
potential adverse effects of the policy, the Mitigation and Compensation tool would remove
some of the objections to the application of the 5th tool (Rights), thus enabling the Merton
policy to move forward, therefore it may be considered as a bona-fide tool in and of itself.
We look forward to reporting on the actual full implementation of the middle-out approach to
City Knowledge in Merton or elsewhere, so we can begin to critically analyze the value of the
principles exposed in this paper. We are confident that it will not be long before this happens.
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