Data-driven urban design

Welcome to the Urbanista blog where we discuss water management challenges of Nordic cities. From safe drinking water distribution and stormwater collection, to building sustainable urban living environments. The Urbanista blog is based on the Urbanista podcast episodes. This post is based on the interview with ith Natalia Rincón – Co-Founder and CEO at CHAOS, an AI startup focused on location intelligence forecasts to improve the liveability of cities. 

A lot has been said about smart cities. But how can we make data-driven, but people focused, cities? My guest today is an expert in both data and urban planning. Who are you and what do you do?

- Hi. Thank you for having me. My name is Natalia Rincón. I have a background in computer science and architecture. My architecture life has been focused on urban planning, maybe because every time we had to build something like a space or a building, we were required to understand the user: who is going to use the space? Who is going to walk by? Is it nice to walk by? Is this something that the community actually wants? All of these things I have been pondering a lot in my mind. Hence, me being here.

What is your company CHAOS architects doing?

- CHAOS is a location intelligence company which collects and geolocates data. We clean it, put it together, apply AI data science, and gets new insights from this. And we do this for anyone that needs location intelligence: municipalities, property developers, real estate investors, banks, retail and even the end consumer who needs to find a home. This is what we do and our vision is to make more visible cities.
One of the reasons we feel strongly about this is that not every country has the ability to provide good environments for its citizens.
 

What do you mean by location intelligence?

- When you usually think of doing something, a hobby for example, it has a location. Or when you think of marketing for a company, you can think where are my consumers? If you travel, you travel to a location. Location is so embedded in our everyday life that we don’t even notice it. Unless, perhaps, if you are lost in a very remote location where you cannot relate to the environment. So, location intelligence is the science of understanding a location – the insight of a location.
A location can very easily come to your mind, a street for example, or a bar. If you are invited for a drink by one of your friends you tend to look for that location in Google maps and go. But if you think more into it, a location can a community, like a neighbourhood in your city that has a characteristic. That is an intangible thing that mainly we think of as qualitative, but it can be quantitative. For example, how many people think in a certain way in this neighbourhood? And when we look at neighbourhoods around the world, some are very hipster neighbourhoods filled with young people. Others are more for elderly people, some are for families and there you have playgrounds. So neighbourhoods also have characteristics that can also be quantitative. So anything that we’re speaking about, the essence and the insight is location intelligence.
 

What kind of data are you collecting and how can it be leveraged by an urban planner?

- Anything can be quantified from a location. Maybe for a very long time we have been used to think that sentiments cannot be quantified. Now we are realising, with social media, that they actually can. If we think of Twitter, when people tweet there is always a positive tone or a negative tone. There is also an IP address of the tweet. If you sum up the tweets from a community, it is very interesting to learn what is the sentiment of that community. Since Twitter comments on the news of the world, it might be that the sentiment changes based on what is happening in the world. But if we take another example, the Google searches, it might be that in a very young, progressive or liberal neighbourhood, you might find a lot of searches for vegetarian restaurants, or for certain hobbies that appeal to them. So, and this is the beauty of big data, you can quantify sentiments and feelings.
 

By looking at this data, can you explain the social situation happening at a given place and time?

- Yes. It can be the weather for example. At this time of the year in Finland we are getting a bit more sun, and if you check how people are interacting on Instagram, for example, how many positive words are used when the weather is good? Then we discover that two seemingly unrelated data points actually are related. Another example are the ‘happy or not’ feedback buttons in stores. It might be that on rainy days people feel a bit more grumpy and therefore you get more negative feedback. It’s important that we understand how factors like the weather can affect how people are feeling. It varies along the way and that’s where our name, CHAOS, comes from. It’s a very complex system that is difficult to predict because there are a lot of factors that affect the outcome.

Why does an urban planner want to know this data that seems to have so many variables?

- An urban planner can be working in either the public or private sector. With regard to a municipality, the goal is to attract tax payers and raise their quality of life. So when making a more general or detailed zoning plan you need to understand a lot of influencing factors. E.g., you want to provide schools, you want to see how many households you can attract and of what type, age, gender, etc. Then once you attract them you have to also provide hospitals, services like stores and transportation. You need to plan a lot of things. You need to allocate budget and have the use of the land clearly structured and then you start building accordingly. It’s also important to be able to forecast your demographic, how it is going to grow and change and how you can retain taxpayers. How do we help people stay in small cities and avoid them moving to the big cities?
 

Are you collecting information about the soil / ground and its contamination levels? Because sometimes plans to build residential areas are complicated by contamination from a previous use of the land.

- There is data on the state of the soil. This has also been done by geographers. When you build, construction companies need to know more about the soil. You also have to comply with regulations and health regulations when building there. Information about the soil is also relevant when it comes to flooding and managing rainwater. Regarding climate data, we are still in a R&D phase, for example wind, air quality, soil, energy sources, etc. However, this data is part of the 360 view that we have.

We have seen in some parts of the world more droughts, and in other parts a lot more rainwater. When we build new places, can we predict future rainfall levels?

- We are experiencing now different climate conditions and we see that happening a lot, like extra rainwater, or droughts, like in California where you have forest fires.  You see also in Finland how the winters are varying. On the other hand, I come from a city that is in a desert. We didn’t have rainwater, but when it rained it rained drastically and then we would have floods.
So, why did this happen? It wasn’t that we didn’t have infrastructure to absorb rainwater, but it was because the diameter of the pipes to handle the rainwater was based on the average rainfall: small pipes for low rainfall. Then, of course, the diameter of the pipes was not enough in the times of heavy rainfall. Cities should take these examples into consideration. Is the infrastructure ready to support the changes from global warming?
Going back to your question, I think in the whole topic of climate change scientists have been looking at historical data for a while and advising that something is happening here. We are very careful to say that we can forecast things. People might ask, can you forecast a pandemic, like covid? But exceptions and anomalies cannot be forecast. A forecast is the best understanding, using the elements we have available today, of what the future is going to look like. And in that you can add how climate change is performing and assume that it is getting worse and worse and therefore the future will look like this. But it could be that an asteroid hits earth and completely changes a climate, in which case a forecast would not be the same because of this anomaly.
The same can happen with services. We know the services of an area, how many schools, grocery stores, etc, it has. We can forecast the demand for a service, but on the other hand, we cannot forecast how many restaurants are going to open, because that is an anomaly. But I can tell you the trend. I can tell you that in the past year, five restaurants that have been here have all closed. I can forecast that a restaurant in this area won’t pay off and then I can look at the demographics and ask, ‘why are restaurants not working in this area?’ I can understand a trend and make assumptions, but I cannot predict if four new shopping malls are going to open tomorrow.

Regarding sustainable development goals, what level of interest have you seen from investors?

- Sustainability in general is an old topic and it has been discussed a lot. As architects we have always been taught to be conscious about the environment. We’ve also had these environmental labels which are ‘nice’ to have, which might provide an edge over your competitor. But now, because of the Paris Agreement, over the last couple of years I have seen a complete shift in attitude of developers, real estate investors and investors overall. Sustainability now is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a must. Everywhere nowadays, the discussion is about ESG. I think now people feel that whoever isn’t quick to adopt the new standards, is going to be left out of the conversation. There is an urgency to do that.

Have you seen examples in the Nordics that they are including environmental requirements in public tendering?

- Yes. Definitely. It’s everywhere. For example, the EU taxonomy, all the ESG measurements that you have to have if you want to make an investment, now you have to present that data. Also from the equity side with regard to investors, they’re asking all companies to have quantifiable CO2 reductions and explanations of how they are helping with the environment. It’s not enough anymore to say that ‘we comply’, you have to have calculations on how much you are helping. And to get to that level is actually quite hard. The currency at the moment is CO2 emissions: how much you create, how much you save and if can you transfer them, because that is also a possibility in the EU now.

Is the way we are measuring the key factor in reaching sustainability goals?

- One big challenge we have is the standardising of how we interpret data. So if you take a look at different reports, can you say which one is the best and can we compare between them? It tends to be that they are not comparable. Many reports are done by private companies, and if you take one report to another company, they may say that that report is not good enough and it will have to be done again, because they may not be comparable, and also because they want to sell services. Therefore, the standardisation of how we interpret things is a big challenge and just seeing two reports doesn’t tell me the big picture. We should just learn to think a bit differently.
I’ll give you an example of plastic straws. 88% of the beaches in the world were polluted by plastic and 56% of that was from single use plastic, much coming from an estimated 8,3 billion plastic straws. Then, in order to control the problem, it was decided that we should switch to metal straws which could be reused. Now the metal straw industry is growing by 5.3% year on year, and in the US alone the market for metal straws is expected to pass 32 billion dollars by 2033. So, now the number of straws that is being generated is already more than the total number of people in the world. And if they are reusable, why are we generating so many? And in the end, if we were to drink without a straw at all, we would save 8.3 billion straws.
So this is a very subjective discussion, because people can argue that they want luxuries in their lives, like plastic straws, Mercedes and Tupperware. But imagine, if 9 billion people in the world want luxuries, it will explode the world. So the conclusion is, we need to kill our darlings. What was the problem here? The plastic produced or the unnecessary trash? Don’t go to a metal straw, or a glass straw, start thinking differently. And when approaching ESG. We need to think in this way.
 

CHAOS has a manifesto for sustainable urban development. Can you explain more about this?

- We realised that our vision is liveable cities. And we were speaking initially about this more internally than outside, we were not really showing how we were doing the things and how we are getting insights. For example, it is important for us to get an insight into affordability, which is one of the UN SDG goals. Our customers want to know the affordability of apartments, because it’s a right that everyone should have housing and that shouldn’t cost more than 30% of your income. Imagine that some families pay more than 50% of their income for their own housing. How do you manage a family with your remaining income?
So, we cannot control the decisions of our customers, but we can advise what is the best practice. And our manifesto is our way of saying we will stand by this, we are measuring, we are telling and we are doing our job here and we want the world to understand the benefits of that. There is a long term benefit, for humanity.
If I could end with two takeaways from this conversation, I would say that firstly, reporting is not enough, and secondly, monitoring is the key.