Location data will change decision-making in cities

For years, cities have been trying to use data that has sat, siloed in individual departments. Even as that historic data is liberated and made more open, however, more and different types of data are coming in. Since the advent of smartphones with built in GPS, location data, streaming from millions of phones, has created new opportunities – and headaches – for cities.

Out of this new data, location intelligence (LI) has emerged, a field that uses geospatial information to tackle problems. Governments are using location intelligence to see where residents are, and to improve and hone projects, especially within public safety and transportation.

Using location information, cities can effectively create digital nervous systems of how their cities run. Cities can use maps overlaid with data points, sourced from connected personal devices, to analyze problems and find data-driven solutions.

Massive amounts of data coming in, from smart trash cans, to smart traffic lights, to GPS data from mobile devices, are an as-of-yet untapped resource for cities to find solutions to problems that can’t be solved with traditional city management tools.

“Location intelligence is a device for answering more forward-thinking questions,” said Santiago Giraldo Anduaga, director of product marketing at CARTO, a location intelligence software company. “It’s the new requirement and new standard for city services in general.”

Companies, which typically have their own sources of data and can move faster than governments, are already proving the case for location data, according to Eddie Copeland, Director of Government Innovation at Nesta, a U.K. based innovation center.

Uber and Airbnb already use LI as a core part of their company. Other organizations like Wikipedia and Tripadvisor prove that sourcing data from the outside is profitable.

“In light of this, many cities’ approach to open data can be seen to have a glaring shortfall: the flow of information is in just one direction,” Copeland said in an email. “Businesses, charities and citizens can receive data from government. But there are few official, standardized and automated mechanisms to provide data to government and each other. That is a huge missed opportunity.”

While still in the early stages, there are examples of cities using data from companies.

In Bath, England, a community initiative group used data from the fitness app Strava to see the most popular cycling routes.