RealTime Digital City (Catalyst, ABC1)

Reporter: Dr Maryanne Demasi
Producer: Paul Schneller
Researcher: Holly Trueman
Camera: Michael Fanning
David Collins
Sound: David Guppy
Nick Wood
Editor: Leah Donovan

Transcript
Related Info

20 March 2008
RealTime Digital City

Thanks to mobile phone and digital technology, communication is quicker and more effective than ever before.

Now researchers are harnessing the information packed power of the digital signal, and it’s set to change the way city people interact.

Transcript

Dr Maryanne Demasi: My phone is transmitting a signal letting my phone company know where I am anytime, anywhere. And that goes for anyone with a mobile.

But how can this information help to plan a city?

Professor Carlo Ratti: It has been a long standing effort in planning, to try and understand really how people move in the city, how cars and pedestrians move, there’s a lot of traditional techniques. What you can do now is really see what’s happening in real time.

Narration: Professor Carlo Ratti is finding new ways of exploiting digital technology to design better cities.

Professor Ratti: What we're doing is we are taking data, that are bi-products of the cell phone network operations, and if you take those data and if you analyse it, then you can get really an interesting picture of the city.

You can understand where there is a problem, congestion problem, you can understand where maybe there's a critical point on the urban infrastructure and if you take all these data, you analyse it, then you've got a wonderful base of information to design better cities.

Narration: With the backing of Telecom Italia and the city’s Mayor, Carlo used his high-tech methods to analyse the chaos and congestion of Rome.

Professor Ratti: So what we got was, well, the information from the cell phone network, and then all the information from all the buses in real time through GPS, all the taxis in real time through GPS, and when you actually merge this information, that becomes an extremely powerful way to visualise urban dynamics.

Narration: Carlo showed that monitoring the cities dynamics in real time provides invaluable information for urban planners.

Maryanne: So what do you use it for?

Professor Ratti: Well there's many possible applications, you know.

The most obvious in a certain sense is traffic, you know, looking at congestion and buses and things.

Narration: You can get information about road congestion from traffic cameras and road sensors, but using mobile phone data can map the movements of people - whether they’re in their cars, on their bikes or just on foot.

And obtaining this information is quite cheap given that mobile phone data is already collected by phone companies.

Professor Ratti: Think about the environmental benefits, there’s billions spent every year just because of traffic jams and if you’re able to address just a fraction of that by making the city more efficient, then that’s a big advantage.

Narration: Carlo also looked at the impact of big sporting events.

Professor Ratti: We looked at the city during um the World Cup, the final, when Italy won the soccer World Cup.

Maryanne: The real vibe of a city comes from the interaction between people. Cities need places where people can come together, to encourage a real sense of community.

Narration: So, it may not be long before you can access a real time map to find the most crowded place to have a drink and the quickest way to get there.

And that’s not all. Advertisers could use this information to locate billboards in areas of high pedestrian activity.

But will all this access to phone data raise privacy issues?

Professor Ratti: There’s no privacy implications because of really the type of data we get.

We’re actually not seeing individual people, so we’re seeing like density and statistical and anonymous and aggregated data.

Maryanne: Will technology advanced to a point where you can pinpoint a single person?

Professor Ratti: This is a different type of technology. Those are something we’re not too interested in. We’re more interested in really understanding the city as a whole.

Narration: It remains to be seen whether this technology will change the way we use our cities, but at the very least it might reduce traffic jams and shorten bus queues.

Story Contacts

Professor Carlo Ratti (Director)
ratti@mit.edu
SENSEable City Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building 10-485, 77 Massachusetts Av.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139 USA