Arup & Alibaba combine efforts to plan future cities with dynamic data

Urban planning and design schemes affect millions of people and billion dollars of construction investments. However, often the data sets available to urban planners and designers are only hour traffic records, decennial census data and survey responses from a thousandth of the population. Educated estimates and creative imagination often fill the vacuum in planning techniques.

The whitepaper envisions that physical and digital infrastructures will be deeply integrated in future cities, which will grow and fulfil people’s needs by better allocation of resources. Dynamic data becomes a new resource for urban development, driving the change of planning techniques and processes. To realise the vision, Arup and Alibaba Cloud jointly put forth four propositions to guide the transformation of the planning practice:

• Planning-operation alignment: Through Activity Information Modelling (AIM), the actual operation data of the city is integrated; appropriate planning mechanisms and performance indicators are also derived.
• Agile planning: This allows the planning process to be much more flexible and responsive to what dynamic data tell us about the real needs of the population, and to how these change over time.
• Crowd-sourced planning: Urban data generated from multiple sources are collected to inform better planning decisions, and protect data security and privacy with the ‘urban data trust’.
• Digital master planning: It provides a framework to realise management, integration and application of massive urban data, and serves as a blueprint for digital infrastructure development.

Based on these four propositions, the report further explores the use of dynamic data in three planning endeavours that are of high demand in recent years. They are campus planning, urban regeneration and the new form of statutory plan in China called the territory spatial planning.