For many years, urban planners and designers have been relying on personal experience, qualitative analyses and planning principles to formulate planning schemes that affect millions of people and billion dollars of construction investments. The data sets they can often grasp are only peak-hour traffic records, decennial census data and survey responses from a thousandth of the population. Authoritative judgments and creative imagination fill the vacuum in planning techniques.
In recent years, the application of new technologies such as the Internet of Things and mobile internet has resulted in an explosive growth of urban dynamic data. For the first time in history, we can now understand people’s collective behaviours via urban dynamic data, and use this to make better decisions for the next generations to come.
This Whitepaper, jointly developed by Arup and Alibaba Cloud Research Centre, explores how the urban planning and design industry can make good use of cutting-edge digital technology and ubiquitous city data. With new propositions including planning-operation alignment, crowd-sourced planning, agile planning and digital masterplanning together with a comprehensive digital infrastructure, we can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planning work and turn people-oriented development to a reality.
