Moving beyond Operations: Leveraging Big Data for Urban Planning Decisions

Big data is here: urban infrastructure systems are being instrumented to provide continuous reports on their performance; buildings are monitoring and reporting occupancy and energy use; distributed water and air quality sensors are providing real time information on dozens of environmental parameters. Cell phone location data is providing a detailed view of the activity patterns for millions of urban residents. However, when the utility of big data is discussed almost all of the examples provided are short-term management applications. There are very few examples of big data being used in long range planning. This paper discusses why big data is particularly well suited to short term management applications and identifies the factors that have limited its use for longer range planning. This paper also provides examples of how big data can be abstracted in ways that are useful for long range planning, and how these uses differ from the short-term management applications that are so commonly discussed. _______________________________________________________ S. French (Corresponding author) • C. Barchers • W. Zhang School of City & Regional Planning, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30338, USA Email: [email protected] C. Barchers Email: [email protected] W. Zhang Email: [email protected] CUPUM 2015 194-Paper