Tumbleweeds of information

So, I typed the words "big data" into a couple of search engines at the library today.  More questions appeared than answers.  Out of 172 general articles that came back, 150 were three pages or less.  Where they exceeded three pages, we looked at 20 articles that were surveys of surveys in biological or chemical sciences.  The other two were about the information systems solutions to big data problems.

A separate search of law journals turned up 19 articles.  All of them were about the legality of data mining.

We, as planners, are not piecing together the potential for this resource.  We are not listening to our friends in biology and sociology who are starting to aggregate real data clusters in a whole.

And that's a damn shame, because we are where the rubber hits the road.  Of all the social sciences, city and urban planning is the one field where law and policy manifests itself in a measurable group of setbacks, density, development, and population.  But it's a lonely field.

And we are the place where real surveys of data should be taking place, but they are not.  So, it drives me to another question: why am I looking at this?

Big data is the frontier of urban planning.  We have two choices: become technocrats or become obsolete.  We can talk a big game about working with communities and building places and all the other stuff, but if we don't have the data to back it up, we're going nowhere.

The funny thing is that I would not have said that six months ago.

Truthfully, we shouldn't be here.  We should be able to move through a community and listen to people, read buildings, and feel the beat of the place and what makes it move forward and forms its heart.  

That time is gone.  It's not gone because of anything we did.  We did not fail.  But the world moved around us.

We have to take the vernacular of the day and use it to our advantage.  We have to take the 1s and 0s that move the economy and opinion and debate and steer them towards the arguments that we need to make.

All is not lost because this is what we do.  We were the first arbiters of feedback.  We were the first ones to look at honest places and talk about what they mean.  We were the ones who could discern where paths go, where hardship was settling, and where things were improving.  We could only feel the trend, but not delineate the potential.

We just never had anything beyond our own gut feeling to justify it.  UNTIL NOW.

Now we have data.

Now we have numbers.

Now we have surveys.

Now we have research.

Now we have objectivity. 

Now we use them to push the point home:   Cities are alive, they matter, and they will make you better.