New Tools for Supporting Urban Policy: Open Data Platforms and Urban Dashboards
"In a world where the urbanization rate is constantly growing, so are the problems of city life, which increase in both number and diversity. In parallel, our means for coping with these problems and crises are also diversifying."
Since 2007, more than half of the world’s population has lived in cities. In a world where the urbanization rate is constantly growing, so are the problems of city life, which increase in both number and diversity. In parallel, our means for coping with these problems and crises are also diversifying. One such method is data-based strategy development. The accelerated increase, especially in the recent period, in the amount, variety and speed of data sources on cities has been a significant driver of data-based strategy development. As globalization renders cities more complex, connections established between cities through individuals and institutions or within cities themselves have produced very large data flows. This reality, also dubbed “the urban data revolution,” has transformed our tools for and perspective on monitoring and evaluating cities, too.
The goals in writing this report are to use examples from around the world to scrutinize the relationship between the city and data, underline the importance of data in supporting city policies, and provide information about the emerging tendency to create open data platforms and urban dashboards. The longer-term goal, however, is to promote data production, sharing and use in local policymaking processes. The city-scale data sources produced through top-down mechanisms by the official statistics institution and other public institutions in Turkey are unfortunately very limited. This makes local administrations increasingly important to data production and sharing. Local administrations that provide many municipal services produce data in parallel with these services. Most of the time, the data that is produced remains inside the institution or does not even enter circulation within the institution itself. In order to discourage this practice, the report is analyzed the open data platforms and urban dashboards of local administrations in cities around the world with populations greater than 1 million. In this analysis, the national scale platforms and dashboards are excluded.