Tangible impact in cities worldwide

Success Stories

See how ur-scape has been used to approach real-world urban problems.

FEATURED PROJECT

Makassar uses big data to fight COVID-19

Project Partners: City of Makassar, Asian Development Bank, Asean Australia Smart Cities Trust Fund (AASCTF)

The recent pandemic and its massive economic and social impacts have emphasised the urgency of developing (pandemic) resilience in cities. Cities around the world have been forced to reflect on their ability to mitigate, manage and respond to the pandemic. How do we make our cities pandemic-​proof? 

The “Leveraging data for urban design and planning in post-​COVID cities” project aims to develop a guide for cities to leverage available data to enhance planning policies post-​Covid. Specifically, it will address the following questions:

• What kinds of data are relevant to understanding the impacts of Covid-​19 on cities?
• How might existing and new data be gathered, managed and stored?
• What are the various ways to analyse such data?
• How might those analyses support transparent and collective decision making, urban design and planning?

At the centre of this project is the case study of the city of Makassar in Indonesia. It leverages on FCL’s previous engagement in supporting the spatial data analysis of COVID-​19 incidences in the city. 

This project is funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under the framework of Asean Australia Smart Cities Trust Fund (AASCTF).

FEATURED PROJECT

Promoting the empowerment of women in Bandung

Project Partners: City of Bandung, Asian Development Bank, Resilience Development Initiative, Bappelitbang

Future Cities, Future Women Initiative (FCFWI) is an initiative project funded by the Asian Development Bank as a part of its larger technical assistance “Promoting Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment”. Future Cities, Future Women Initiative (FCFWI) aims to identify and support key triggers that would accelerate women’s participation in urban governance and enhance their productivity.

The intention of this assignment in Bandung under FCFWI is to investigate options for improving gender sensitivity in urban planning using a geospatial-based planning support tool, Ur-scape. Ur-scape consists of software and data collection protocols. Further functionalities were developed for Ur-scape in the context of the Bandung Smart Systems project (under the ADB TA9025 REG: Establishing the Future Cities Program in the Asia and Pacific Region). The software can be a valuable tool in urban planning and targeting of resources to meet priority needs around the city.

Specifically, for the gender-sensitive urban planning project, the city appointed DP3APM (Office of Women’s Empowerment, Child Protection and Community Empowerment in Bandung City) as the leading sector. Together with Bappelitbang (Planning, Research and Development Agency), DP3APM works with Future Cities Laboratory to organize meetings and trainings in order to improve the literacy of Ur-scape, particularly in the use of Ur-scape to visualize gender related data as an approach towards more gender sensitive planning in the city. The engagement in Bandung City is supported by Resilience Development Initiative (RDI) to examine and inventory gender-disaggregated data by collecting a list of potential data that is relevant to gender-sensitive urban planning and exploring data from commercial data owners (has discussed possible data sharing and uses cases with several companies such as Go-Jek and Qlue). The team also prepared a gender scenario development workshop and Ur-scape training. The gender scenario development workshop focused on gender issues in relation to poverty, as a continuation of the previous Ur-scape project on poverty data visualization. In the workshop, the project introduced 4 case studies (MAPS) to trigger dialogues among various city departments about the provisions of city infrastructures and services that are gender-sensitive in different settings. The cases were drawn from real cases that were highlighted by the representatives of civil society organization during the previous meetings in September. The engagement with RDI potentially exhibits a model of collaboration with a local partner for Ur-scape future development and training in Bandung City.