Are Thirtysomething Londoners Really ‘Fleeing’ the Capital? December 20th, 2016 by Monica Li There have been a number of media reports[1] in recent years about the exodus of young adults from London. One report from 2014 suggested that the number of thirty-somethings ‘fleeing’ the Capital was the highest on record. Rising housing costs are commonly cited as the main reason behind this apparent recent exodus of Londoners in…
LODA Pilot Update December 19th, 2016 by Nevena Dragicevic (Nesta) and Wil Tonkiss (GLA) In June this year the GLA’s Intelligence Unit began working with Nesta on the pilot for the London Office for Data Analytics (LODA). As the year draws to a close, this post provides an update on the key milestones we have already achieved and looks forward to some of the next steps being taken in…
Where to draw the Line in Use of Personal Data? A New Experiment to understand Public Acceptance and a Call for Help September 21st, 2016 by Michelle Warbis Today – sometimes knowingly, most of the time almost certainly not – people share, or depending on your point of view, give away, the data they create simply as a result of passing through a normal day. This data is drawn from a wide array of sources, in both the public and private sectors, in…
Developing Data Infrastructure for London August 15th, 2016 by Larissa Suzuki Earlier this year we published the Implementation Plan for the GLA’s City Data Strategy. The Implementation Plan is a key organising element of our work, needed for the realisation of the priority actions we have set out in our strategy, all of which are designed to help us to deliver maximum social, economic, environmental and…
London Office of Data Analytics Pilot: two weeks of showing and telling to focus the data science and sharpen the overall approach August 12th, 2016 by Lora Armstrong It’s been 6 weeks since our kickoff workshop for the London Office of Data Analytics (LODA) pilot programme, a joint venture between the GLA and Nesta, with involvement from nearly half of the London boroughs. The broader context shows a real sense of growing intent and purpose around data sharing for impact. In the same…
Implementing a City Data Strategy: The Data for London Road trip starts here May 19th, 2016 by Larissa Romualdo-Suzuki On the 1st of March 2016 we published our City Data Market Strategy – a document that aims to be both technically competent and persuasive to a political and senior leadership audience in London about the need to actively integrate and mobilise all the ‘working parts’ of the city data economy. Over the intervening weeks,…
Steal with pride and share with passion May 18th, 2016 by Nathan Pierce When is stealing something the right thing to do? We learn from a young age that society frowns on the concept of stealing. Yet, in the case of the Horizon 2020 programmes, I would argue that we should actively borrow from each other, with transparency and with pride, in order that we can combine, build,…
Championing the better use of data May 5th, 2016 by Emma Christie The GLA recently submitted a response to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on the better use of data in government. As the London Datastore team will attest, the ‘better use of data’ is a perpetual endeavour of the GLA’s Intelligence Unit – it’s the business we are in. While we are a modest bunch, and not…
From poetry into prose: Early stages delivery for Sharing Cities March 9th, 2016 by Francisco Goncalves From the 2nd to the 4th March, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano held two important technical meetings in the early stages of our H2020 Smart Cities and Communities Programme, “Sharing Cities”. During three days, all the relevant partners, responsible for the demonstration of tangible technology measures (in our ‘Place’ work package) and for their integration in…
33 boroughs, two babies and one city modelling platform February 2nd, 2016 by Elisabeth Weise We’ve been hard at work since our last update – in that time we’ve delivered our first release of Witan, and two babies! Our city modelling platform is now live and our first users in London have been given access this week. On-demand demographic projections to meet housing demand Witan is now able to generate…
London leads on a bold initiative to generate €500m smart city investment funds from €25m EU seed funds January 19th, 2016 by Graham Colclough If there was one city that should be able to deliver on such a bold goal then it would be London – the city with more financial muscle than most. The good news is that this goal is one that is shared. It is one of ten bold goals that are shared with Lisbon, Milan…
London School’s Atlas Update January 4th, 2016 by Alan Lewis and Ben Corr In 2013, the GLA launched the London Schools Atlas. This was a ground-breaking new resource for parents, planners and policy makers – providing a unique view of patterns of attendance across the capital’s schools together with a wide range of contextual information. Two years on from release, we recently refreshed the data behind the Atlas…
Where were London’s mothers born? November 18th, 2015 by Monica Li An analysis of data on mothers’ country of birth, based on ONS data, shows that in 2014, 58 per cent of live births in London were to mothers born outside the UK, compared with 27% in England & Wales. However within London there are still considerable differences between boroughs – in Havering, only 28 per…
Will Big Data Be the Solution to the London Tube Strike? October 16th, 2015 by Larry Alton Several times a year, London will experience a Tube strike in which thousands are unable to ride the rails. As a result, Transport for London (TFL) has been working round the clock to provide extra transportation routes and networks to accommodate those people. Because people have a harder time getting to work, businesses experience the backlash of…
Update on the Witan Project October 5th, 2015 by Ben Corr The Witan project kicked off this summer with a flurry of meetings, workshops, brainstorming sessions and lofty aspirations. Out of this frothy mix came the pragmatic decision to aim for concrete deliverables which both demonstrated the project’s potential and offered real benefit to stakeholders. Demography was chosen as the field on which to focus first…
Hey, Big Spender – Using linked data to inform the management of public funding September 28th, 2015 by Andy Hamflett Hey, Big Spender – Using linked data to inform the management of public funding Here at AAM Associates we’re exploring how various data sources and approaches can be used to drive social impact. Earlier in the summer we supported a short open data project with London South Bank University and the Big Lottery Fund, who recently…
What will be the next Streetmapper? September 24th, 2015 by The City Data Team Everyone has a transport app on their phone nowadays – they’ve been extraordinarily successful. But what’s next? What are the new combinations of data that will transform our lives and drive successful new businesses, products and services? We at City Hall have been working with London-based startup DataPress to develop a new API for the…
The Fog of War: The problem with queueing and why data is important September 17th, 2015 by James Swanston In the military there is a great expression – the fog of war – which is all about how confusion can reign on a battlefield because of all of the unknowns that happen. There was a recent article in the Washington Post about the issue of waiting in line, and how the typical first-come, first…
Spotlight on London – What Do Millennials Desire in a Property? September 2nd, 2015 by Alexandra Coumas The housing market has undoubtedly suffered negative coverage in the media in recent years and with millennials (people reaching young adulthood around the year 2000) struggling to get onto the property ladder, it has become a cause for concern for many. With this in mind, it comes as a surprise that a recent study reveals that…
Integrating infrastructure data – publishing a first version of the London Infrastructure Map August 28th, 2015 by Madalina Ursu Today we publish a first version of the London infrastructure map. UPDATE: April 2016 now replaced by guest version of the Infrastructure Mapping Application (IMA). The aim is to create a database to better understand the phasing of projects, the synergies and tensions that arise when looking at the cumulative impact of development, the potential…
Big Data and Cloud Computing Are Fundamentally Changing London and Other Major Cities August 27th, 2015 by Larry Alton For the better part of a decade, IT experts have discussed the imminent impact of big data and cloud computing on the very cities we live in. It wasn’t until recently that the deeper effects of their forecasts became apparent, however. Now, in the second half of 2015, the question arises: How have technologies backed…
An update on Witan – the flexible city modelling platform August 19th, 2015 by Fran Bennett As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Mastodon C is working together with the Greater London Authority to develop a flexible approach to city modelling. The aim is to take forecasting beyond the limitations of Excel, while providing modellers with the benefits of sophisticated data management tools, such as version control, security levels and scaling…
Know your Place, realise your Value: exploring the Concept of Data-Driven Value Networks August 5th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki This is the third in a series of blogs we are writing as we create a City Data Market Strategy for London. In the most recent post, we presented a new leadership pattern to create data infrastructures for smart cities called “middle-out” approach. This new leadership pattern is formed on the basis of social influence and…
The Middle Out Approach – A New Leadership Pattern to create Data Infrastructure in Cities July 27th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki The need for data infrastructures (by this we mean data platforms, marketplaces, open data portals and so on) for smart cities is well established. Cities of today must be prepared to cope with population growth, scarcity of natural resources and environmental issues. The answer to these problems can be found in high quality contextualised data.…
London’s Mortgage Lending Hotspots July 24th, 2015 by Alasdair Rae A number of extremely useful new housing datasets have been opened up in recent years, including those on mortgage lending and house prices. So, at the risk of saturating the market in blog posts on housing in London, in this short piece I examine London’s mortgage lending hotspots by looking at changes in mortgage lending…
Data Suggests London’s Love with Contactless Payment is Only Beginning July 22nd, 2015 by Anna Johansson Smart Cities are progressive cities – and that’s especially true for London. For the last year or so, London has been seen as the unofficial contactless payment capital of the world. Most of this reputation comes from the widespread adoption of contactless payments on the Transport for London (TfL) network, which reports more than 1.2…
A City Data Market Strategy: creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for London July 20th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki The modern city should provide an environment in which information flows rapidly and easily, making of itself a platform for both the dissemination and active consumption of innovation to improve the way it works and peoples’ lives. It needs to. Every day nearly 180,000 people move to cities, creating more than 60 million new urban…
Study Suggests London Appoint a Data Tsar July 17th, 2015 by Larry Alton The next mayor of London needs to appoint an official Data Tsar to collect and organize data in a more efficient manner. At least, that’s what a new report from Capital City Foundation says, having reviewed New York City’s data set monitoring practices. The Pursuit of Becoming Smarter While many cities drastically need better data…
Why and how data will save the NHS July 1st, 2015 by Jonathan Lewis Today Bromley Healthcare, the south London community healthcare provider I have led for the last four years, has become the first to publish clinical data on the London Datastore. We have done this because we believe that data will save the NHS. I realise this is a hard concept for the many in the NHS…
Engaging Londoners in Open Data June 29th, 2015 by Alan Renwick Some people have described data as the new oil. A precious resource that fuels growth and innovation (let’s just hope it doesn’t have so many downsides…). For the great global cities such as London, data certainly has the potential to unlock fundamental progress. If data can record our human actions and our physical environment, and…
London’s Digital Connectivity June 26th, 2015 by Julia Harrowsmith London has a healthy market of digital connectivity providers – some big names, but hundreds of other smaller firms offering all kinds of different solutions. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of potential consumers of faster digital connectivity. We know that some businesses and residents in parts of the city cannot access fast…
How can the London Datastore Improve Green Space Access? June 12th, 2015 by Dan Steiner One of the more intriguing elements of the updated Datastore design is the Schools Atlas. The Atlas’ case study notes that it “illustrates perfectly the power of accessing previously locked up data and using it in innovative ways”, and represents one of the ways in which the Datastore has democratized access to data that tangibly…
A Next-generation City Modelling Platform is born… (well, conceived… blog post #1 in a series) June 4th, 2015 by Fran Bennett There’s been a lot of discussion, on this blog and elsewhere, of what to actually do with city data once it’s out in the world. We think that, given the capital’s booming population and the consequent policy focus on addressing a wide range of infrastructure needs, one of the most important applications is using data…
London Schools Atlas May 29th, 2015 by DataPress The London Schools Atlas is a real triumph of the city data agenda. It illustrates perfectly the power of accessing previously locked up data and using it in innovative ways to help solve real world public policy problems.For context, planning the provision of sufficient school places for London’s burgeoning school age population has become increasingly…
GLA Population Projections – Visualisation Tool May 28th, 2015 by DataPress The population of London is set to surpass its previous historical high of 8.6million in the coming months. With this comes a range of challenges for London to tackle, from meeting the need for affordable housing; providing school places for the Capital’s children; and increasing capacity on its transport networks. The GLA Intelligence Unit produces…
Whereabouts London, by Future Cities Catapult May 19th, 2015 by DataPress An experiment in how open data can be used to understand and improve future cities From Jon Snow discovering the source of London’s Cholera outbreak to Charles Booth’s poverty maps, effective use of data has a history of improving city life. The insights it brings can open up huge opportunities for making them cleaner, healthier…
London Open Workspaces May 17th, 2015 by DataPress The GLA has launched an interactive map of more than 130 start-up friendly office spaces and 200 artist studios to help SMEs find the right type of space. Users can search by factors including price, length of stay and types of business already in the building. Providers of workspaces are encouraged to keep this a…
2011 Census outputs update June 14th, 2011 by Will Victor At present the full range of 2011 Census products and services have not been consulted on, or finalised, the Office Statistics (ONS) are aware that users need to be kept up-to-date with plans for the dissemination of 2011 Census data as they develop. ONS therefore intends to publish reports relating to the 2011 Census outputs…
First release of opinion data – telling Londoners what they already know. September 29th, 2010 by Will Victor In our push to make the work we do at the GLA transparent and available to the public we have published the first of a number of pieces of our opinion research data on Datastore. The first examples up and running are the 2009 Young Londoners Survey, and 2010 Annual London Survey datasets. These pieces…
