For Immediate Release: November 15, 2010
Media Contacts: Emma Filar, Marketing & Communications Associate
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The National Building Museum Launches Intelligent Cities Initiative to Gather Data and Reveal New Insights about Urban Life
Washington, D.C.—How did you decide where to live? Was it the city? The size of your place? Its appearance? The neighborhood? The commute? Would you make the same decision today?
With these questions, the National Building Museum launches Intelligent Cities, a year-long initiative driven by the concept that informed people make better decisions. Toward that end, the initiative will produce data, analysis, and ideas on how new technologies are shaping cities and present this information in new and revealing ways. We will encourage bold and provocative thinking on the part of experts and the public about how to make our cities thrive. Intelligent Cities is a National Building Museum project in partnership with TIME, supported by IBM, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
“What makes a city intelligent? You do.”
Intelligent Cities will reach millions of people by launching with promotional advertising in the November 1, 2010 issue of TIME, which is currently on newsstands, and on TIME.com. Intelligent Cities’ public outreach campaign is the biggest in the Museum’s history and features a series of polling questions announced in TIME and TIME.com that ask people to reflect on their quality of life in cities.
“It’s the grassroots input about people’s perceptions of and priorities for the built environment around them that makes Intelligent Cities particularly significant for us,” states National Building Museum president and executive director Chase W. Rynd. “Technology and access to information has reached a point where non-professionals can generate data and think deeply about where they live. Through Intelligent Cities, we have the means to share their viewpoints with experts in the design and building industries so that there is a true give and take between constituencies. Experts need input from the community and can use it to make the planning and design process more open, participatory, and democratic.˝
Goal is Better Decision Making
Vast amounts of data exist about everything from housing costs to water usage. Intelligent Cities’ goal is to make technology and data more useful to urban planners, professionals in the design and building industries, and the public. The crux is the interrelationship between information sets. For example, Intelligent Cities will make connections between the size of our homes and the energy we consume as a nation, walkable neighborhoods and our health, and where we work and our infrastructure. These insights may surprise us and change our perception of the built environment around us, and, perhaps, even our behavior.
Intelligent Cities explores the intersection of information technology and urban design to understand where we are, where we want to be, and how to get there. In the words of Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino, “For as long as we have lived in cities we have reflected on their form, feel, and function. From the launch of the first hot air balloon to Google maps, we have developed technologies to see what we have done, what we are doing, and what we wish to do. Today, the scale and complexity of neighborhoods, towns, and cities are unprecedented, and so are our tools for understanding them.”
Intelligent Cities Funder
“By the middle of this century, more than three quarters of the world’s population will live in a city, which also means global poverty will have an urban face,” says Rockefeller Foundation associate director Benjamin de la Pena. “Can we use the growing data and technology about cities to address the issues of equity and sustainability and to improve the lives of the urban poor? Or will it create more exclusion and further divide our communities. The Rockefeller Foundation is proud to support the National Building Museum to determine how poor and vulnerable populations will fare and how we can help them in the brave new world of Intelligent Cities.”
Intelligent Cities Partners
“For decades, TIME has been reporting on the power of cities and urban development to shape the larger issues—the economic, political, healthcare, infrastructure, and social landscape—that impact the lives, businesses, and fates of all people wherever they live,” says Bill Saporito, TIME’s assistant managing editor. “Through Intelligent Cities, we’ll be exploring the latest strategies, innovations, and surprises that the smartest city planners are employing to build the data-driven urban environment of the 21st century.”
"In order for urban centers to sustain growth and play a positive and central role in the global economy, cities must grow smart. City infrastructures that deliver vital services such as transportation, healthcare, education, public safety, energy, and water, must rely on a wealth of new information and technologies that will allow them to sense and respond intelligently to the needs of their growing populations. In collaboration with the Intelligent Cities initiative, IBM will continue to explore opportunities to apply advances in technology, and better understanding of how systems work, to give the world’s most progressive civic leaders and citizens alike, great hope for a smarter future," says John Tolva, director of citizenship and technology, IBM.
Intelligent Cities Scope
Intelligent Cities is opening with a six-month national public outreach campaign, which will reach millions of people through advertisements in TIME and on TIME.com. The one-year initiative will include research and consultation conducted by the Museum and an advisory committee of experts, a public forum in June 2011, and a publication in Fall 2011.
Intelligent Cities Public Outreach Campaign
Intelligent Cities’ priority is drawing the public into a compelling, dynamic conversation about American cities, development, and technology. From now through March 2011, a new public polling question conceived by the Museum will premier in promotional advertisings in TIME and TIME.com and be shared broadly through social media. The poll is open to everyone at http://go.nbm.org/intelligentcities. Poll results, essays, videos, and other related content are also on-line at www.nbm.org/intelligentcities.
For much of the next year, TIME and TIME.com will be exploring in a series of print and online editorial reports the strategies, systems, and innovations being leveraged to build the intelligent city of today. With this Intelligent Cities-themed editorial content, with the Intelligent Cities public outreach awareness campaign in TIME and on TIME.com, and with TIME editor participation in related Intelligent Cities live events, TIME serves as exclusive worldwide print and digital media partner of the National Building Museum's Intelligent Cities initiative. IBM is enabling a robust public outreach advertising campaign.
The first polling questions focus on the home: why you chose your current house and if you would prioritize the same things if you had the choice to make over again. Subsequent polls will focus on the neighborhood, community, city, region, and country. The Museum is asking these questions because it wants the public to think about what drives their decisions and what intended or unintended consequences those decisions might have.
The first ad includes an info-graphic demonstrating the connection between the size of our homes and how much energy we use. It demonstrates the average square footage of a new, single-family house more than doubled from 1950 to 2010 along with energy consumption while the average size of the household actually decreased from 3.37 people in 1950 to 2.53 people in 2010. Our heating and cooling systems have become much more efficient over the last 60 years, but our homes have ballooned in size even as household populations has shrunk, which offsets that energy efficiency. The information that told this 60-year old story has been out there all this time. It was right there, but we could not really see the correlations among energy use, house size, and household size.
Intelligent Cities Research and Consultation
The Museum has invited a group of advisors to help guide Intelligent Cities. They are all leaders in their field, interdisciplinary in their approach, forward-thinking, and represent a broad geographic base within the country. On January 10, 2011, the advisors will meet at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. to reflect on the initial responses of the public outreach campaign, add commentary, and help plan for the Intelligent Cities public forum to be held in June 2011. One of the advisors, prize-winning author, professor, and architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, will deliver a talk based on his upcoming book—Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities—in a public program at the Museum that evening.
The following are the members of the Intelligent Cities Advisory Council:
• Ahmed Abukhater, global industry manager, ESRI
• Martin Chavez, executive director, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA
• Peter Corbett, chief executive officer, iStrategy Labs
• Jennifer Evans-Cowley, associate professor and section head, City and Regional Planning, Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University; chair, American Planning Association’s Technology Committee
• Howard Frumkin, dean, University of Washington School of Public Health
• Mindy Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry and professor of clinical sociomedical sciences; co-director, Community Research Group, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
• Jeanne Gang, STUDIO GANG
• Bert Gregory, chief executive officer, Mithun Architects + Design + Planners
• Anita Hairston, senior associate, Transportation Policy, PolicyLink
• Amy Liu / Bruce Katz / Robert Puentes, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution
• Michelle Moore, federal environmental executive, White House Council on Environmental Quality
• Chris Pyke, vice president, Research, US Green Building Council
• Carlo Ratti, director, SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Witold Rybczynski, Martin & Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, Professor of Real Estate, University of Pennsylvania
• Bill Saporito, assistant managing editor, TIME Magazine
• Erik Steiner, creative director, Stanford’s Spatial History Project
• John Tolva, director, Citizenship & Technology, IBM Corporation
• Anthony Townsend, director of technology development, Institute for the Future
• Sarah Williams, director, Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University
• Jess Zimbabwe, executive director, Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use, The Urban Land Institute
Intelligent Cities Forum
The Museum will convene a one-day forum in June 2011 to explore the intersection of information technology and cities. It will urge thought leaders, government officials, and the public to think about how to use existing and emerging technologies and data to improve urban life. It will build on the public information campaign, revealing new data by sharing the public responses. The forum will take place at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. and be broadcast live on the web.
Intelligent Cities Publication
The Museum will release a publication in the Fall 2011 that will be a thought piece on information technology and the city. It will summarize the ideas, theses, and proposals that emerge from the discussions at the forum and public outreach.
Intelligent Cities Exhibition at the National Building Museum
The National Building Museum expects to open an interactive exhibition based on Intelligent Cities’ themes in 2013.
The National Building Museum is America’s leading cultural institution dedicated to advancing the quality of the built environment by educating people about its impact on their lives. Through its exhibitions, educational programs, online content, and publications, the Museum has become a vital forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the world we build for ourselves. Public inquiries: 202.272.2448 or visit www.nbm.org. Connect with us on Twitter: @BuildingMuseum and Facebook.
