New evidence-based platform to unlock further funds for cities

A new platform will aim to help city planners and decision makers anywhere in the world to assist their cities become more resilient and in the process help them to attract new sources of funding.

Delegates attending the ‘Sharing cities – Bridging regions’ conference in Copenhagen, jointly run by the International Federation for Housing and Planning, the Nordic City Network and the Danish Architecture Centre, heard how the platform aims to enable planners to visualise and build a three dimensional model of resource flows from human, ecological and economic activity in city regions.

“We now have the computing power to put this data into system models that can run in the cloud to enable us to actually understand the connections,” explained Peter Head, Founder and CEO of the not-for-profit Ecological Sequestration Trust, that is supporting the platform. “We are putting human wellbeing at the centre of this model, of which we have already built 11 algorithms.”

Dubbed resilience.io, it will be an open-source, cloud-based regional platform that gathers a variety of data from crowd-sourced economic, social and environmental data, among others. A key component of the new platform will be the ability to see how factors such as human health, welfare, water quality, air quality and education, among others, impact city regions’ economy.

“We don’t do this right now, [assessing what each resource flow’s impact is] which is complete madness. These are very powerful factors,” added Head.

A further benefit that Head outlined will be the role the platform can play in assisting procurement, particularly in Europe’s advantage and lead its open data policies have over other regions in the world.

“The platform can become a procurement tool for every project,” Head explained. “Pension and sovereign wealth funds are heaving with money which they would like to invest in good projects but no one is bringing them good projects.”

Head outlined that the platform will provide a connection between city regions and new sources of investment through evidence-based social, environmental and economic outcomes.

“I’m talking with them [development banks, sovereign wealth and pension funds] and they are all willing to put money into a regional investment fund that will be attached to this evidence-based platform for procurement and investment. So anyone who uses the platform can get access to capital to take the project forward.”

A working model of the platform is now being taken to China, Mongolia, parts of the UK and Africa to identify how it can best function alongside government with organisers hoping to release reslience.io for open source by the end of 2016.