Urbanite

We set out the global goal of the project. Namely, in the mobility transformation and the pressure for more sustainable transport models and new urbanism trends, changing the landscape of urban planning of mobility in cities and provides policy-makers with means to help them understand these new scenarios, supporting in making policy.

URBANITE takes steps towards adopting a collaborative, evidence-based data-driven for policy-making on urban mobility planning.

The decision-making process in the policy-making should rely on data-driven evidence, in most of the cases, the raw data needs to be processed to transform it into actionable information. For this purpose, several tools have been developed within the URBANITE project to transform urban mobility data into usable information.

Among its functionalities, The URBANITE Platform allows its users to build and share custom dashboard.

The users can easily create, edit, clone, access available dashboards, as well as share (with other users of the platform) and make publicly accessible a dashboard, facilitating the overcome of information silos and driving decision-makers from information share to knowledge share.

The decision-making process is essential when it comes to addressing any decision, it aims to solve problems and give a set of options or alternatives, which represent some actions either, choose an option that best satisfies the goals or rank the options according to predefined goals or criteria.

In previous blog posts the overall architecture of the Urbanite platform [^1] and the harvesting process [^2] were described. The harvesting process consist of multiple services working together to gather, transform and store the data from the diverse sources harvested in this project. To give the reader a better understanding of this procedure, the harvesting process for the data of two pilot cities is described in more detail in this post: Amsterdam and Messina.

The activities related to co-creation in URBANITE project are mainly performed through what we call SoPoLabs (Social Policy Labs) which see the involvement of the stakeholders which revolve around urban mobility. In Messina SoPoLabs have brought stakeholders and policy makers to discuss about common issues, in order to find shared solutions on urban mobility for the Municipality. Since the start of the URBANITE project, three SoPoLabs have been held and they have brought interesting results.

Due to digitalization, there is a growing number of traffic and mobility data available for the cities to use world-wide. It is usually in the interest of cities to take control over this data. This is also the target of the city of Helsinki, which aims to build a data platform for traffic and mobility data, therefore supporting evidence-based decision-making and strengthening the whole ecosystem of traffic and mobility. Currently, there is plenty of mobility data but it is not as widely used as it could be.