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Urban Dynamics Lab: Spatial analytics for urban and regional development
The Urban Dynamics Lab at UCL was part of a five-year EPSRC-funded research project (UK Regions Digital Research Facility) bringing together expertise from across UCL (Space Syntax, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Geography and Computer Science), to explore and address questions at the intersection of city and regional economic development and urban modelling, data analytics and computing.
The project was firmly based on a commitment to applied research and exploring avenues for policy impact within the UK regions in co-design with Local and Central Government, as well as project partners.
The project is supported by a range of partners, including Bank of England, Greater London Authority, SAS, Intel, Future Cities Catapult, Core Cities, Centre for Cities, Space Syntax Limited, and will involve the implementation of a policy engagement and outreach programme across the regions The UKRDRF grant is part of the RCUK's Digital Economy programme and works in conjunction with other Digital Economy Centres across the UK.
This project is part of the Digital Economy Network.
Our Impact
The Urban Dynamics Lab aimed to transform the way that regional policy is created to allow much greater local sensitivity to context, at the same time as learning from evidence of what works and what does not in different locations.
One of the core tenets of our work is to work towards a stronger base of data and analytics-led, evidence-based policy-making and increase the interaction between research community, the policy-maker community and the wider community.
Our impact was delivered through a combined programme of
- A Policy Advisor Network
- Close engagement with partners
- Annual 'Challenge Awards' to foster development of our work by the wider community
- Regional workshops and hackathons with policy professionals, the developer community and the public
- Publications, reports, audio-visual materials to foster knowledge exchange and to build a community of practice
By developing support networks and workshops for policy professionals we aimed to build a community of practice working across the UK's cities and regions. The open source technology platform will make available the tools needed to develop policy customised to the specific local context of different regions while maintaining comparability of methodology and evidence.
City and regional development
A fundamental question facing policymakers turns on whether digital technologies and advanced analytics can help overcome the geographical and historical inequalities in economic distribution, which appear to powerfully lock‐in trajectories of economic, social and cultural development.
Within cities, a lot of expertise is located within departmental silos, while city growth and development requires working across these to address the interdependencies between key challenges. Very often, decision-making is dependent on political dynamics, rather than on data and analytics driven evidence.
Between cities and regions, a similar problem exists: the problems facing individual cities do not exist in isolation, and their inter-city dynamics, often not based on pre-defined administrative boundaries, are complex, interdependent processes for which coherent data or analytics do not exist to be readily used.
At the national scale all this becomes relevant particularly against the backdrop of the recent series of devolution agreements and city deals, designed to devolve financial and policy-making responsibilities to select city regions and address the historical issue of North-South regional economic imbalances, but without a coherent mechanism to share knowledge between global and local level.
Analytics for local government
Leading and governing cities and enabling dynamics across and between them and wider regional economies is a complex process. How can policy-making for cities and regions become more accountable, locally sensitive, coherent, sustainable and evidence-based rather than solely driven by top-down or local political currents and short-term interests?
We are proposing that increased accessibility, understanding and devolution of data, modelling and analytics through an open source platform, combined with comprehensive research on urban and regional development, can help local and central government deal with the complexity of long-term investment decisions and their impact, and ultimately aid the economies of city and regional systems.
Our work on these tools and analytics aim to support and empower Local Authorities in this, through a co-design process exploring a number of challenges in urban and regional development and policy decision-making:
- Intra- and inter-city, and regional interdependencies
- A lack of local, system-internal understanding of methods and modelling techniques
- A lack of comprehensive, intra-departmental, data-driven analytics
- Communication of methodologies and intelligence between cities, regions and central government
- Inaccessibility of integrated, relevant, frequent data
- Skills gaps in data management and processing
Partners