Time: 2 PM GMT, October 30, 2019
In this presentation, Paul will provide a background to the MultipliCity platform, and go over how academics, practitioners, and enthusiasts can collaborate to upload, curate, and visualize urban stocks and flows datasets.
About MultipliCity:
For urban metabolism researchers, obtaining data is one of the most important and time-consuming activities. This not only limits research activities, but it also creates a significant threshold for policy makers and others interested in using urban metabolism on a more practical level. The inconsistency and scattered nature of data furthermore complicate the uptake of urban metabolism tools and practices.
Metabolism of Cities has launched a new project called MultipliCity to try and take on this challenge. MultipliCity aims to develop a global network that maintains an online hub to centralize, visualize, and present datasets related to urban resource use and requirements. A network of local volunteers (students, researchers, city officials, citizens, etc) assists with the identification of relevant datasets, and the MultipliCity platform takes care of indexing, processing, and standardizing the datasets. This allows for a large collection of in-depth data to become available to researchers and the general public, vastly improving access and allowing for more work to be done on analysis and interpretation, rather than on data collection.
Through the MulitipliCity platform, a wide variety of data can be stored and processed in a single location. The goal is to record any information that is of relevance to understand a city’s urban metabolism, and this includes data on material stocks and flows, as well as details of relevant infrastructure, geospatial maps, photos, satellite imagery, publications, reports, academic work, legislation and demographic and environmental information for the city. MultipliCity’s roadmap consists of three phases which will be discussed in more detail during the presentation.
Who is Paul Hoekman?
Paul Hoekman is involved in a variety of different projects revolving around industrial ecology – with a focus on urban metabolism – as well as web development. Paul is Co-founder and Programming Task Force Leader at the Metabolism of Cities. He has helped this initiative grow from a side project into an open-source platform run by a global network of collaborators who organize events, develop tools, and share knowledge around urban metabolism. Paul is also the Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, and he teaches web development through The Penguin Collective.
Paul has done consultancy work for the United Nations Environment Program and the Inter-American Development Bank. He holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Science from the University of Cape Town. Paul grew up in The Netherlands but spent his adult life in Nicaragua and South Africa.
Watch the recorded version here: https://is4ie.org/resources/videos/22