Urban development in waterfront cities includes a wide range of activities aiming to either exploit the beauty and opportunities offered by water to foster economic growth (tourism, recreational & sport facilities in the coast, infrastructure for transport of goods etc.) or alleviate the environmental stresses caused by water and protect cities from threats such as floods or erosion (measures for flood reduction, against climate change, etc.). It is clear that urban development activities in such areas affect all three pillars of the urban ecosystem, i.e. the society, the environment and the economy. To effectively balance between ensuring the well-being of citizens, strengthening the economy, and protecting the environment, evidence-based policy planning and implementation is required.
When addressing such problems, policy makers face a number of fundamental challenges. The different components of the urban system are strongly interwoven, creating complex dynamics and making it difficult to anticipate the impact and consequences of public action. Urban development policies are subject to distributed, multi-level decision processes and impact a wide variety of stakeholders. The increasing availability of datasets represents a significant opportunity for municipalities to develop tools for coping with these problems and enabling interactive urban planning and governance. However, harnessing the potential for economic, social and environmental betterment through analysis of this data requires new configurations of actors in order to address the challenges of data access and data analysis.
CUTLER's central goal is to establish a sustainable solution for incorporating big data and data science in the policy-making process, aiming to shift the existing paradigm of policy making, which is largely based on intuition, towards an evidence-driven approach enabled by big data. To this end, an innovative platform has been developed that helps policy makers to easily design, monitor and evaluate urban development policies for waterfront cities, based on the wealth of economic, environmental and social data generated in the cities on a daily basis. The CUTLER platform provides a standardized way to model the decision making processes of public administrations and offers a variety of big-data analysis and visualization tools that allow policy makers to design and implement urban development policies by simultaneously considering citizen well-being, economic growth, and environment protection. To reach this goal, CUTLER has pursued the following objectives:
• Deal with ethical and legal issues in collecting and processing economic, environmental and social data coming from the governmental sector.
• Setup a flexible cloud-based infrastructure for large scale data storage and processing that can be adapted to the needs of different cities.
• Crawl, interlink and integrate heterogeneous data sources to support data-intensive operations.
• Sense the economic and environmental impact and the social consequences of urban policy-making by applying big data analytics on collected data and computing appropriate indicators.
• Use business process models (BPM) to bring foresight intelligence in policy modeling.
• Integrate the sensing and data analytics outputs and the BPM under a single multi-faceted dashboard for policy design, monitoring and evaluation.
• Design, implement and evaluate different urban development policies in waterfront cities using the CUTLER dashboard.
