In September 2016, we launched Mapbox Cities to tackle cities’ biggest challenges through data-driven decision making.
As a Mapbox Cities Featured Partner, the City of Melbourne’s Smart City Office set out to prove how tools and data can transform cities. The team started with experiments visualizing Melbourne’s open datasets to make data that’s available on their open data portal visually accessible to more people in the local community.
Watch an animated visualization of Melbourne's Open Data
The City of Melbourne is using cutting edge technology to share information with the people of Melbourne. They are not only focused on analyzing past events through existing datasets to learn for the future, but also are making potential future data available to their ‘users’ - the local community. They can then better understand and discuss what the city has in the works for them, thereby offering citizens an opportunity to influence the city’s decisions. We call this urban transparency 3.0!
The Mapbox Cities mentorship came just at the right time to power one of the City of Melbourne’s latest projects: The Smart City Office team created the 3D Development Activity Model (3D DAM), a tool which visualizes in 3D the current state of Melbourne, buildings under construction, approved developments, and applications for building permits for the next three years. The 3D DAM shows the local community how the City of Melbourne is changing over time.
Play with the model at developmentactivity.melbourne.vic.gov.au
Gathering feedback from the local community is essential to the work of the Smart City Office, but data as such may not be as accessible to the majority of the population as 3D visualizations are. Digital and physical spaces “for people to come together and collaborate on urban and civic innovations” are essential to create what MIT Professor Carlo Ratti calls an “innovation ecosystem” in smart cities created by engaged citizens.
A team of in-house engineers at the City of Melbourne’s Smart City Office developed the 3D DAM with technical guidance from the Mapbox Cities team. The team used our Maps APIs to host and serve Melbourne’s building data with our GL JS SDK to build the visual 3D interface. The result is an amazing city exploration tool, complete with 3D building hover highlights. This is essentially a minimal viable product (MVP) for a 3D city model of Melbourne, one of the cornerstones of the smart city strategy of the City of Melbourne.
We’re excited to see what the City of Melbourne’s Smart City Office comes up with next. Interested to learn more about Mapbox Cities and how your city can get involved? Sign up for our Cities newsletter.