Data for People and Place: introducing the Smart Places initiative

Gracemount is a small area south of Liberton on the outskirts of Edinburgh. You’ve definitely passed by it on your way out of town — the A701 bounds it on the west and Lasswade Road on the east. You probably crossed Captain’s Road without a passing thought, and yet for young people in Gracemount this is a defining boundary that shapes their relationships, activities, and sense of safety.

Last year, Edinburgh Living Lab partnered with the City of Edinburgh Council to test a data- and design-driven approach to making decisions about the future of public buildings in local communities, with the pilot taking place in Gracemount. The project aimed to demonstrate how innovative use of data integrated with community-centred design could identify new trajectories for people and place.

Looking for a project name early on, we agreed with the Council to call the initiative ‘My Gracemount’. That was before we knew that the area on the south side of Captain’s Road, while considered by the Council to be part of the Gracemount small area, is actually made up of Burdiehouse and Southhouse — and residents of those areas typically do not identify as residents of Gracemount.

Micro boundaries like these are not only part of people’s identities; they’re part of their lived experience. Captain’s Road is a busy road with few pedestrian crossings. If you’re an elderly person trying to access the Libertus day care services, you might find it intimidating to get to or from the bus stop on the opposite side of the road. If you’re a young person who accessed youth services at the now-closed Gracemount Mansion on the north side of the road, you might feel less inclined to go to Valley Park Community Centre on the south side, because not only is it likely to be further from your house, but you’ll have to walk past a notorious drinking establishment to get there. If you’re a parent, you may not feel comfortable letting your younger children cross the road on their own — it would require moving beyond an invisibly defined ‘safe’ boundary.

In order for a place to provide what people need and desire — be it an essential service such as food or healthcare, a place for relaxation, a human connection, access to green space and nature, opportunities for sports and physical activity or otherwise — its many components need to work together effectively. There are complex layers of physical, service and social infrastructure that, if thoughtfully and intentionally integrated, can build on and amplify the assets and resources of a place and the people who live there.

One of the aims of the emerging Smart Places initiative in the Edinburgh Futures Institute is to understand how we can bring together data from different sources to create a more holistic picture of how places can support human and environmental health and well-being. Data for us encompasses stories and documentation of people’s experiences, values and priorities alongside statistics, spatial data, and other kinds of data commonly collected in computer systems. We are particularly keen to look at how we integrate different types of data to create new perspectives on challenging problems.

In what eventually became the ‘Our Gracemount — Burdiehouse — Southhouse’ project, we collected and integrated conversations, photographs and comments on a public exhibition with analysis of people flows, building usage and accessibility of services based on proximity. This provided an emerging picture of community needs and showed potentially underutilised community assets that could be aligned with a few adjustments — for example focussing on the delivery of free wifi rather than static computer labs in the community centre, or creating pop-up seating areas in an empty space near the local shops to make it more welcoming as a place to relax, gather with friends and eat together.

There were also more substantial opportunities for improvements, such as better integration of building, service and planning data to make sure that buildings are more responsive to the needs of growing and changing communities. Or ensuring better collection of data about the options and levels of participation in community activities and using that data to make sure that there is a range of activities for all ages and income levels on offer in the community. These are bigger, often systemic conversations about how we come together to understand places.

Our sense of place and community has been drastically reshaped over the last few weeks, and we are keen to use this opportunity to look creatively at the spaces around us, to understand how places shape communities and vice versa. We look forward to the conversations that will be sparked by the Smart Places events taking place over the coming month and the ideas and insights that will emerge from them.

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Visit www.edinburghlivinglab.org for more information about some of our other activities related to Smart Places:

• ParkLife — developing a physical-digital noticeboard that provides up-to-date information about park usage and biodiversity while allowing park users to communicate directly with a chatbot to share what is most important to them about the park.
• Festival Mobility — looking at how events data, bus routes, train ticket sales, social media insights and conversations about people’s patterns and priorities during the Festivals can help us to identify ‘hot spots’ and alleviate transport congestion.
• Culture and Communities Mapping — documenting the diversity of creative and cultural spaces across Edinburgh through participatory mapping and creating an open-source resource to support equitable and inclusive investment in the arts.