While Open Building holds positive emancipatory potential for urban governance, the adverse impact of technology in an urban space must be kept in mind
Technology has always played an important role in urban planning. The role of technology has been a key element of urban planning over time. Technology in urban planning has manifested in recent decades through digitisation, software, and computer-aided design. The role of technology, however, can be traced back to the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300 to 1300 BC), when the tools of surveying and mapping were utilised to build cities with planned street ways in a grid system along with an efficient drainage network. Throughout human history, the role of technology has further modified and received a major thrust in the post-Industrial Revolution period, when urban-centric economic activities (mainly in the manufacturing sector), proved to be a major thrust to urban expansion. Currently, the roles of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are gaining prominence in urban policy and planning. The worldwide drive towards creating smart cities has further enhanced the role of technology in shaping urban futures. For example, in India, the Smart City Mission (SCM) was masterminded in 2014 to plan existing and upcoming cities to respond to the challenges of 21st century urbanisation. Some of the features that characterise the Smart City discourse in India are—Information and Communication Technology (ICT), knowledge and creativity, enhanced connectivity, big data and open data, business and entrepreneurialism, social capital, smart community, and ecological sustainability.
The worldwide drive towards creating smart cities has further enhanced the role of technology in shaping urban futures.
Recent scholarship has examined the question of technology in urban planning by evaluating its prospects of improving the quality of public services, community satisfaction, and quality of life. In this context, it becomes relevant to understand an application named ‘Open Building’ (OB) launched in August 2022 by Google, a technology corporation.
OB is an open dataset of building footprints across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In simple words, OB is a compilation of open building information, which includes the building footprints (area covered by a building) and heights. A stated goal of the building footprint compilation is to serve multiple practical and scientific purposes. It claims, that OB will be useful in the domains of population mapping, humanitarian response, environmental science, addressing systems, vaccination planning indicators, amongst others. OB can be a useful tool for policy interventions in places where the availability of alternative data sources—for example, census and municipal surveys—is scarce.
A dataset of 1 million images in which 1.75 million building instances were manually labelled, were used to create the OB dataset of Africa containing 516 million building footprints.
The initial work of OB was initiated in Africa, using 50 cm satellite imagery and employing the U-Net model. This involved studying variations in architecture, loss functions, regularisation, pre-training, self-training, and post-processing that increase instance segmentation performance. Such information is derived from high-resolution satellite imagery with the help of a deep learning model. A dataset of 1 million images in which 1.75 million building instances were manually labelled, were used to create the OB dataset of Africa containing 516 million building footprints. The first dataset of OB (V1) comprised data from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, while the second dataset (V2) included Latin America and the Caribbean.
OB has the potential to be an effective tool in policy intervention, especially in cities which exhibit dense built environments. For the Global South, where urbanisation is happening on a rapid scale, the lack of data about newly developed urban areas is a key factor in unplanned and under-serviced urbanisation. As studies have documented, in many cities of Latin America, South Asia, and other parts of the Global South, neighbourhoods and new parts of the city are built by the people themselves, leading to a phenomenon called ‘auto-construction’. Such developments may not be documented by state agencies and therefore restrict the ability of these areas to receive policy attention. OB can draw attention to the newly built areas in cities and inform policies on governing urban peripheries while making a case for expanding the ambit of existing municipalities. This holds the potential of democratising urban policy focus on such new settlements, which would frame pathways for equitable and inclusive cities. For example, in India, urban housing policy like the Prime Minister Awas Yojana (PMAY) can be extended to newl-built neighbourhoods in cities and villages with the help of OB, which could also help in supervising the progress of such policy intervention, while ensuring monitoring to prevent any acts of corruption.
OB can draw attention to the newly built areas in cities and inform policies on governing urban peripheries while making a case for expanding the ambit of existing municipalities.
OB could also help urban governing agencies of developing nations to identify plots for future developments and earmarking them for infrastructure to handle projected population growth in cities. If we take the case of some of the newly built cities and satellite towns in India, such as Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra), Gurugram (Haryana) and New Town (Kolkata), they are characterised by newly built buildings developed far away from each other with swathes of empty lands in between them. Such a situation stalls the organic growth of liveable infrastructure (markets, transport, and other institutions) and manufactures an incomplete urban experience, with strong implications for safety, mobility, and sustainability. A judicious application of OB can prevent such scenarios in the upcoming cities of India and elsewhere in the world. OB can also be utilised to develop an effective multimodal public transport network in alignment with the building footprint of a given area, which would eventually lead to better air quality in cities and improving public access to transport.
OB and other such technologies can be considered as a right step towards open data movement which makes data accessible for relevant stakeholders. This would also enable citizens to engage in participatory planning and development, aiding their demands of social infrastructure (education, health, transport) in under-serviced areas. While OB has positive emancipatory potentials for urban governance, the implications of technology in an urban space must be kept in mind. Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, there has been a worldwide shift in making cities more amenable to private financial and technological capital, which hinges on the expansion of digital platforms based on processing and monetising user data.
India has passed the Data Protection Bill in 2023, which aims to protect the personal data of Indian citizens, with emphasis on the rights of individuals over their data and obligations of organisations regarding personal data.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of digital platforms in the domains of mobility, consumption and service has further accelerated, which has raised relevant questions on data governance and ownership. In the Indian context, in recent years there has been a thrust to digital infrastructure (Smart City, Unified Payments Interface) which has democratised digital access. India has passed the Data Protection Bill in 2023, which aims to protect the personal data of Indian citizens, with emphasis on the rights of individuals over their data and obligations of organisations regarding personal data. However, critics have pointed out the shortcomings in the legislation in terms of protection of data protection and discounting accountabilities of state and private entities regarding data principals. Addressing such issues is essential for India to ensure meaningful employment of applications like OB while safeguarding personal data and sensitive geographical information. Having a broad consensus about data governance by meaningfully engaging with the civil society stakeholders will ensure the beneficial use of such technologies for urban governance in an equitable manner.
Snehashish Mitra is a Fellow with the Urban Studies at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Snehashish is a Fellow-Urban Studies at ORF Mumbai. His research focus is on issues of urban housing, environmental justice, borderlands and citizenship politics. He has extensive ...
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