Smart green infrastructure

Unstructured thought about green infrastructure and data -

A lot of thinking around data and openness tends towards the already quantified - traffic, transit systems, municipal data that’s not in the public domain.  This data mostly concerns the ‘hard’ systems of infrastructure, and reflects priorities and needs of cities as they are currently managed. We track the dirty, congested and expensive things.

But what about the data we don’t yet have, tracking ’soft’ infrastructure for environmental management in cities? Where’s the sensor system monitoring water retention on each green roof, tracking the bioswale performance, responsively controlling storm water containment, scoring my neighborhood’s carbon sequstration and impact on urban heat island? I can dynamically monitor my domestic energy use (soonish), but not the vital green stuff.

Maybe if we want a greener infrastructure we need to start coming up with ways to measure it. Over next couple of weeks I’m going to take a look at some projects doing just that.