Cities, which according to the UN account for 87.6 per cent of urban areas, face challenges in infrastructure, basic services, health and transport. The City Lab Biobío initiative addresses these challenges through the development of smart cities, using methodologies developed across a global network of city laboratories.
Within this framework, a collaboration agreement between City Lab Biobío and Claro Empresas will allow the telecommunications company to contribute anonymised 4G/LTE mobile network connection data for City Lab Biobío to study mobility patterns across Greater Concepción and generate travel matrices. This will make it possible to identify with precision which areas of the city attract the most movement, which points experience the highest demand and when, and how tourist or mass events affect travel dynamics across Greater Concepción.
“To plan a city properly, you need information. Today technology allows us not only to gather data, but also to process it rapidly to anticipate situations or the impact of any given urban decision. A metropolitan area like Greater Concepción generates millions of data points across the most diverse fields, and our proposal as City Lab Biobío is to take that data, study it and build models that allow us to contribute to better planning,” said Marcela Martínez, director of City Lab Biobío.
The mobility generated by public spaces, parks and shopping centres, the length of time people spend in them throughout the day, the transport modes used for urban and inter-urban journeys, preferred routes and trip duration are among the questions this partnership will also seek to answer.
