How a city in decline is reinventing itself through data

Data is not the Holy Grail of the city of tomorrow but it can be a valuable tool for designing a smarty city on a human scale. It’s this belief that led American NGO Data Driven Detroit (D3) to launch an innovative open-data project in Detroit, an industrial city that has lost its shine. D3 collects and aggregates data generated by hundreds of urban sources (for example events handled by firefighters) so as to provide the public and businesses with a wealth of information that will help rethink urban planning and social cohesion. Combined with civic engagement, this simplified approach to data could well inspire other cities in search of intelligence.