Category: Urban Development
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Mapple: Better Design and Business Decisions with Location Data
I had the pleasure of interviewing Karolina Mosiadz, COO of Mapple, an urban intelligence startup. Can you say a few words about yourself and your role in the Mapple team? As a marketer, I help early-stage companies find product-market fit, get first customers and start scaling. I focus on projects that aim to bring a…
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How Machine Learning Can Help with Urban Development
An experimentation project has demonstrated the capabilities of machine learning in urban development. It used images as a starting point and came up with interesting and useful applications. “I read data science papers on how machine vision algorithms can be used with satellite imagery. I immediately saw a connection to what we had been doing,”…
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Toward Increased Citizen Engagement in Urban Planning
Digitalization creates new opportunities for citizen engagement in urban planning. I gave a short presentation on the topic at the Digitalization in Urban Planning event in Helsinki. The event was organized by CHAOS Architects, a tech company. Its AI cloud platform allows citizens to share ideas about their city and co-create it with their community.…
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City Development with Interactive 3D Models
The Finnish city of Hyvinkää has developed a unique internet service for collaborative 3D city planning. It gives real estate owners, investors, developers, designers, authorities, and citizens easy-to-use tools to publish their 3D plans and ideas for the built city environment. Participants can comment on the 3D plans directly in the city model. The 3D…
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How Uber is Developing Urban Mobility – An Interview with Marius Macku
I had the pleasure of interviewing Uber’s Marius Macku, Senior Associate of Public Policy & Government Relations, EU. We discuss the outlook for urban mobility. Can you say a few words about your background and your current position at Uber? Sure. I’ve joined Uber almost two years ago, leading our policy efforts around mobility in…
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The Digital Future of Construction – An Interview with Minister Tiilikainen
Kimmo Tiilikainen is the Minister of the Environment, Energy, and Housing of the Finnish government. He will be speaking at the upcoming World Summit on Digital Built Environment WDBE 2018 in Helsinki. Aarni Heiskanen interviewed Minister Tiilikainen on his views of the construction industry and its digital future. The Ministry of the Environment launched, in…
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How BIM is Revolutionizing Building Control in Finland
BIM is becoming mainstream in building design, but building control is still predominantly based on paper documents and 2D drawings. A Finnish KIRA-digi experimentation project has demonstrated how BIM can speed up and improve the building permit process considerably. Three Finnish cities–Hyvinkää, Järvenpää, and Vantaa–are in the vanguard of model-based building control. Together with Evolta,…
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CHAOS Architects Engages Citizens in the Smart City
In this podcast episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Natalia Rincón and Johanna Suortti of CHAOS Architects, a smart city AI platform startup. CHAOS Architects say that current smart cities are missing a key element: “The smart city is very good at tracking but not very good at listening. We are still missing one ingredient. A city…
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Lessons Learned from Implementing Infrastructure BIM in Helsinki
Finland’s capital is currently experiencing a construction boom. Old industrial citadels are turning into residential areas with new commercial centers. Consequently, Helsinki needs to build new infrastructure. To improve the efficiency and quality of infrastructure construction, the city has started using BIM, and is now learning how to get the most value from it. Ville…
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BLOXHUB: The Urban Innovation Hub
Coworking spaces have become popular in the Nordics, but few of them are focused on a certain vertical. Torben Klitgaard, director of BLOXHUB, describes the unique initiative from Denmark. It invites architects, designers, contractors, and tech companies to create better cities. “BLOXHUB is an urban innovation lab; it’s a coworking space and community providing a…