Report: Digital Cities Seminar - Presentation2: Dr Andy Hudson-Smith

This delivery gave great cause for concern: it illustrated the ways in which British world class academic research still fails to deliver timely implementation of emergent technologies. CASA was a tiny team in a small lab at UCL, Dr Hudson-Smith was way ahead of the game , his team used lidar data technology to produce a detailed interactive 3d map of Greater London. He anticipated the value of such a project for the democratization of the planning process. Way before Google Earth or MS world, these London researchers actually delivered all that was needed to implement the entire system. However, defeat was pulled form the jaws of victory thanks to the cumbersome and inflexible licensing of geographical data in the UK and the byzantine organization and control of the our planning system by local authority lawyers. In the end, due to licensing restrictions, the anticipated mass “free access” roll out of the project was stunted to a handful of Local Authorities, who already owned a requisite license. A visionary pilot scheme enabling democratic consultation for planning issues in Hackney was quickly aborted when the politicians and planners were obstructed from engaging in the democratic process by their own legal department.

The Web 2.0 revolution soon swept away the early lead that CASA had established; providing business models that enabled a truly democratic process to emerge, business models that the UK seemed unable to develop in its own right! So, should we conclude that we are wasting our money, talent and time by pioneering such new technologies, until we first reform the political, legal, and economic structures to allow for their proper implementation? Unfortunately, in the very fast moving world of e-commerce, we are losing our competitive edge by foolishly clinging to regressive systems of government regulation and by embracing outdated notions of ownership and dissemination of information.

However, Dr Hudson-Smith did offer some small reasons to be cheerful, in the form of an new generation of open access, cheaply available computer applications; notably computer games engines and immersive on line communities, like “Second Life.” His research is currently looking at how to harness these cheap/free virtual environments to deliver solutions that were frustrated by a generation of more cumbersome and prohibitively expensive technology.

Dr Andy Hudson-Smith is from CASA the centre for Advanced spatial Analysis at UCL

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