layer | thinkthinkthink #24
on the reason behind this newsletter's long silence
This issue on Layer is 571 words long and it takes ~3 minutes to read. I hope you enjoy it.
A few years ago I embarked on an old aspiration to organize knowledge and data in better understanding and thinking about cities. I founded Layer. After a decade in the public sector I realized that there is quite a bit of granular spatial data on cities available out there. While not necessarily decisive for most planning decisions and typically too low-resolution for developed western capitals, open spatial information is quite relevant to the world’s second- and third-tier cities.
Layer at it’s first iteration attempts to do just that. Organize open and paid spatial datasets with global coverage under one easily accessible platform. Most datasets are either geospatially derived (with powerful and always improving satellite-based sensors from various space agencies as well as private sector actors) or crowdsourced (hats-off to OpenStreetMap and WorldPop for leading the way here). Most of our business revolves around custom service provision for a variety of clients including local government administration, real estate agencies, multilateral institutions, architecture and planning offices etc. (hint: contact us or reach out to me directly if that sounds interesting to you). The platform is free to sign-up with 26 out of 53 layers available for free for any city on earth.
Users can combine and overlay layers as varied as land surface temperature, geospatially derived land use, road network analytics, nightlight activity as a proxy for local economic development, public transportation network, population density, as well as a myriad of geographical, environmental and amenity data. You can check out the catalogue of available data here.
This is only the beginning however. You cannot get to the sense of a city by data alone. Data however can help when intersected with local ambitions. We want to build a platform that can serve as a future training dataset for artificial intelligence in an effort to provide AI augmented spatial analytics across the world. This will enable professionals and citizens alike to discover locally relevant and contextual spatial references from anywhere on earth.
I plan to get back to more regular writing on thinkthinkthink while using data from Layer to illustrate the complex and attractive features of the most complex organisms that have ever been created: cities.
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📚 One Book
How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
As Smil states at the end of the book - he's not an optimist nor a pessimist - he's a scientist. He attempts to look at our developmental pathway pragmatically and realistically with little more than passive aggressive derision towards doomsday scenarios or cornucopian fantasies. As in most of his work he's focused on numbers and he provides a great screenshot of the world at the beginning of the 2020s in terms of energy, food, industrial production and materials, globalization, risks and the environment. The conclusion is bittersweet - it's going to be close to impossible to transform the world into a circular sustainable system, but even though we'll fail humanity and the planet will probably do just fine.
📝 Three Links
Corrosion: Rust Never Sleeps by Stewart Brand
An allegory on the maintainability of everything.
A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic by Lachlan Summers
Claxon Taxonomy on New Tenochtitlan.
The Unending Quest to Build a Better Chicken by Boyce Upholt
A poultrian tragedy.
🐤 Five Tweets
This was the twenty-fourth issue of thinkthinkthink - a periodic newsletter by Joni Baboci on cities, science and complexity. If you liked it why not subscribe?
Thanks for reading; don't hesitate to reach out at dbaboci@gmail.com or @dbaboci. Have a question or want to add something to the discussion?