A smarter city: partnering with Melbourne to solve complex urban challenges

Christina Franken
Fri, 13 Jan 2017 06:00:00 -0500

Melbourne is changing the way cities are run. Australia’s fastest growing city’s Smart City Office has a clear vision: to enhance the aspects of our city that make us uniquely Melbourne, and intelligently prepare for the changing needs of the community, the environment, and the economy. That’s exactly the kind of innovative thinking we launched Mapbox Cities to help support, and we’re very excited to announce Melbourne as our first featured partner.

As a part of Mapbox Cities, the City of Melbourne receives free access to Mapbox’s anonymized traffic data, web and mobile mapping tools, and first-class support. We’re kick-starting our collaboration with the City of Melbourne by working with its team to visualize traffic data that can help inform infrastructure planning. The goal is to measure how cyclists and pedestrians use Melbourne’s city areas and help meet demand as the city grows.

Mapbox’s map development tools come into play as well. The Smart City Office team is using the latest Mapbox GL extrusion feature in their web and mobile apps to visualize the city’s development. And we’re both excited to work closely with the local OpenStreetMap community.

Open and transparent access to data is a critical part of any smart city effort, and the City of Melbourne has operated an open data platform with datasets such as pedestrian counts from 2009 to the present. The Smart City team continues to expand its open data offering and provide users with new ways to visualize it.

City of Melbourne Deputy Lord Mayor Arron Wood said he can see an enormous amount of possibilities in working with Mapbox technology to create multi-layered city maps.

“Working with Mapbox, we can create ‘live’ maps that display all kinds of information about our great city,” he said. “We can take information that the City of Melbourne already collects, such as traffic flow or construction activity, and present it on web apps to make it useful for Melburnians. With this technology we can also help people to visualize their surrounding environment, not only as it is now but also how it could be in the future.”

Partners enrolled in Mapbox Cities are also eligible to receive AWS Cloud Credits through our partnership with Amazon Web Services.

As our work begins with Melbourne, we’ll be bringing on more partners in the coming weeks from the more than 70 city governments that applied to the program. Learn more at mapbox.com/cities.