At the moment I think we're beginning to see a shift in the way that cities are understood.
Never before have we had so much data about individuals, about transportation, about the
economy, on such a fine-grained level as we do today.
We see that as developing into the future, exponentially so.
With that we'll be able to build our understanding of the city, and improve our models of the
city. The bike data - the bike-hire data - from
that we'll be able to identify different types of usage and where they're used, and why.
We have the data on the locations of tube trains, of buses, we have oyster card data
- so people's movement from origins and destinations across London - with that we're beginning
to understand, better than ever before, where people go, when, and why, and start to understand
how people change their behaviour in different circumstances.
So this is already happening, to a certain degree, and I think in the next 50 years you
can imagine that more increasing levels of individual data will become available, so
relating to each of us, about our individual behaviours. But at the same time you can imagine
there'd be a kick-back against this movement, so as it becomes increasingly known that your
financial transactions are available to researchers, what will people's responses be to that, and
will they be happy with that sort of research continuing?
I think we're really seeing these sort-of patterns of realisation occuring - if you
look at organisations or companies like Facebook, there's a small movement there against Facebook
in terms of their utilisation of people's data for advertising, or marketing purposes,
so this is a trend you may see continuing as data increases, as individual data increases
and people become aware of what data can be used for.
As these data sources become available and more accesible and easier to understand, people
will become better at understanding these and being able to use them for their own purposes,
to question their government, to make decisions about their own lives.