Summary of the commentary article titled Big data, smart cities and city planning from 2013 by Michael Batty published in the Dialogues in Human Geography journal. 
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see sea of available data changes urban areas. This article investigates how the big data shifts the emphasis from longer term strategic planning to short term thinking about urban functions and management.
The article is available through this link.
Abstract: I define big data with respect to its size but pay particular attention to the fact that the data I am referring to is urban data, that is, data for cities that are invariably tagged to space and time. I argue that this sort of data are largely being streamed from sensors, and this represents a sea change in the kinds of data that we have about what happens where and when in cities. I describe how the growth of big data is shifting the emphasis from longer term strategic planning to short-term thinking about how cities function and can be managed, although with the possibility that over much longer periods of time, this kind of big data will become a source for information about every time horizon. By way of conclusion, I illustrate the need for new theory and analysis with respect to 6 months of smart travel card data of individual trips on Greater London’s public transport systems.
The transcript is available through this link.
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