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Outlining a DIYcity 1.0

Submitted by John Geraci on 9 June 2009 - 3:02pm to Discussions.

As I was preparing a presentation on DIYcity recently, I started thinking about the idea of a "do-it-yourself city", a city that tunes into its own data to create services and tools for residents without relying on government, and without needing big budgets to sustain itself. What would such a city look like? What services commonly offered by cities are things that could be extended, improved, even replaced entirely with a Do-It-Yourself framework? What would a 1.0 version of a DIY City look like?

In the process of thinking about this I visited Wikipedia's page on Public Services. Their list of public services includes:

Broadcasting
Education
Electricity
Fire service
Gas
Health care
Military
Police service
Public transportation
Social housing
Telecommunications
Town planning
Waste management
Water services
Public information and archiving, such as libraries
Social services

From that and other sources, I came up with my own list of services that I thought were really ripe for DIY-ification:

Transportation
Police Services
Emergency Care
Public Health
Waste Management

...with the following subsets to each category:

Transportation - subway + bus scheduling, accident alerts, traffic control + routing

Police Services - crime alert, crime prevention, crime awareness

Emergency Care - crisis detection, response, evacuation

Public Health - outbreak detection, public alerts, deterrence

Waste Management - recycling, reduction, location of hazards

...and that was what I presented as a list of low-hanging fruit for DIYcity-type initiatives. Sort of a first stab at an outline for a DIY City 1.0.

Of course, I'm always surprised on the site by the ideas other people have for DIY-type initiatives, and how different they are from my own, so this list is admittedly my own perspective, and not complete.

And now I'm thinking about this again, and I'm interested in putting together a roadmap of services that could be improved with DIY-type methods, to begin to really outline what a DIYcity 1.0 would look like.

So what do you think? Do you like my list? Are there things I'm leaving off?

If so, let me know. As part of the Next Steps for DIYcity, I need to create a finalized version of this "roadmap" to a DIYcity 1.0.

10 Jun17:22

Education

By nickyg

I like your approach here.

Education strikes me as another natural DIY element. The internet (blogs, wikipedia, twitter, opencourseware), has already provided perhaps the biggest DIY education system ever invented. I'm not sure what it would take to add the "city" part to that, but I know that there are many citizens out there with skills to teach.

Back when I worked at Project for Public Spaces and we did public space use surveys, we always asked "what skills would you be willing to teach others" and "what skills would you want to learn", and we were always surprised by the overlap. Public spaces are natural teaching/learning venues, and that seems to be a function that's been somewhat lost in modern cities.