A History of 'Urban Dashboards' and their Impact on City Governance

Shannon Mattern describes the adoption of "Mission Control" style urban dashboards in city governments all over the world. Mattern introduces the idea of the urban dashboard at the beginning of the long article:

"We know what rocket science looks like in the movies: a windowless bunker filled with blinking consoles, swivel chairs, and shirt-sleeved men in headsets nonchalantly relaying updates from “Houston” to outer space. Lately, that vision of Mission Control has taken over City Hall. NASA meets Copacabana, proclaimed the New York Times, hailing Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center as a 'potentially lucrative experiment that could shape the future of cities around the world.'"

Mattern lists some of the governments that have adopted futuristic control rooms, such as Baltimore, London, Michigan, and the United Kingdom (the Boston Globe reported last year that new(ish) Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh is also a believer).

As for the implications of such technology, Mattern describes the urban dashboard as a key indicator of an evolving understanding about cities: "They don’t seek merely seek [sic] to display information about a system but to generate insights that human analysts use to change that system — to render it more efficient or sustainable or profitable, depending upon whatever qualities are valued."

Mattern goes on to provide a history of the rise of urban dashboards. Included in the number of the most recent experiments, for example is the work of a "group of Europen cities…collaborating on the development of urbanAPI, which proposes to help planners engage citizens in making decisions about urban development."

The long form article includes a lot more on the history and potential of dashboards and their relevance to the concerns of planning-related fields.