Citizen IBM Blog.

As part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, I had the chance to spend three weeks in Syracuse, New York helping city officials understand how to reduce residential property vacancy rates. More than four percent (about 1,500) of Syracuse’s 35,000 to 45,000 housing units are vacant, and their byproducts – urban blight, street crime, and declining property values and tax revenues – are impacting residents’ quality of life. My IBM colleagues and I were onsite to show civic and community leaders how to use technology to analyze, predict and ultimately prevent the spread of vacant residential properties.

So, what’s the connection? How can technology help solve the problem of empty houses and urban decay? It can be a difficult concept to grasp, but the short answer is that technology can turn data into insight. Cities can use data to build predictive mathematical models to forecast the spread of vacant properties. In Syracuse, they needed to identify and aggregate the information that was stored in many different forms and places so it could be used to develop workable plans.

In short, Syracuse needed to move from decision making based on anecdotal knowledge and reactive strategies to development of proactive policies based on informed, holistic insights. The city hadn’t been able to find or afford the kind of expertise they knew they needed, which is one of the reasons why working with them through the Smarter Cities Challenge was so rewarding.

Since 2008, more than half of the world’s population has lived in cities, and municipal leaders everywhere are grappling with how to support successful growth, better deliver services, engage citizens, and improve efficiency for greater numbers of constituents. The need for better city management has never been greater, as urban populations continue to increase. And the Smarter Cities Challenge has already helped cities like Edmonton and St. Louis use data to help reduce traffic problems and improve public safety.

Syracuse has a broad and diverse ecosystem, with committed stakeholders – policy makers, police, social aid agencies, housing authorities and neighborhood associations – who are uniformly and passionately committed to making things better. I don’t imagine the Syracusans we met were that much different from committed and passionate stakeholders in any of the other cities that have received (or will receive) Smarter Cities Challenge grants, but I would bet they are somewhat ahead of the curve when it comes to appreciating how critical the analysis of data is to making better, more informed decisions.

Related Article:

Bringing Syracuse Back, One Neighborhood at a Time

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