Taking a Page From SimCity, UrbanFootprint Pitches New Tools for Developers and Urban Planners

TechCrunch on UrbanFootprint — the urban-planning data platform from co-founder Peter Calthorpe and CEO Joe DiStefano — read on April 17th, 2020. Notes captured verbatim from the Roam daily note.

Notes

• Read Taking a page from SimCity UrbanFootprint pitches new tools for developers and urban planners The New City Urban Planning
  • Peter Calthorpe the Co-Founder of UrbanFootprint
  • Joe DiStefano is the CEO of UrbanFootprint
  • Wrote a book on sustainable communities with Sim Van der Ryn #books-to-read
  • “Through our practice we started looking at a tool that gathered all the data together [and] organized it in a way that allowed for intelligent queries… [It] allowed people to ask questions and plan scenarios,” Calthorpe said in an interview.
  • “Because cities are so complex and so interconnected in all of their dimensions, looking at multiple outcomes simultaneously is the healthiest and the best way to think about possible outcomes,” he says.
  • Ultimately, it’s not that much different than SimCity.
  • “Businesses across every major industry are realizing that to succeed in cities, you need to understand them,” said DiStefano, in a statement. “By creating easy access to essential planning data and analyses, UrbanFootprint offers a new solution for anyone focused on cities or urban markets to build more efficiently and sustainably.”
  • Cities now house roughly half of the global population, and that number is expected to reach 70% of the world’s men, women and children over the next several decades. “Just about every major issue we confront… All these things intersect in the way we shape cities and yet there’s no tool that allows people to think coherently about it,” says Calthorpe. “We’re a platform that allows people to understand the city itself.”
  • Meanwhile, the much-maligned Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric is using UrbanFootprint to see how heat waves affect their infrastructure and distribution network, according to a statement from the company.
  • “PG&E’s Climate Resilience team is working to ensure that PG&E is building a resilient system that will be able to continue to provide safe, affordable, and reliable energy to its customers amidst the growing risks of climate change,” said Heather Rock, Climate Resilience Chief at PG&E. “To that end, we are using forward-looking climate data to better inform how we plan and protect our infrastructure, employees, customers, and communities in which we serve. UrbanFootprint is an important partner to us as we seek data and tools that allow us to assess and mitigate these risks in a thoughtful way.” Climate Change
  • “Cities are superstructures for culture, lifestyles, aspirations, and well-being – the real ‘social networks’ in our lives,” said Jay Zaveri at Social Capital, in a statement. “Since 2018, UrbanFootprint has helped private and civic planners, mobility and energy companies execute **nearly 4,000 projects in over 700 cities in the U.S., providing answers for complex scenarios in a matter of hours. This is a phenomenal effort as we move to seven billion urban citizens by 2050, **with the urgent need of this decade being resilience and preparedness for urban systems.”

Saved assets

• urbanfootprint-1.png — two UrbanFootprint maps of Oakland, CA embedded in the article: Risk & Resilience (sea-level-rise risk 0–4m, fire hazard moderate→very high, seismic liquefaction) and Transit Access (walk access to high-quality transit, 0–61 minutes, with subway/metro and rail lines).

Connections

• UrbanFootprint · Peter Calthorpe · Joe DiStefano
• City Building — the thesis area this sits in.
• PG&E — cited using UrbanFootprint for climate resilience.
• Read on April 17th, 2020.