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  • At the moment I think we're beginning to see a shift in the way that cities are understood.

  • Never before have we had so much data about individuals, about transportation, about the

  • economy, on such a fine-grained level as we do today.

  • We see that as developing into the future, exponentially so.

  • With that we'll be able to build our understanding of the city, and improve our models of the

  • city. The bike data - the bike-hire data - from

  • that we'll be able to identify different types of usage and where they're used, and why.

  • We have the data on the locations of tube trains, of buses, we have oyster card data

  • - so people's movement from origins and destinations across London - with that we're beginning

  • to understand, better than ever before, where people go, when, and why, and start to understand

  • how people change their behaviour in different circumstances.

  • So this is already happening, to a certain degree, and I think in the next 50 years you

  • can imagine that more increasing levels of individual data will become available, so

  • relating to each of us, about our individual behaviours. But at the same time you can imagine

  • there'd be a kick-back against this movement, so as it becomes increasingly known that your

  • financial transactions are available to researchers, what will people's responses be to that, and

  • will they be happy with that sort of research continuing?

  • I think we're really seeing these sort-of patterns of realisation occuring - if you

  • look at organisations or companies like Facebook, there's a small movement there against Facebook

  • their utilisation of people's data for advertising, or marketing purposes,

  • so this is a trend you may see continuing as data increases, as individual data increases

  • and people become aware of what data can be used for.

  • As these data sources become available and more accesible and easier to understand, people

  • will become better at understanding these and being able to use them for their own purposes,

  • to question their government, to make decisions about their own lives.

At the moment I think we're beginning to see a shift in the way that cities are understood.

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