York City Environment Observatory: Diagnostic Phase

By the middle of this century, two thirds of the world's population will be urban - equivalent to around 6.3 billion people. Mismanagement of these urban areas will adversely affect the health and well-being (i.e. how people experience their lives and flourish) of the population, and lead to social and environmental injustice. It has long been recognised that good quality cultural, social, built and natural environments within cities provide benefits in terms of health, well-being and equity of urban residents. Conversely, poor quality environments negatively affect the health and well-being of citizens and have negative economic consequences. With increasing urbanisation and changes in climate, the built, cultural, social and natural environments within cities will come under further pressure.

While the relationships between selected environment quality parameters, such as noise and air pollution and health, have been well characterised, relatively little is known about the relationship between other quality measures, or endpoints, of economic and societal well-being and health. A major reason for this limited understanding is that while much data on city environments exist, this is fragmented across numerous data owners, is not joined up or at suitable granularity. As these existing datasets have been collected for other reasons, they are not always in a form where they are useful for a wide variety of purposes or for future needs. Data on some important parameters simply does not yet exist. Additionally, specialists in the different disciplines needed to tackle these complex issues often work in isolation. By bringing data together, breaking down barriers across research disciplines and exploiting and developing new monitoring, modelling and analytical technologies (e.g. wireless sensing networks, wearable devices, drones, crowdsourcing, 3D models of cities and virtual reality), it should be possible to provide a holistic analysis of the quality of the environment with a city that can be used by many different stakeholders (e.g. researchers, policy makers, planners, businesses and the public) to address their needs. This holistic analysis will then provide us with a better understanding of how to manage city environments and will provide long-term benefits to citizens and the economy.

The York City Environment Observatory (YCEO) initiative will address this major knowledge gap by providing a framework, tools and conceptual models at the urban scale that can be rolled-out to assist with governance of environments in York and other cities in the UK and around the world. In this diagnostic phase project, experts from a diverse range of sectors and disciplines, will work together in a holistic way to design and lay the groundwork for establishing the YCEO. The consortium will work with a range of stakeholders and look to the past, present and future in trying to diagnose and predict environmental issues for York and their associated human health and well-being and economic impacts. We will build on York's strong track record in open data and combine data and models in order to do this. This diagnostic project will allow us to develop a prototype design for the YCEO, to be implemented within the next five years and a roadmap for achieving this. The YCEO will be designed to provide the evidence-base for making decisions on how best to manage and enhance the social, cultural, built and natural environment across city systems now and into the future, and in this way, improve the health, well-being and equity of citizens and the economy of the city. The YCEO will also aid local, national and international stakeholders (including planners, businesses, residents and community groups) to come up with low cost and innovative solutions to a range of problems identified as part of this diagnostic phase of the Urban Living Partnership.

The primary aim of the York City Environment Observatory (YCEO) is to improve the environment of York and other cities in order to provide benefits to health, well-being and the economy. The results of the study will be beneficial to a range of stakeholders both within York and elsewhere around the world, including the research community, city decision makers, national government departments, citizens, large and small businesses and future generations of the different sectors. Benefits to individual sectors include:

Citizens and Communities - As the primary aim of the Observatory is to generate the knowledge and understanding to improve the environment of York and other cities, citizens will benefit in the long-term from improved health, wellbeing and quality of life. Citizens and community groups will also benefit from active participation and contribution (e.g. through citizen science activities) to the project.

Researchers - The YCEO will provide researchers from the environmental, health and social science and the humanities sectors with the models and datasets they need in their research to more fully understand the links between the quality of the environment, health and well-being and the economy.

Decision makers - For the first time, the City of York Council and other decision makers (e.g. the Environment Agency; NHS trusts) in the city will have the holistic intelligence they need to make evidence-based decisions on the design and operation of the city environment to benefit citizens. The availability of the YCEO will mean that they are better placed to demonstrate the impacts of different interventions (e.g. designation of the city as an ultra-low emission zone; changes in transport policy) on the environment of York and the resulting implications for health, well-being and the city economy. Much of the knowledge and understanding will be transferable to other cities in the UK and elsewhere in the world meaning that the benefits will be reaped beyond York.

Businesses and cultural and heritage organisations - The deployment of YCEO and the use of the knowledge coming out of the Observatory will result in long-term improvements to the environment of York resulting in benefits (e.g. a safer environment; a more attractive environment; healthier and happier workers) to a wide range of businesses and cultural and heritage organisations that operate in York resulting in enhancements to the economy of the city. The learnings from the YCEO will also be relevant more broadly so these benefits will be realised in other urban areas across the Globe. York and non-York businesses involved in the development of innovative approaches to monitoring of the environment and of the collation, organisation and analysis of big data will have a test bed to allow them to develop, evaluate and demonstrate their technologies (e.g. apps, sensor technologies or novel approaches to data analytics) in a timely manner.

Future researchers, business innovators and decision makers - Postgraduate and undergraduate students, schools and colleges will benefit from access to a unique training environment allowing them to develop the skill sets and knowledge required to solve complex city problems in the future. The development of the open data platform will create further opportunities for "innovators" to use and re-engineer newly available data to create new products and services.