Only 1% of people have cars Meet Dhaka

He loves his city and wants to find a way to reduce congestion

Meet Zia

Should he close down the road?

In cities like Fazilka, road closure seemed to counterintuitively reduce congestion

He did once before (but wasn’t sure if it worked)

Before After

Better to do nothing.

To the naked eye, It looked like the experiment was a success – some of the residents seemed to like it. But he couldn’t tell if it was a 5% or 50% improvement. Also, maybe it was because it was a weekend. Maybe it was because petrol prices went up recently. Maybe it was because of the big cricket match the night before. What he did know is that the car owners were not happy. He knew that it cost the city 500,000 taka to monitor and close the street.

Can the mayor of Dhaka run his city like an MIT scientist managing a lab of experiments?

Cities have become too complicated to manage on gut instinct. Measuring a city’s performance can help encourage experimentation. There are no effective, low cost means of quickly assessing a city’s performance.

The Urban Launchpad employs human and mobile sensors to deliver a targeted, low-cost data service for measuring the impact of city experiments

15 million users carry a unique

code

A distributed subset of

smartphone volunteers

marks their spot

city user scanner

walking, happy

bus, frustrated

CNG, content

Two-wheeler, angry

making the invisible visible

LIVING DHAKA

An initiative of the

Albert Ching is an aspiring urban innovator, a lifelong Hawaiian and former Googler based in Mountain View, Hyderabad and Singapore. Albert is enduring the frigid cold of Boston to help cities innovate, specifically by using the proliferation of information technologies to solve transport problems in South and Southeast Asia. He is a researcher for the Singapore-MIT Alliance’s Future of Urban Mobility project. www.mrching.blogspot.com

Muntasir Mamun Imran is a nature lover, adventure-trekker, and an experienced social entrepreneur from Bangladesh. He is the co-founder of Kewkradong Bangladesh, country coordinator for the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, and Organizer of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. He has organized cycling rides throughout Bangladesh including the Sir Edmund Hillary Ride, the Ride for Green, and the LiveStrong Ride. www.muntasirmamun.com/

Collaborators

Stephen Kennedy is a designer and artist formerly based in Atlanta with a background in Industrial Design from Georgia Tech. At first a reluctant transplant to Boston, Stephen has enjoyed trying to escape frigid New England by working as a hybrid planner-designer on signage initiatives in New Orleans, greenway planning in the Bronx, urban realm technology in Thessaloniki, and participatory planning in Indonesia. His focus is on both physical planning and spatial information design. www.stephenjameskennedy.com

P. Chris Zegras is the Ford Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation at MIT. His research interests include the influence of the built environment on individual travel behavior, transportation infrastructure and system financing, indicators of sustainable transportation, and mitigating transportation greenhouse gas emissions. On these and other related topics, he has consulted widely, including for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian, German, US, and Peruvian Governments, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Center for Regional Development.

Advisors

Zia Wadud is an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Zia completed his PhD from Imperial College London in Civil Engineering Policy in 2008 as a Commonwealth Scholar and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zia’s current research interests are in modeling and valuation of policy interventions in the transportation and environment sector (including climate change policy), modeling energy demand and assessing risk and vulnerability in the context of broader Civil Engineering topics.

Good cities don’t happen by accident.

Living Dhaka Program Requirements manpower 500 volunteers to help register / scan city users (university students) Training for volunteers and marketing campaign for users materials 100-400 Android powered smart-phones QR code printer and collateral (business cards/ T-shirts) T-shirts / hats / food for volunteers Signage and digital projectors technology (being developed at MIT) Mobile application(s) for registering and scanning users Back-end databases for storing, processing, analyzing data

Living Dhaka Proposed Timeline

Jan 15 Launch

Oct 19 Today

Oct - Jan Recruit Volunteers (Dhaka)

Oct 31st Finish 1st Working Prototype of Mobile Apps and Backend (MIT)

Oct 21st - Nov 9th Funding deadline from MIT resources (MIT)

Nov 1 – 24th User testing in both MIT and Dhaka

Nov Identify specific experiments to measure* (Dhaka)

Dec 1st Viral marketing campaign (Dhaka)

Jan 1st Training of volunteers begins

*Related to existing or new experiments in the city to promote alternatives to cars

Jan 8th

Team from MIT arrives in Dhaka

Oct Reach out to NGOs, gov’t officials, & other stakeholders to garner support and evaluate feasibility

Oct-Nov Build MIT-Dhaka working team

Open Questions Feedback on idea and concept esp on pitch clarity

COUHES approval from MIT

Funding sources for Living Dhaka prototype during IAP

User experience – will users participate?

How much data and participation required for data to be useful

Building technology prototype and testing remotely before launch

Identifying and/or deploying city experiments

Government approvals to prototype

Business model

Appendix

Register. Scan. Project.

1 2 3

User experience

An initiative of the

LIVING DHAKA

H

W 2 Hour Commute

Visualize.

User experience

An initiative of the

LIVING DHAKA

Scan.

Scan to download app. Also press to

start the scan.

Scanning mobile application

An initiative of the

LIVING DHAKA

Select transport

mode.

10 seconds (or less).

Send data to the cloud.

Scan QR code.

An initiative of the

Scanning mobile application

LIVING DHAKA

sexy sidewalks

*Potential city experiments

LIVING DHAKA

critical mass cycling

*Potential city experiments

LIVING DHAKA

the best way to see Dhaka

*Potential city experiments

LIVING DHAKA