Hi #SmartCommunity friends, in this episode of the Smart Community podcast I have a wonderful conversation with Eshita Dutia.
Eshita is the Principal Smart Places Officer at Cumberland City Council, bringing her background as an architect, planner, and urban designer to the smart city space with a focus on putting community first.
In this episode Eshita tells us about actioning Cumberland’s Smart Places Strategy and Action Plan, embedding smart technology into placemaking projects to collect data and show impact. We discuss the Guildford Laneway project as part of Transport for NSW’s Safer Cities Her Way program, including how the team moved from ad hoc data collection to a streamlined Data for Places methodology.
We talk about combining qualitative feedback like perception of safety surveys with quantitative data including footfall, dwell time, and economic spend.
We finish our chat discussing the power of simplified data and how small-scale interventions can have significant impact when documented through data storytelling. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.
What we cover in this episode:
- Transitioning from architect to planner to Smart Places officer, bringing built environment and placemaking perspectives into technology work at Cumberland City Council
- Moving beyond static annual report datasets to embedding smart technology for showing impact of place improvement projects and closing the loop with community engagement
- The Guilford Laneway project revitalising a neglected connection between car park and town centre, co-designing with local women and girls to understand problems before applying technology solutions
- Collecting footfall, dwell time, microclimate, economic spend, and perception of safety data before and after upgrades, seeing 5-6 times increase in visitation post-project
- Building interactive dashboards that let viewers choose how to see data through different filters, layers, charts, and graphs while combining qualitative images with quantitative metrics
- Following the Data for Places methodology from Transport NSW through discovery, design, implementation, and manage/review phases with regular “just because we can, should we?” sense checks
- Privacy and ethics considerations ensuring aggregated anonymised data focuses on usage patterns and place perception rather than tracking individuals
- Perception of safety improvements from 8% to 59% feeling safe after dark and 39% to 92% during the day, validated by increased footfall data after dark
- The power of simplified data to help a project be more widely understood and therefore accepted
- How small-scale interventions can have significant impact when documented through data storytelling
Quotes:
“It’s not necessarily the billion dollar or million dollar projects that can have far-reaching impacts. It’s surprising how even small interventions, placemaking interventions, and tactical urbanism can actually have a significant impact on local economy, footfall, and people’s perception of place.”
“Simplified data is a lot more powerful than complex data sets that not a lot of people can understand. So try and simplify your data sets, even if they seem very complex. If there’s an easy way to showcase this, it’ll be more widely understood and more widely accepted.”
“Just because we can, should we? Those sense checks really helped us stay within the problem question that we had done at the start of the project. Technology costs and so does data, so it’s not always feasible to just get all the different kinds of data sources and then figure out what is actually useful.”
“It is our hope and our ideal to make data and smart places technology so deeply embedded within our places that it just becomes business as usual. The more we can involve other teams and collaborate, the easier it is going to be for smart places to become the norm.”
Links:
- Cumberland City Council Open Data Hub
- Guildford Laneway dashboard with real-time and historical data
- Smart Places Data for Places: A Practitioner’s Guide
- NSW Government case study on Guildford Laneway and other data projects
- Cumberland Smart Places Strategy and Action Plan (2023)
Connect:
Connect with Eshita Dutia on LinkedIn
Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community
Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn and watch on YouTube
Podcast Production by Perk Digital
This podcast is recorded on the traditional lands of the Kabi Kabi peoples and edited on the lands of the Gaibal peoples. I pay my respects to traditional owners of country and their elders past and present. I also extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Here on the Smart Community Podcast, we talk about data, technology, communities and the future. First Nations peoples have been sharing knowledge, caring for country, and telling stories for tens of thousands of years. I honour that deep connection of storytelling and community connection as we continue our conversation together here today.
Disclaimer
The views, opinions, and perspectives expressed by guests on The Smart Community Podcast are solely those of the individual speakers. They do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of the host, Zoe Eather, or of The Smart Community Podcast as a whole.
Any discussion of ideas, products, organisations, or services by podcast guests does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by the host or the podcast. Listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions and seek professional advice where appropriate.
