What is Data Hosting?
You know what’s missing from Ratio.City? Your data. No, not in some creepy-ad-driven, personal-data-harvesting, no-accountability kind of way.
Our goal has always been to provide our customers with data where and when they need it. So what if all these city builders could privately and securely add their own data to the world’s most advanced geospatial knowledge platform?
Well for starters, they would have the ability to see their data on a map and that’s the best way to analyze geospatial data. Sure, there are a bunch of ways to do this already but maps are only half the solution. How about gaining the ability to combine their data with the policy, construction, environmental, transit, and all the other data on Ratio.City? That map just got a lot more powerful. And what if this capability was available to everyone, not just people with advanced technical skills in digital mapping and geographic information systems? This is what our new Data Hosting feature does.
Suddenly the portfolio manager for a REIT can determine in seconds which of their assets are affected by a new inclusionary zoning policy or which assets are within walking distance of a proposed transit line. Speaking of that proposed transit line, how many buildings on the proposed alignments are likely to have foundation depths that will interfere with tunnelling? The design team for that multi-billion dollar project definitely cares. What about the municipality that needs to deliver affordable and equitable housing? It turns out the municipality already owns hundreds of parcels that might be candidates for redevelopment and a quick search yields a dozen promising sites.
In each of these cases, the complex work that city-builders undertake is made much faster and much more robust by combining their own data with the data already on Ratio.City. This is important because more and more of us are living in cities and the global spend for planning, building, and maintaining cities is trillions each year. At the same time, the complexity of the problems is increasing. How do we build sustainable and equitable cities? What interventions are needed to adapt to climate change? As the complexity grows, the value of fast access to relevant data increases.
The traditional approach to data management in the city-building space is siloed and hand crafted. It is routine for the data gathering, organizing, and gap-filling process to take up 50-60% of the resources in planning and design. This is wasteful and leads to poorer outcomes as the talent and communication of dedicated people is directed away from finding and championing solutions. Imagine a world where planners, engineers, investors, and the public have access to the data and tools they need to imagine and build great cities.
