Veronica Barbaro

This blog post has in part been inspired by the recent coverage of 15min city concepts in the mainstream media (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/16/15-minute-city-planning-theory-conspiracists">In praise of the &lsquo;15-minute city&rsquo; &mdash; the mundane planning theory terrifying conspiracists | Oliver Wainwright | The Guardian</a>) and the fears they have explored. It is also a reflection on how the concept may apply to more rural localities where distances between homes and services/facilities are inevitably greater than in a typical urban context.
Before this, the team at Diagonal had already been discussing the pros and cons of this type of planning concept. What do we need to think about and understand when considering equity in accessibility to services, facilities and opportunities? And what about the range of encounters, the diversity of offerings and quality of services that different people living in different neighbourhoods may be able to, or need to, access within a typical 15 min walk?
One thing is clear &mdash; some fears expressed are unfounded when you go back to the concept itself. No supporter of the concept is implying a restriction in access, or an inability to go beyond a certain boundary. No municipality has, to date, shown any ambition to patrol the &lsquo;gates&rsquo; that may demarcate a 15/20-minute radius from a given centre.
However, the concept does seem to provide a sound platform to explore ways of improving the quality of life of people living in cities, with an emphasis on locality. Aside from recognising that developing greater relationships with one&rsquo;s neighbourhood, be it shopping local, frequenting local parks and community centres, getting to know our neighbours can have positive effects on our mental health, it is also an obvious response to the climate crisis. There is clearly an urgent need to reduce and minimise car journeys. With that in mind, increasing the proximity between someone&rsquo;s home and their point of interest seems an obvious starting point. This is not always practical. A shorter journey may not automatically mean a switch from driving to walking/cycling/wheeling etc. But with appropriate consideration and adequate local governance, adopting a 15-minute or similar principle, some positive things that may happen include:
<ul>
<li>if realistic, walking/cycling/wheeling instead of driving: positive knock-on effects on physical, mental health and wider population health through improved air quality</li>
<li>a better spread of services and facilities in any given neighbourhood: resulting in more vibrant places, more passive surveillance and therefore potentially safer places, more chance encounters and therefore reduced loneliness for some, more jobs closer to home for a number of people</li>
<li>increased footfall for local businesses: shop local, support small</li>
<li>generally more liveable streets, with the opportunity to replace car traffic with more street furniture, play opportunities, planting etc</li>
</ul>
The concept raises questions though, particularly if we ask &lsquo;a 15-minute city for whom&rsquo;? For example, could a barista in your local cafe afford to live within 15 minutes of their place of work? Or what happens when some parents decide the most walkable school is not good enough for their children and enrol them in a school a short drive or a 40-minute walk from home? How do these types of dynamics affect the concept and its real world application and sustainability?
The answers go beyond a concept that is not designed to solve deep-rooted political, planning, and behavioural challenges. In theory an equal spread of genuinely affordable housing should mean that a barista could live within walking distance of their place of work. Equally, if Ofsted ratings did not play such a big part in more privileged families&rsquo; decisions around schooling, and everyone just attended their nearest school, there would likely be more equity across the board in terms of educational opportunities. However, the chronic lack of affordable housing in the UK is always going to be a challenge; just as the implementation of school catchment areas is currently the only way to manage the link between homes and schools.
In addition, it is a tough call for 15-minute city concepts to undo the mass deployment of less sustainable but ubiquitous, car-dominated, edge-of-town estates. However, the aspiration for people to be able to access key services and facilities in a more sustainable (and potentially more pleasant!) way can only be a positive one.
And so, in my view, the concept needs to be supported by a wider strategy around mobility, one that focuses not only on more equitable access to key services and facilities, but also to education, work, play, and culture for all parts of the population.
It is not realistic to think that everyone is able to, or would want to, live within 15 minutes walking distance of an art gallery, or of high-earning work opportunities. But it would be naive to ignore the fact that access to certain opportunities is linked to income, education, and health outcomes. Therefore enabling those that want to, to reach those places relatively quickly and cheaply, through good quality and reliable public transport infrastructure, is key. And on top of enabling access to opportunities, proximity-focussed planning is about making everyone feel that, irrespective of their socio-economic background, they are aware of and are welcome to visit&nbsp;x&nbsp;museum, frequent&nbsp;x&nbsp;playpark, aspire to work or study in&nbsp;x&nbsp;location etc. Otherwise, the criticism that 15-minute cities would risk amplifying socio-economic differences may have legs.
Perhaps one of the greatest issues with the concept of &lsquo;15-minute city&rsquo; or &lsquo;20-minute neighbourhoods&rsquo; is the &lsquo;number of minutes&rsquo;. This is why talking about the concept of &lsquo;happy proximity&rsquo; instead is so attractive. Quoting Carlos Moreno in a recent interview with the Parkly team (<a href="https://helloparkly.com/sustainable-cities-of-happy-proximities-2/">Sustainable cities of happy proximities - helloparkly.com</a>)
The question with 15-minute city and 30-minute territory is not the number of minutes. Sometimes people are almost obsessed with the number of minutes, and it doesn&rsquo;t really matter if it is 15, 30, 17 or 35 minutes &mdash; that&rsquo;s not the point of the model.
Thinking about more rural locations, Moreno&rsquo;s view is that:
We should develop a sharing economy, such as sharing cars, and we could propose to small towns and ruralities new economic models supported by technologies, for example collective, shared mobility systems.
Instead of each small town having to try to invest in the same services for instance, we can think of a grid model for resources and create a shared territorial vision.
Happy proximity is contextual. While in some locations, it may be inappropriate and unrealistic for someone to have all their basic needs and wants within a 15-minute walk of their home, a balance can be struck whereby some of these needs are closer than others. But also for the services/facilities etc that are further afield, there should be room for innovation in terms of accessing these facilities more sustainably, or perhaps making those facilities mobile, or even sharing those facilities with neighbouring towns/villages. Mobile libraries are a great example of this, and not an innovation!
The point is, there is generally room for improving people&rsquo;s accessibility to places of interest, irrespective of where they live &mdash; and this is even more important now, for a range of reasons, including:
<ul>
<li>climate change and the need to travel more sustainability</li>
<li>people&rsquo;s physical health and mental health</li>
<li>the need to increase equity in accessibility</li>
<li>mixing up uses in neighbourhoods can add vitality to an area</li>
</ul>
In more rural areas, this may open the door to new opportunities such as:
<ul>
<li>opportunities for small localities to make joint business cases for new, shared facilities</li>
<li>opportunities for new businesses to start &lsquo;on wheels&rsquo;, reducing overheads and potentially reaching more people: eg bakeries, libraries, theatres, butchers, fishmongers</li>
<li>opportunities to seek investment for e-bike and e-scooter schemes</li>
</ul>
The idea for these opportunities to be tested as part of a &lsquo;shared territorial vision&rsquo; is particularly exciting. It is something that Diagonal&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/skyline-use-cases/">Skyline tool</a>&nbsp;is designed to do, effectively and cheaply.
If you would like to know more, or if you have a project that you&rsquo;d be intrigued to test,&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">get in touch!</a>.

15-minute city musings

Claire Fram

Something is missing in the active travel movement - consistent data to make accurate, sustainable and inclusive decisions. This blog explores one solution that Diagonal is championing and how we are calling for collaborators.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
Active travel &ndash; everyday journeys made by walking, wheeling, or cycling &ndash; has a range of benefits for people&rsquo;s health and the environment, including being a low-carbon form of travel. The UK Department for Transport (DfT) wants active travel to be the natural choice for shorter journeys in England, or part of longer journeys, by 2040.
</blockquote>
&ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/active-travel-in-england/">UK National Audit Office</a>
We need a consistent, open specification for recording, planning and publishing data about the physical infrastructure that supports active travel. This means we need better data on the UK&rsquo;s pathways, cycleways, and pedestrian crossings.&nbsp;
At Diagonal we have a purpose and a commitment to supporting positive change, systematically. In partnership with <a href="https://www.appliedinformation.group/">Applied</a>, we are calling for standardisation of pathways data in an Active Travel Data Specification (ATDS). This is why.
<h2 dir="ltr">Why active travel?</h2>
At Diagonal we work with data to help planners and architects who want to make positive changes in the urban environment. We make it easy for people to explore scenarios for change, using data and visualisation tools to democratise sophisticated analysis. We believe in the benefits of safe, accessible, well-designed pathways. So we want to make it easier to design <a href="https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/planning-for-the-future/healthy-streets#:~:text=The%20Healthy%20Streets%20Approach%20focuses,from%20getting%20out%20and%20about.">healthy streets</a> and <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/complete-streets">complete streets</a>. To do that at scale, we need consistency in the data behind development proposals.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
Research based on longitudinal population study data finds that journeys of walking and cycling maintain and improve physical and mental health across the life course. However, the data also show it is important that means of active travel are easily accessible to everyone so it can become part of peoples&rsquo; daily routine.
</blockquote>
[<a href="https://closer.ac.uk/news-opinion/news/active-travel-briefing-2023/#:~:text=Research%20based%20on%20longitudinal%20population%20study%20data%20finds,it%20can%20become%20part%20of%20peoples%E2%80%99%20daily%20routine." target="_blank" rel="noopener">CLOSER</a>]
To make active travel more accessible requires a detailed understanding of the landscape and currently this is hampered by poor quality, mismatched, differently labelled data. To&nbsp; unlock active travel&rsquo;s potential we need consistent information about existing infrastructure for active travel and consistent information about planned infrastructure for active travel. We need this type of data to be open and available to everyone.
<h2 dir="ltr">What&rsquo;s the problem?</h2>
In the UK and internationally, there is no agreed standard for recording or publishing data about where we can safely cycle, wheel, and walk.&nbsp; Data attributes are not aligned. Definitions of path width, surface materials, presence of steps, inclines, lighting or other factors related to the pathway are inconsistent. This makes the data unfit for multiple purposes and multiple systems.&nbsp;
The power of consistent data specifications comes from the power of interoperable data. Data that can be used in a range of tools and applications. Without a specification, anyone exploring trends or analyses of active travel has to consolidate multiple, separate datasets. Further, solutions stay localised, rather than scaling. For example, when active travel data takes a different shape in London, compared with Cardiff, compared with Edinburgh, application developers who want to build routing applications for wheelchair users don&rsquo;t have a reliable foundation to build with.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0H2MyWiIvM"> Or when planning new developments</a>, decision makers don&rsquo;t have data about the &lsquo;last mile&rsquo; that might connect a new project with employment opportunities, healthcare, or education.&nbsp;
And for active travel asset owners, there is no standardised way to collect or share information about their assets. This is unsustainable. It leads to wasted time and effort: re-invention and ad-hoc creation of new datasets which don&rsquo;t work with existing data. For local authorities and mapping providers this is a problem &ndash; they are unable to make use of this data or unlock its social value.&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">How do we fix it?</h2>
We are proposing an Active Travel Data Specification (ATDS), to provide guidance towards a consistent specification. We want to&nbsp; increase everyone&rsquo;s understanding of active travel infrastructure today, and what is planned in the future. Such a specification could power useful tools for safer active travel pathways.
A data specification for active travel will allow many disparate and dispersed stakeholders and interested parties to improve the ROI on their investment in active travel &ndash; ensuring collective knowledge grows and sustainability is ensured by better, high quality, and more comprehensive data..&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">What will it do?</h2>
By creating a reliable picture of the UK's pathways with coordinated data, it will enable better active travel planning, more inclusive routing applications, and greater efficiencies in data management at the local level. Developers and local authorities will be able to use data about active travel to understand multi-modal connectivity &ndash; beyond their own local boundaries. Large and small mapping apps will be able to surface information relevant to people with disabilities or additional mobility needs. And stakeholders will be able to access information about active travel infrastructure in the pipeline.&nbsp;
Ultimately the aim of the Active Travel Data Specification (ATDS) is to increase the amount of active travel journeys and to make sure this works best for people with greater need. This includes disabled and older people who will benefit the most from the interoperability of pathways data and more accurate and data-informed decisions.&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">How will it work?</h2>
The world has many transportation-related&nbsp; data specifications and data schemas for things like public transit schedules (like: General Transit Feed Specification &ndash; GTFS, Bus Rapid Transit&ndash; BRT, and even OpenStreetMap OSM.) So the concept of building consistent data to describe transport infrastructure is not new!&nbsp; Many of these specifications are now widely adopted and transit agencies wouldn&rsquo;t dream of operating without them. We will take inspiration from these schemas, systems, and codified publishing guidelines. The innovation is in applying these systems to active travel &ndash; not inventing a new way to standardise and share information.&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">Work with us</h2>
We can&rsquo;t do this alone! Applied and Diagonal are currently in the scoping phase of this project. If you are ready to pilot this with us, let&rsquo;s connect: <a href="mailto:claire@diagonal.works">claire@diagonal.works</a>

Active Travel Data Specification

Clara Peiret-Garcia

Chris Larkin

Rachael Sanderson

Sophie Mann

Sam Christelow

This blog was writen by PhD candidates at the&nbsp;<a href="https://geospatialcdt.ac.uk/">Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Geospatial Systems</a>, Clara Peiret-Garcia, Chris Larkin, Rachael Sanderson, Sophie Mann and Sam Christelow.
In late April, we collaborated with Diagonal as part of an event organised in conjunction with our PhD program, the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Geospatial Systems at the Universities of Newcastle and Nottingham. The event, known as Challenge Week, allowed us to work on a challenge proposed by a company over the course of a week. This year, we were fortunate to have Diagonal lead the challenge, an experience that proved to be extremely edifying. The challenge required us to answer the following question: &ldquo;Where is the 15-minute-city concept currently failing?&rdquo; employing geospatial data science techniques.
The 15-minute-city is an urban planning concept aimed at making cities more sustainable. The 15-minute-city envisions urban areas where residents can meet their daily needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their homes. It promotes the idea of compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods that offer a diverse range of amenities, such as shops, schools, parks, healthcare facilities, and workplaces, all within proximity. The idea is to make walking and cycling to all these amenities more convenient in order to reduce our dependence on cars, improving people&rsquo;s health and reducing pollution.
The 15-minute-city concept was not new to us. Some of our team members&rsquo; research focuses on using geospatial data science to explore the implementation of new urban planning models, such as low-traffic neighbourhoods, aimed at making our cities more sustainable and our communities more liveable. In this respect, the use of geospatial techniques plays a crucial role in achieving these goals. From urban planning to transport and mobility, geodata science can assist in making more informed decisions about zoning, resource allocation, or developing more efficient mobility solutions. This challenge was a great example of what geodata science can offer to policy makers in this respect.
From the very beginning, our group envisioned this challenge as an outstanding opportunity to learn from one another and from Diagonal. The company presented their software Bedrock (b6) to us, as one potential avenue we could use to solve the challenge. b6 is a tool that allows users to, amongst many other things, retrieve data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and perform a wide range of analyses, including routing and accessibility analyses. Following initial discussions, we all agreed on testing b6 and taking it to the limits by basing all our analysis on this tool. And we were not disappointed. b6 proved to be an exceptional tool for fetching data, with a speed that surprised us all, particularly those of us who had used other tools to retrieve OSM data. Its performance was so impressive that we eventually ran our analysis at a higher spatial resolution than initially intended.
For our analysis, we chose the city of Liverpool. Initially, our aim was to generate an accessibility index based on the categories of urban amenities that could be accessed from each neighbourhood. In a nutshell, we retrieved the limits of the different neighbourhoods in the city and the amenities we were interested in; schools, supermarkets, pharmacies, parks, entertainment, gyms, and ATMs, and calculated how many of them were within a 15-minute walk from the neighbourhoods&rsquo; centre. All these tasks we did using b6. We were particularly surprised at how little it took for us to understand the logic behind the tool. It is written in Python, which makes it intuitive and accessible to those familiar with this programming language. Surprised by b6&rsquo;s performance, we decided on pushing its limits a bit more and moving the analysis down to building level, which, to our surprise, worked fantastically well.
Our outputs can be accessed&nbsp;<a href="https://rpubs.com/cpeiretgarcia/1050760">here</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://rpubs.com/cpeiretgarcia/1050763">here</a>.
The rapidness with which we obtained our results allowed us to expand our analysis. As a second phase of the study, we incorporated geodemographic data, extracted from the&nbsp;<a href="https://census.gov.uk/">Census 2021</a>, to better characterise our study areas. Overall, the experience was extremely rewarding, and insightful, as it allowed us to further our knowledge both on the technical side of the analysis but also on the socio economic reality of Liverpool.
Collaborating with Diagonal proved to be an exceptional experience. The team&rsquo;s unwavering commitment to the challenge was truly impressive, as they maintained constant communication with us through a dedicated Slack channel. Their prompt responsiveness greatly enhanced our productivity, which was particularly valuable given the time limitations we faced during the challenge.
Furthermore, Diagonal&rsquo;s willingness to incorporate participant suggestions and swiftly update the tool on-the-go demonstrated its agile approach to work. By the end of the week, we all felt fully supported throughout the challenge and recognised the immense benefits that resulted from our collaboration with Diagonal.
Overall, we will definitely reflect on this year&rsquo;s Challenge Week as one to remember, and b6 as a tool to look forward to. We are particularly excited about what Diagonal will develop in the future, so, as geodata scientists, we will keep an eye on them!

Guest blog: Where is the 15 minute-city concept currently failing?

<section>
In this post, we share our experience to date of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/civtech-7">CivTech Scotland</a>&nbsp;process, and our approach to responding to Challenge 7.13:&nbsp;How can we use technology to better understand the issues facing our town centres, and be a catalyst for revitalisation?
Why &lsquo;Challenge 7.13&rsquo; and why Diagonal?
<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/civtech-7-challenges#block-049481f6b4188663ab4f">Challenge 7.13</a>&nbsp;immediately jumped out for its relevance to our work, and its links to our own ambition: to use our geospatial technology to help people understand and shape the urban environment. Our technology is designed to process large quantities of data, which is typically held in silos, to provide a very rich baseline understanding of a place. It can process data incredibly fast and therefore is not comparable to traditional GIS mapping tools. It also allows for co-creation and collaborative approaches to data gathering and analysis, which is a particularly powerful approach in the context of place-making.
What is CivTech and what does it involve?
In brief, the CivTech process is designed to match innovative and scalable digital solutions to problems faced by public sector organisations in Scotland.
The process started in September 2022 with a 3-week &lsquo;Exploration Stage&rsquo;. Diagonal was shortlisted alongside 2 other companies to propose solutions to Challenge 7.13.
The &lsquo;Exploration Stage&rsquo; was a short but intense period of meetings and workshops to allow us to explore the problem further. We collaborated with challenge sponsors and spoke with stakeholders to prepare an updated, more refined solution response. Our proposal was selected as the successful solution to address revitalising town centres. The sponsors selected our solution because of the holistic approach we offer, and because of our focus on streamlining the evidence-gathering process for local plan development.
We joined a cohort of 14 other successful teams (each responding to a different challenge) to go through the 15-week Accelerator stage which kicked off in mid- October.
The challenge sponsors (i.e. the organisations setting the problem) are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotborders.gov.uk/">Scottish Borders Council</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.southofscotlandenterprise.com/">South of Scotland Enterprise</a>&nbsp;(SOSE). For the Accelerator, our project focuses on the Scottish Borders town of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/14496333">Galashiels</a>. Our solution will support the Local Place Plans, as well as more broadly assisting with directing investment to the town in a very effective and transparent way.
We&rsquo;re halfway through the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/civtech-7-challenges">CivTech 7 Challenges</a>&nbsp;process and are now preparing for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtechdemoday.com/">Demo Day</a>&nbsp;which will take place in February 2023!
Our collaborative approach
We&rsquo;ve been working very closely with our sponsors since inception and have welcomed their support and enthusiasm for our technology. This collaborative approach is intrinsic to our work: every step of the way we have sense-checked our assumptions with our sponsors and key stakeholders, and asked for input and feedback, digging deep into &lsquo;needs&rsquo; and &lsquo;goals&rsquo;, and drilling into the essence of the challenge.
This approach is designed to ensure our tool meaningfully answers the challenge question but also potentially optimises wider organisational processes.
Our approach has been entirely transparent, creating a sound and trusting working relationship. In turn, our sponsors&rsquo; support has allowed us to meet with a breadth of subject matter experts and gain access to critical data to inform our analysis.
At this half-way point, we are pulling together the data that our solution will use to address the challenge. The data was informed by a review of strategic, national, and local planning policies alongside focused conversations with sponsors and key stakeholders. Our in-house planning expertise has been instrumental in our ability to navigate the breadth of relevant strategies and policies and identifying key priorities.
Alongside the data-gathering and review exercise we are building the wireframe for our solution. This prototype will be the interface between our technology and our users. This will allow us to test our tooling with key users to inform the final iteration of our MVP which we will launch at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtechdemoday.com/day-three-agenda">CivTech&rsquo;s Demo Day, in February</a>.
Watch this space for more updates on our progress, what to expect from us on Demo Day and any developments beyond this. And if the problem we are seeking to address is something you too are grappling with, feel free to get in touch:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

Our CivTech Scotland experience

Our Principal Planner, Veronica Barbaro, offers her reflections of our first Demo Day for CivTech Scotland, on February 8th.
Taking part in CivTech Scotland&rsquo;s Demo Day, the culmination of a fast paced 15-week accelerator programme through which we developed our solution to Civtech Challenge 7.13:&nbsp;How can we use technology to better understand the issues facing our town centres, and be a catalyst for revitalisation?
Demo Day was our opportunity to promote our MVP, pitch for a particular &lsquo;ask&rsquo;, make more connections and crucially have an opportunity to share our work with high-profile Scottish Government officials.
The CivTech team put so much effort into ensuring the day would run as smoothly as possible, from hours of presentation skills training available to all presenters, slide deck reviews, dry runs and countless offers of help and advice. It is clear that Demo Day was as important to them as it was to us. And that&rsquo;s understandable given that the organisation&rsquo;s reputation heavily relies on the success of the programme which is supported by a broad range of partners and has just secured&nbsp;<a href="https://futurescot.com/government-announces-10m-in-funding-for-civtech-challenges-in-2023/#:~:text=Government%20announces%20%C2%A310m%20in%20funding%20for%20CivTech%20challenges,series%20of%20tech-related%20challenges%20in%20the%20year%20ahead">&pound;10 million of Scottish Government funding</a>&nbsp;to support the 2023 programme of challenges!
In terms of Demo Day itself, the in-person event was held at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms though many attended online. There were 13 companies presenting their solutions to the CivTech 7 challenges, all following the same format: 2 minute sponsor introduction, 6 minute pitch, and 3 minute Q&amp;A. In between the presentations we heard from Ivan McKee MSP (Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise), Geoff Huggins (Director of Digital, Scottish Government) and Ms Clare Haughey MSP (Minister for Children and Young People, Scottish Government). There were also updates from past participants and a fireside chat which focused on the importance of digital and innovation for the public sector. If this wasn&rsquo;t already obvious to those attending/ tuning into the event, the need for the public sector to truly engage with digital innovation to deliver the best services it can to its citizens was highlighted as absolutely critical.
When it came to Diagonal&rsquo;s pitch, we were super excited to share the work we have been doing, working collaboratively with our sponsors&nbsp;<a href="https://www.southofscotlandenterprise.com/">South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE)</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotborders.gov.uk/">Scottish Borders Council (SBC)</a>. Our pitch included a demo of our MVP which will ultimately lead to the development, over the coming months. of&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/hello-skyline/">Skyline</a>, a &lsquo;Software as a Service&rsquo; (SaaS) tool available UK-wide in the not-so-distant future.
To enable us to develop and launch Skyline, our ask was (and still is!) for Scottish public sector organisations to pilot our MVP in the coming months, to test and refine it, and add to its functionalities. The Q&amp;A was brief but we were asked a number of interesting questions including what use cases beyond town centres might be relevant to our work. We will be reflecting on this question in our next blog post, so watch this space!
If you have watched our presentation and read about our work and would like to know more, or if you are interested in piloting with us,&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/product/">sign up here</a>&nbsp;for updates or get in touch with us at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

CivTech Scotland Demo Day Reflections

Maddie Kortenaar

Apply by 1 December 2023 with Diagonal to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/digital-planning/funding/digital-planning-programme-funding-2023/">Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) Digital Planning and PropTech Innovation Funds.</a>&nbsp;Funds of up to &pound;85,000 are available for Local Planning Authorities and up to &pound;225,000 for joint Local Authority projects.
Our consultancy service is specifically tailored for Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) who are looking to enhance their digital capabilities in spatial planning.
We specialise in streamlining data analysis for planning processes and collaborating with local authorities to democratise the adoption of digital capabilities. These are crucial elements for modernising and streamlining planning practices. We do this by focusing on three priority areas:
<ul>
<li>Making data usable</li>
<li>Making data and analysis easy to share and visualise</li>
<li>Supporting scenario planning</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/3c227630-4778-4f48-8ae1-19e704f9fa3b?width=1280&amp;height=680" alt="Our process" loading="lazy">
How we work together
The Fund allows LPAs to work with suppliers that can inform their tech capabilities and capacities. Diagonal can help with identifying training needs, delivering digital planning improvements, compliance with new legislations, and service improvements.
Our team will:
<ul>
<li>Provide the framework for measuring improvements in the planning process. This includes facilitating workshops with your planning team to detail metrics for programme evaluation.</li>
<li>Connect your planners with (open source) data, and conduct tutorials and workshops about how to access and interpret this data &ndash; including licensing terms, data precision, and data gaps.</li>
<li>Support LPAs navigating tooling to make use of the data, including performing basic analysis questions, sharing solutions, and system interoperability.</li>
</ul>
In addition to working with open source tools and data sets, we offer our clients early access to our planning tool, Skyline. Tested in urban and rural planning scenarios Skyline has been designed to address and simplify technical spatial analysis. This means planning teams can access and use valuable insights from the data they have available, without the need for specialised GIS expertise.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/8bb28254-06f4-4771-91c3-78eadefe4f46?width=1494&amp;height=1852" alt="View from our tool Skyline" loading="lazy">
Why work with Diagonal?
Diagonal is a steward-owned data visualisation consultancy. We specialise in the ethical use of data, making complex data accessible and actionable for LPAs.
Our planning tool Skyline can support LPAs in understanding sites within their context, taking environmental and built constraints into account, as well as key socio-environmental factors. For any given site, LPAs will be able to understand:
<ul>
<li>How it is served by key services and facilities</li>
<li>What gaps in provision are there surrounding the site</li>
<li>How it is connected to the wider area</li>
<li>Who may be impacted by any changes to the site</li>
</ul>
We prioritise the use of open data; this ensures our analysis is transparent and repeatable. The use of Skyline as part of a digital citizen engagement exercise can support the building of building trust between LPAs and stakeholders by providing a visually interactive and transparent approach to site assessment.
Apply today
Time is short &ndash; the latest round of funding opened this month, and the deadline is December 1, 2023. Our team is ready to hear about your needs and ambitions, to help you make the best use of this funding to upgrade and augment your digital capacity and capability. Read more about eligibility and funding scope&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/dluhc-funding-info/">here</a>.
Start the conversation with us and find out more by&nbsp;<a href="https://calendar.app.google/Qh5GiwcN3T3LanxTA">setting up a call today</a>, or send us an email at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>

Apply for DLUHC Digital Planning Programme 2023 Funding Rounds with Diagonal

Lucy Brett

The government has announced the joining together of two programmes of work: the digital planning improvement fund and the proptech innovation fund. It is a fixed grant amount, ringfenced for a defined set of improvement activities:
<ul>
<li>Identified training needs</li>
<li>Delivering digital planning improvements</li>
<li>Preparing for legislative changes (for example relating to the now in force Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill), and</li>
<li>Improving services.</li>
</ul>
Who is it for?
Local Planning Authorities (the planning departments of Local Authorities.)
What is the vision?
The funding is designed to help create a &ldquo;new, more modular, software landscape&rdquo; which will:
<ul>
<li>encourage digital innovation, and</li>
<li>provide access to underlying data.</li>
</ul>
The intention is that this will &ldquo;help automate routine processes&rdquo; making support faster, and allow for &ldquo;more certain decision-making&rdquo;
What is the purpose of the funds?
It is designed to provide funding for local planning authorities that want to adopt modern planning practices by improving:
<ul>
<li>Planning data</li>
<li>Digital capabilities</li>
<li>Development management software</li>
</ul>
What are the themes?
Theme 1: land assessment, viability and feasibility
Theme 2: land assessment, small sites
Theme 3: land assessment, land and site assembly
Theme 4: land assessment, wildcard
Theme 5: digital citizen engagement - visualisation
What should applicants consider?
<ul>
<li>They should demonstrate awareness of what has already been achieved in the PropTech Innovation Fund</li>
<li>Explore the Fund&rsquo;s focus on leveraging existing products in the market and working with suppliers to inform tech capabilities.&nbsp;This is where Diagonal can support.</li>
<li>Understand the importance of commitment to establishing a baseline and benchmark data to measure success</li>
<li>Demonstrate, where relevant, welcoming in partners and industry allies as project enablers</li>
</ul>
DLUHC includes a number of examples of how working with collaborators might be beneficial including:
<ul>
<li>Adopting and implementing off-the-shelf digital products. As noted above, this may include a budget for some digital enhancements and product development to evolve existing products.</li>
<li>Analysis, management and integration of data sets to inform assessment/modelling.</li>
<li>Enabling local authority staff time to resource each pilot, including project engagement and collaboration with PropTech Innovation Fund Round 4 partners, suppliers and DLUHC stakeholders.</li>
<li>Training and capacity building across local authority teams to support longer term adoption and integration of digital tools and services.</li>
<li>DLUHC&rsquo;s expectation is that projects will run for a maximum of 9 to 12 months, concluding by December 2024.</li>
</ul>
NB the fund is not for:
<ul>
<li>Speculative projects</li>
<li>Tailored grant amounts</li>
<li>Projects with current or prospective software providers</li>
<li>Digitisation of documents</li>
<li>Software licences or subscriptions</li>
<li>Hardware</li>
</ul>
When are successful applications announced?
January-February 2024.
How much is available?
<ul>
<li>Individual local authorities can apply for up to &pound;85,000</li>
<li>Joint local authority projects can apply for up to &pound;225,000</li>
</ul>
Visit the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/digital-planning/funding/">DLUHC website</a>&nbsp;for information on how to apply.
Start the conversation with us and find out more:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>

DLUHC Digital Planning Innovation Fund and the opportunity for Local Planning Authorities

On June 25 Veronica spoke at a <a href="https://emptyhomespartnership.scot/">Scottish Empty Homes Partnership</a> workshop on &lsquo;Mapping, data, communities &amp; empty homes&rsquo;. It was a great opportunity to hear about different initiatives and digital tools developed to support the re-use of empty buildings, with the primary aim to tackle chronic housing shortages across Scotland and beyond.&nbsp;
Speakers included representatives from&nbsp;<a href="https://landhero.org/">Land Hero</a>, <a href="https://sosch.org/">South of Scotland Community Housing (SOSCH)</a>, <a href="https://www.grandbequest.co.uk/">Grand Bequest</a>, <a href="https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/">Habitat for Humanity Great Britain</a>, <a href="https://www.scottishfuturestrust.org.uk/">Scottish Futures Trust</a>.
Topics discussed included: the link between infrastructure development and inclusive growth and sustainability; transforming empty and derelict buildings into ESG impact investments; how to release development sites from complicated utility constraints; the complexity of submitting information to brownfield registers; and the importance of communities and engaging those communities in action and decision-making.
The discussion highlighted the power of communities in relation to tackling challenging scenarios around the re-use of empty properties. Unlike developers, communities care and have a lot of knowledge about and connections to empty buildings in their area. They also experience first hand the potential economic and social benefits of bringing vacant buildings back into use, particularly when this translates into the creation of new affordable homes that meet specific local needs.&nbsp;
Veronica was invited to talk about the collaborative project that saw Diagonal working closely with Rachel Whale, Scottish Borders Council&rsquo;s Empty Homes Officer, for a period of over 6 months, starting in June 2023. This was in the context of Diagonal&rsquo;s involvement in a Civtech Scotland tech accelerator programme as part of which we collaborated with a number of Local Authority Officers and other stakeholders to develop and build Skyline, our recently launched place baseline assessment tool. Veronica gave a demonstration of Skyline explaining how, adopting a data-driven approach to understanding the context of a place, at building level,can help unpick some of the reasons behind a prevalence of empty homes in a given location. Skyline can also help to understand the potential impact of introducing change in a village, town, city, such as introducing amenities in currently under-provided areas. Veronica also showed how Skyline can help those planning and making decisions about vacant sites explore how its scenario planning feature could help in their work by offering fast visualisations of the impact for change on homes and businesses.
 You can view the whole <a href="https://youtu.be/HfbGnjt50bw?si=H1ei-0Uh6BrtBfi1">recording here.</a>

How digital innovation can help solve the challenges posed by empty housing

Gala Camacho

As part of the 2023 Architecture Fringe Gala attended a session on Feminist Urbanism &ndash; what is it and why now? Here are some of her thoughts on the session and how we can build a more equitable future.
Diagonal is a majority female owned, steward led company. Part of our remit is making sure our work considers wider social good, and we are committed to making urban spaces equitable and accessible, and understanding how and why that is important to making them safe, thriving and inclusive for everyone.
Feminist Urbanism - what is it and why now?
The event was a conversation lead by Daisy Narayanan MBE and Jude Barber who spoke to Councillor Holly Bruce of Glasgow City Council and Professor Suzanne Ewing of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ed.ac.uk/women-make-cities">Women Make Cities Initiative</a>&nbsp;from the University of Edinburgh.
It had a lot of audience participation, which was refreshing, interesting, and incredibly empowering. The audience was not as mixed as you might have hoped &ndash; there were few men in the audience, expected but disappointing..
If I think about the title of the event, I would have called it &ldquo;Feminist Urbanism - we know what it is and its long overdue&rdquo;, but working in urbanism, I have come to see that &ldquo;feminism&rdquo; still needs a soft introduction and many times, as in other discourse, people still consider it adversarial.
Councillor Bruce started the conversation strongly by saying that feminist urbanism is &ldquo;not just about [women] existing in space it&rsquo;s about thriving in space. We should start with what is strong vs what is wrong.&rdquo;
I appreciated the focus on thriving rather than just existing, as I believe cities do have the power to push people into opportunities and improve their life outcomes (as well as do the opposite).
Focusing on strengths and what works seems the right approach but sometimes we have to unpack if what is working is also relying on some power imbalances that are overall negative and counter the cause. Specifically, in urbanism it&rsquo;s important to ask - where does it work and how is that place the same or different to where you are, in the urban form but also in the demographics, the politics, the culture, etc?
The event raised the profile of an interesting project: &rsquo;<a href="https://www.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/files/a_city_built_on_baskets_final.pdf">A City Built on Baskets</a>&rsquo; which is part of the Women Make Cities initiative, led by Freya Purcell, who is documenting and exploring how women street sellers in Edinburgh shaped the urban space in the 18th and 19th centuries. The project has highlighted many side benefits the street sellers brought to the city. For example, how street selling gave women the ability to earn a living without having to afford a shop but also, their mere presence sometimes acted as a contributing factor to others feeling safe. It&rsquo;s not the same thing, but it made me think back on some initiatives taken a few years back in Mexico City to clean up the &ldquo;vendedores ambulates&rdquo; &ndash; street sellers &ndash; in the very famous plaza of Coyoacan, and the way the place has not been the same. Informal economies can be a huge part of the blood that runs through city veins. I am very much looking forward to following this research project as it continues.
After the event, talking to other attendees, it was clear that there are a lot of people keen to come together and discuss this type of urbanism. One that includes and re-thinks the way our cities operate, in the path towards imagining a better way, a more equitable way to evolve them
To find out more about how and why we created Diagonal and our social purpose look&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonalworks.notion.site/Charter-Public-Copy-7641959989504a2ca6b8727a7d94ebd6">here</a>.

Architecture Fringe - Feminist Urbanism

<a href="https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/planning-and-redevelopment/how-feminist-urbanism-could-transform-glasgow-10019">Glasgow Councillors met this week to talk</a>&nbsp;about incorporating the lived-experience of women and girls into their planning and decision making processes, and &lsquo;embed gender equality into the City Development Plan.&rsquo;
This is not a simple undertaking for Scottish cities or any urban spaces globally. It is imperative that decisions in the built environment be informed by the lived experiences of all women.
Veronica and Gala have been exploring this internally, with thoughts and inspiration from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nourhan-bassam-39164b78">Nourhan Bassam</a>. Our Data Science Lead Gala asked: What could we measure - directly from the built environment, which would provide insight into whether an area makes women feel safe and comfortable in the space? Could we test, with urban environment data, some of the considerations and challenges being explored by policymakers who want to embed gender equality in ways that ensure truly inclusive and equitable cities?
The real work of feminist urbanism will have, in part, to start in evaluating how what we have already built, supports or hinders women to thrive in the city.
Many will jump on board to do this, but we should be mindful that sometimes the biggest and best change comes from making space for new voices and new players.
Analysis and ideas that come with fresh eyes and are less loaded with baggage. It will be important that in the path to &ldquo;listen to women&rdquo; cities take an intersectional approach and go above and beyond to include all different kinds of women, and mirror the approach within the women population. This means listening to those who are most marginalised. A lot of times the &ldquo;voice of women&rdquo; is actually the voice of affluent and/or white women.
We hope this group and others looking to bring women and girls&rsquo; experience into city planning and decision making take inspiration from Audre Lorde:
&ldquo;I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.&rdquo;
Our cities are not feminist cities if they don&rsquo;t work for the most marginalised.
The feminist urbanism agenda must break beyond binaries.
Our Planning Lead Veronica added that decision makers should be wary.
&lsquo;To really be inclusive means recognising different needs&nbsp;irrespective&nbsp;of gender, and understanding the links between societal issues and the built environment.
It is going to be very difficult to plan for women if we don&rsquo;t interrogate and challenge gender stereotypes around public spaces e.g. all there is in this park is a skatepark and a basketball court and that doesn&rsquo;t cater for girls: maybe it doesn&rsquo;t, but maybe it does or could.
From personal experience this is not necessarily true - I loved hanging out in skateparks and played basketball - while lots of boys didn&rsquo;t. What I didn&rsquo;t like about skateparks was the wolf whistling from older boys and staring. The systemic social issue reflective of a highly patriarchal society was the problem, not the space itself.&rsquo;
Get in touch to talk more about Feminist Urbanism, explore how data can support the creation of equitable urban environments or to learn about how principles of inclusion and equity are embedded in our tools and approach to geospatial data visualisation.

Feminist Urbanism for policymakers is not a simple undertaking

On Wednesday December 6, 2023, the Diagonal team hosted its first online event. It was an informal online conversation focussing on key issues. We discussed the role of GIS in planning practice, and the opportunities for geospatial tools to support a more digital and innovative system.
We were lucky to have an excellent panel hosted by our own planner, Veronica Barbaro:
<ul>
<li>Adam Sheppard:&nbsp;University of Birmingham</li>
<li>Gala Camacho:&nbsp;Diagonal</li>
<li>Frances Summers:&nbsp;University of Gloucestershire. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council</li>
<li>Lucy Styles:&nbsp;Aberdeenshire Council</li>
</ul>
It was a short session but we covered a lot of ground. Catch up on the full session <a href="http://static.diagonal.works/videos/Diagonal_GIS_Beyond_Maps_06-12-2023.mp4" target="_self">here</a>.
Initially we looked at the current landscape, definitions and understanding of GIS amongst the planning community, and blockers to effective use. Then we moved to the future - how GIS could be used, how the role of the planner is changing, and future opportunities brought about by AI and considerations around that.
What follows is a summary of the discussion:
The panel started by focusing on benefits for planners of embracing GIS more and crucially its role in making complex information easier to share with communities: visualising it in a way that anyone can understand it.
However, GIS is in a different place in the private and public sectors. For LAs, where resources are stretched, capacity to use GIS to its full potential is lost, with practitioners only able to scrape the surface of what visualisation tools can do. A knock on of smaller budgets is also that often only the more basic and less intuitive tools are available, or tools are not being used as intended - neither scenario is necessarily conducive to enabling progress and innovation.
As one panellist noted a lot of GIS tools are generalist tools (that want to be &lsquo;anything in a box&rsquo;) and as a working community we then apply these to a fairly specific discipline: this has a direct impact on planning practice and how decisions are made. Tools end up dictating planning work rather than the other way around. We end up measuring things that are easy to measure and missing out as there is value in tools that are more open ended.
We also discussed a current skills shortage. Panellist noted that University planning schools do their best to ensure students are familiar with GIS tools and are confident in using them with GIS specific modules and assessments, tending to be integral to undergraduate courses. The panel did reflect that it is more difficult to give GIS the same level of attention in postgraduate degrees, though the role of universities is really to provide insight, orientation, and instil sufficient confidence in students for them to want to pursue further learning.
This is important as the profession is changing, and with it so are skills requirements and focus. There are opportunities in the new landscape. Becoming a &lsquo;digital planner&rsquo; is now a realistic career prospect. This means that increasingly, there will be a broader range of interest, competency and reliance on GIS tools amongst planners.
We explored definitions. One panellist noted that the term GIS needs to be broken down. To some people it&rsquo;s a map on a pdf, to some people it&rsquo;s heavy computation. And GIS is currently very much used for data gathering, but we forget about its potential to speed up data analysis.
The good news that emerges from these discussions is that GIS tools provide the opportunity to take into account datasets that would not usually be considered in planning practice, providing more depth and richness to planning strategies. They can support the drive to bring public health at the heart of the planning policy agenda; they can expand evidence gathering to include the health and cultural economies, and to explore how policy changes can impact certain demographics.
As we know, artificial Intelligence is rapidly gaining traction in many sectors. A significant challenge planners must reckon with is how to build and maintain trust with communities when incorporating AI. We don&rsquo;t yet fully understand how AI tools will impact planning. As new models are incorporated across different use cases: communities need to have an opportunity to feedback into model assumptions, to ensure their lived experience is not omitted from planning decisions.
This discussion led us on to government responsibility in the wider landscape and the importance of trust and trustworthiness. The panel spoke about the onus on the government to regulate the technology industry. Tech providers who offer proptech/plantech software should have a responsibility to enhance trust between communities and planners. Proptech/plantech should be built responsibly, by diverse teams, who have undergone the requisite checks and meet appropriate standards.
Our next panel
We are planning more events for 2024. We always appreciate feedback, and ideas for new sessions. If there&rsquo;s anything you&rsquo;d like to discuss at our next panel please email <a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works" target="_self">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

How should GIS boost your planning capabilities and enhance your projects?

<section>
Welcome to our current project. We will be unveiling the MVP of our expansive new project Skyline at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/civtech-7-demo-day-live-stream-tickets-476435189477">CivTech 7 Demo Day Live Stream, on 08 Feb 2023.</a>&nbsp;Here, our founders give some insight into how we created Skyline, what it is for, the problems it solves and how it might be used going forward.
<h3>What are we doing?</h3>
We received funding as part of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/blog/t6xkt8t8xmzkd40mo1cv73b1ye037j">CivTech&rsquo;s accelerator grant scheme</a>&nbsp;which allowed us to propose an innovative solution to a complex challenge for those planning, investing in and developing urban spaces.
As discussed in our recent blog&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/civtech-experience/">here</a>&nbsp;&mdash; Skyline is our response to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/civtech-challenge-7-13-town-centre-revitalisation">CivTech Challenge 7.13,</a>&nbsp;sponsored by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotborders.gov.uk/">Scottish Borders Council</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.southofscotlandenterprise.com/">South of Scotland Enterprise</a>:
How can we use technology to better understand the issues facing our town centres, and be a catalyst for revitalisation?
This month we are showcasing our MVP: Skyline, pitching it to stakeholders in the public, private and third sectors. We will demonstrate exactly how far our solution to CivTech&rsquo;s challenge can go &mdash; for wider-scale use and commercialisation.
<h3>What is Skyline?</h3>
Skyline is an evolving web application that:
<ul>
<li>Streamlines baseline assessments for planning applications</li>
<li>Unlocks investment for local place improvements</li>
<li>Enables complex scenario testing</li>
<li>Facilitates dialogue between communities and local planning teams</li>
<li>Provides a transparent, replicable assessment process</li>
</ul>
Skyline is built on Diagonal&rsquo;s geospatial analysis engine, Bedrock. This allows planners and those making investment decisions about city spaces to utilise datasets from multiple data sources, in a spatial context, and with temporal dimensionality (like transit schedules), to understand and visualise changes and impacts.
Bedrock will be open source, and available to anyone working in the space. Skyline will be a SaaS product that planning teams, investment agencies, and developers will be able to use within their planning processes. We will also provide bespoke support for clients with specific and intricate challenges, to extend Skyline&rsquo;s scope to answer even the most complex or sensitive questions.
<h3>What are our aims?</h3>
As a steward-owned business, we put purpose over profit &mdash; and our work is designed to have a positive social impact. Our aim is to support the best and most socially useful plans by making data and evidence easy to access and interpret. We believe that transparent, reproducible data analysis needs to go hand-in-hand with evidence-based decision making.
Skyline was built for the 7.13 CivTech challenge to answer the complex question of how to revitalise town centres. Town centre decline is a multidimensional challenge. The holistic approach taken to address town centre vibrancy is applicable and scalable to place-based investment decisions for city high streets, urban neighbourhoods and rural communities.
<h3>Why is Skyline needed now?</h3>
The problem with the current approach to place-based investment decisions is that planners divert time to gathering and organising data, rather than exploring the consequences of proposed schemes&rsquo; investments.
Skyline will allow them to look closely at the impact of their investment and actions across multiple datasets.
Collecting relevant data, and analysing it in a relevant way, takes time and can be automated. Effective and useful scenario planning also relies on the baseline data, but it cannot be automated in the same way as baseline assessments &mdash; those making planning decisions or deciding how and whether to invest in urban spaces need to customise scenarios (changing land-uses or repurposing vacant buildings).
This can be unapproachable to non-technical audiences. Skyline is designed to have a user-friendly, intuitive interface that encourages experimentation and innovation, and works to allow planners and investors to visualise how changes to an environment play out over time. Additionally it lets them consider a huge variety of datasets &mdash; from demographic information to environmental considerations &mdash; fast.
<h3>Want to know more?</h3>
We can&rsquo;t wait to start introducing Skyline to our friends, colleagues and peers. If you&rsquo;d like to get involved, collaborate, or find out more, please get in touch via&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/product">sign up here</a> for updates.
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

Introducing Skyline

Andrew Eland

Simona Ciocoiu

Cities continually invest in technology to improve the lives of people living and working within them, from London&rsquo;s modern sewer system of the 19th Century to this week&rsquo;s test of Crossrail&rsquo;s central section. Our purpose at Diagonal is to build digital technology that helps cities evolve, as responsibly as we can, while recognising technology is a small part of any change.
Right now, we&rsquo;re trying to make it easier to work with data about cities. We need data to understand and manage changes to cities, and also to formulate ideas for improvement. We need data to communicate those ideas to the people they impact, involving them in their evolution. We need data to monitor whether the implementation of an idea had the consequences expected, and influence the next cycle of improvement. Paying careful attention to governance, we can use data to enforce policy.
Cities are increasingly represented by data, from structured planning and licensing applications to live air quality measurements. The digitisation of services, and the falling cost of sensor technology, feeds this representation. We believe more good can come from this data, if we build better tools. Current tools use discrete datasets to inspect single systems. In reality, cities are a messy ballet of interconnected systems, from housing and transportation to wilderness, food supply and air quality. Current tools don&rsquo;t help you think through the impact of changes to one system on another, separating layers by design. This limitation can result in narrow data being used to bring false confidence to predetermined solutions, rather than help those solutions evolve. At worst, the naive use of data comes at the unnecessary expense of equity and privacy. We&rsquo;d like to help change this. We&rsquo;re not sure how far we&rsquo;ll get, but we&rsquo;re excited to try.
Diagonal works with organisations changing cities, helping them embrace the scale and nuance of urban data, working together to evolve ideas. We build custom software tools necessary to turn complex urban data into insight. We fuse data into a single representation of a city&rsquo;s systems, using privacy preserving technologies to safely unlock sensitive data. We believe these tools allow us to take on problems others can&rsquo;t.
Change in cities takes time, and requires the involvement of the people within them. We designed our company to align ourselves with these needs. We&rsquo;re steward-owned, backed by a small number of private investors. We generate revenue from consultancy work to sustainably build our own tools, and hope to evolve these tools into commercial products. We intend this model to allow us to make the long-term commitments necessary when working within the urban environment. We work with open data, and auditable technology we develop ourselves, allowing us to be transparent about our work. We design tools to make analysis results transparent and accessible to the people impacted by the projects we support. We draw inspiration from cities, and established Diagonal to repay that debt. If you&rsquo;re interested the details, you can read our internal charter.
Our name, Diagonal, comes from crossings such as Shibuya&rsquo;s. These crossings are small, but powerful, examples of how innovation can change how people experience a city while addressing equity in existing systems - in this case, car centricity. We hope to build technology that will similarly impact the experience individuals and communities have in cities.
We&rsquo;ll write more about our work in future, in the meantime, if you&rsquo;d like to talk or think we can help, we&rsquo;re hello@diagonal.works.

How it started

<section>
We received an&nbsp;<a href="https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=10044215">Innovate UK FastStart Grant</a>&nbsp;in October 2022 to open source the tooling we have been working on for the past few years.
Since we founded Diagonal, we have been building our own analysis engine tooling, to help us in the work we deliver with clients and partners creating a positive impact in cities and the built environment. We use data exploration and prototyping as part of research, and use prototyping to steer our research questions &ndash; so when we found existing tooling was too slow, we started to build our own engine so we could test our ideas faster, and without worrying about the size of data we wanted to explore. Internally, we started calling this tool Bedrock (b6). We will share more about b6 in the coming weeks and months- as we release it, test it, and gather feedback.
It&rsquo;s important to us to make our tooling open. Our clients and partner organisations are local authorities, public agencies and their supply-partners, actors who invest in the built environment. We want to see more transparency and accountability in the analysis that informs these projects. By making our technology open, we hope to remove friction and barriers to a more holistic, broader review of investment decisions.
Diagonal is a steward owned company. We are legally bound to fulfil our purpose &ndash; improve the quality of life of those living in cities &ndash; above profit. We don&rsquo;t believe that proprietary technology is in the best interest of our cities and towns. Local authorities shouldn&rsquo;t be locked-in to vendors. If our work is no longer meeting our clients&rsquo; needs, we don&rsquo;t want to be profiting from a vice.
We are delighted that Innovate UK saw the value in our analysis engine, our goals, and vision. If you want to join us as a preview-partner, to test b6 and give us feedback, let us know by signing up&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/product/">here.</a>
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

Innovate UK funding to open source Bedrock (b6)

When the tolerance for risk is, rightly, very low &ndash; how might we update a healthcare system that was not designed for the needs of patients with multiple, chronic conditions? We worked with&nbsp;<a href="https://uclpartners.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">UCL Partners</a> to address this challenge, building a sandbox for decision makers to break-down the enormity of this task into tangible scenarios.&nbsp;
UCL Partners, a health innovation partnership, asked us to model a radical change to healthcare service. This project stretched our definition of who an urban planner is, in the best possible way. Diagonal&rsquo;s purpose is to improve the quality of life of those living in cities. While we typically work with clients who are responsible for infrastructure design and place planning, working with a health partner like UCL Partners allowed us to fold in population health into our model of the world.&nbsp;
UCL Partners came to us with the question: How might we provide better care to a high-needs patient group, through a new poly-clinic care model? And will the demand be serviceable by the existing workforce and resources? &lsquo;High-needs&rsquo; was defined by several parameters, focusing on long-term, chronic, comorbidities, including the following six comorbidities: diabetes, hypertension, COPD, depression, dementia, and cancer.
<h2 dir="ltr">What we did</h2>
We built a system to explore the impact of these new poly-clinics on healthcare provision and workforce demand. We explored this problem at a neighbourhood level and across the whole population. To do this, we had to understand who was likely to have one or more chronic comorbidity and where they were likely to live. With this information, we could start to model new care scenarios. For example, what would happen if patients with comorbidities had a recommended number of routine appointments with specialist care providers, rather than many reactive appointments with GPs and Consultants? How many of these new appointments would be needed? Should the frequency of appointments be recommended by the number of comorbidities a person has? Or by their age? What communities could have the highest demand for these services? Where are there gaps in the existing health infrastructure?&nbsp;
To explore these details, we built a &lsquo;synthetic population&rsquo;. We created a model to relate open data about demographics (age, sex, residential neighbourhood) to health information (prevalence of comorbidities). The result is a population that, in aggregate, reflects the real population, and allows us to zoom into neighbourhoods to understand the distribution of health conditions.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/46197ab7-12ac-4620-84b2-6c5867aed869?width=1688&amp;height=2642" alt="UCL Partners Population Dashboard" loading="lazy">
<h2 dir="ltr">A privacy-first approach</h2>
Detailed population data, and population health data, is very sensitive information. We could have used real data. This would be obtained from patient records, GP surgeries and hospital records, though is a complex process. In fact, UCL Partners began the process of exploring how to collate and share some of this information, to help with benchmarking our analysis. But we did not follow this approach.&nbsp;
Instead, we opted for an approach that would provide our client with a general understanding of its patients&rsquo; needs, without requiring sensitive, real patient data. We used open data from the UK Census, Health Survey for England (2019) and other sources (described in our <a href="https://github.com/diagonalworks/ucl-population-health?tab=readme-ov-file">GitHub repo</a>.) Much of this data is provided at the national scale, so we had to link features together to get a local picture of population health. We did this by building a synthetic population.&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">How did this approach help our collaborators?</h2>
A privacy-first approach provided two important benefits to UCL Partners. First, it allowed us to progress this strategic work, quickly. Gaining approval and managing access to sensitive patient information is timely and costly. By using synthetic data, we could focus on framing the questions and understanding the impacts of a new care model, without the up-front costs of accessing real data.&nbsp;
Second, this approach allowed UCL Partners and their stakeholders to truly innovate. We could keep our analysis questions open, adapting our work as we understood more about the underlying trends. We did not need to set out a very restricted set of questions at the outset - with a requirement of strict adherence to gain access to patient data. For example, when we started this work, we didn&rsquo;t know how the demand for a poly-clinic might change depending on the inclusion of more conditions. We started with three comorbidities, but expanded the exploration to include six comorbidities. This ability to change and expand our scope mid-project provided UCL Partners with greater insight into the complexity of multimorbidity care. If we were using real patient data, we would have had to re-start the approvals process to gain data authorisation.&nbsp;
UCL Partners was able to take an innovative approach to envisioning new healthcare models, without many up-front privacy risks.
Our synthetic population &lsquo;fit&rsquo; the national statistics of condition prevalence, while explorable at local census areas (MSOAs boundaries, which contain between 2,000 and 6,000 households). This meant we could estimate demand for chronic, comorbidity care by neighbourhood, and by GP. We modelled patient demand on the current system and compared this with future scenarios. We built an interactive tool for decision makers to explore the population model. They can sort, filter, and visualise the synthetic population to understand how condition prevalence changes by age, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2019">index of multiple deprivation</a>, and neighbourhood.&nbsp;
The synthetic population was also created more quickly than would have been possible if relying on the real data to be collated. This allows UCL Partners to work at pace in a fast changing complex healthcare landscape where data-informed decision making is imperative for improving services.
As UCL Partners develops its vision, and moves to more detailed implement plans, it is now equipped with a more specific understanding of what data it might need and why.&nbsp;&nbsp;
<h2 dir="ltr">What&rsquo;s next</h2>
UCL Partners is using our work to operationalise this new health service model and design trials. Our tooling is supporting what is seen as a highly innovative program within the NHS and healthcare partner ecosystem.&nbsp;
Not only did this project provide an important dimension to our understanding of neighbourhood service provision, it has inspired us to dive deeper into synthetic population data as a tool for place planning.
How does your work impact different communities? We can help you understand the consequences of your vision, without jeopardising personal or community privacy. 
Get in touch today: <a href="mailto:claire@diagonal.works">claire@diagonal.works</a>

Innovation in healthcare

We worked with Manchester City Council (MCC) to consider and make recommendations on how a digital asset mapping initiative might:
<ul>
<li>increase digital inclusivity across the city</li>
<li>act as best practice for streamlining data management, and</li>
<li>integrate with the City&rsquo;s sustainability goals.</li>
</ul>
The result of this work is published in a report for MCC, which the council will be able to build on as it progresses the initiative. For this project, we were delighted to work with our collaborator, Julia Thomson.
We focused on fibre optic broadband cabling as the digital asset. We gathered input from MCC partners to understand how a digital asset mapping initiative might fit within a complex system of existing initiatives. We listened to a broad range of Manchester stakeholders to draw-out where there is an unmet need for data that describes digital exclusion and fibre cabling availability. From this work, we collated multiple, specific &lsquo;problem statements&rsquo; that MCC can prioritise and design a solution for.
We identified three potential problem statements for a digital asset mapping initiative to target:
<ol>
<li>How might MCC narrow the digital divide by measuring and mapping under-connected populations and analysing potential barriers to get them connected?</li>
<li>How might MCC minimise the cost and disruption associated with installing fibre cabling?</li>
<li>How might MCC maximise its return on investment for highway improvement &ndash; by coupling fibre roll-out with more improvement schemes?</li>
</ol>
During that digital asset mapping initiative we provided guidance to MCC on ways to manage sensitive data. We explored how trusted research environments (TREs) and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) might become useful tools to unlock commercially sensitive data, or evaluate how initiatives to expand broadband access are performing. We used principals from data trusts to guide MCC in developing data-sharing agreements, making sure those agreements were transparent and supported enforceable measures to prioritise the interests of Mancunians.
In addition to our user research and technical advice, we identified several funding pathways for MCC to explore, in order to make this initiative financially achievable and sustainable.
This is an important project because it represents an opportunity for MCC to tactically link its social priorities, like digital inclusion, with its ambition to be a &lsquo;world class&rsquo; digital city. We were excited for the opportunity to describe how modern data management tools and governance structures can be used to challenge the assumption that sensitive data is synonymous with closed, private data. The digital asset mapping initiative may allow for MCC to trial new approaches to data governance, or new technologies to enable greater sharing of sensitive data responsibly.
We learned that Manchester has a motivated, ambitious collection of stakeholders, who see the benefits of collaborating on a digital asset mapping initiative to improve the city. Manchester is open to new ways of thinking, when it comes to how it might transparently collect, govern, and share data. However, the early nature of this project means that the priority use case, and primary user group, has not been selected.
In the next phase of this work, MCC will select a specific problem statement, explore the value of solving that problem, and develop a funding strategy for taking this initiative further. We are very much looking forward to seeing where Manchester takes this work.
Are you developing a data management initiative? If you want to explore how sensitive data can be used and shared securely &ndash; we would like to speak with you. Send us an email:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>

Starting Manchester City Council’s Digital Asset Mapping journey

Earlier this year, Andrew was lucky enough to be asked to build and teach a course on Software Engineering for Machine Learning to masters students at<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/imperial-college-london/"> Imperial College London</a>. He&nbsp;created content designed to cover the engineering concepts required to build robust and trustworthy systems that make use of machine learning (ML) and built the course as it was taught.
You can look at the lectures slides and exercises on <a href="https://www.andreweland.org/swemls/">Andrew&rsquo;s website</a>. They cover all aspects of systems, from data ingestion to user experience, while considering the influence of regulation and wider society:
<ul>
<li dir="ltr">Week 1: Introduction</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ICFXzL9N8fY1JPNnm-nZFTNfUmIoBIZJ-A1txqIfK9k/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xr7QcimK10VG131kznBS7qd6Wl9YX2vBJae029jMO7E/edit#heading=h.nhjmk7sgdyby">Coursework specification: training a model</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 2: Training</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16RG_HGnLdAMw8623fVqnja5MGl-CCjKYSoINo1UXxhw/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f9maZIiHCl5KvtkRE5E4DU_GckqxU35vnMw9q-ovywY/edit#heading=h.nhjmk7sgdyby">Coursework specification: inference design document</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 3: Inference &amp; Testing</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fy7XpHg5gaXC4zPtTweoW1p-Mq3oEwL7l-ndjwyczhw/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DB_8gEkV-1F578Dsu_Sv7kE9Gh2W7IX0O5ywvVOaX9s/edit#heading=h.nhjmk7sgdyby">Coursework specification: implementing inference</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 4: Deployment</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zF-ue0o7b849-KdE8KBr7TavQUEv-lrbU7PbBbDnglk/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kHBUPGuP5LIngVN_REDZyKEuTJPnleqn7YdaujgSF8g/edit#heading=h.mgiyp0moejbp">Coursework specification: running inference on Kubernetes</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 5: Reliability &amp; Monitoring</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M32E9fGEbG0aK30DaRSHq7Aqkuulsg8izryiXoye4ZA/edit#slide=id.g6d72f7b27b0bb2f0_0">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_p8t8dr1T_AWZqGR96-1EnYHzK17RISfUafK1Ruc-Zo/edit#heading=h.13wlau1axnt4">Coursework specification: monitoring with prometheus</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 6: Ethics &amp; Society (featuring guest lecturer Mari)</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mDsavLqVRZ5ZYrkJXkT33flh_iN0BikN5sXhCWyZrck/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j5pVsAd5DqZC9fy76szCkU3aybqEWr6XZD7IqAYJvSM/edit#heading=h.13wlau1axnt4">Coursework specification: running reliably for two weeks</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 7: Design</li>
<li dir="ltr"><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pPvruaCWYkdc6BRvGRy2h5T3l1dLpWIze983QdVnr2o/edit">Lecture slides</a></li>
<li dir="ltr">No new coursework</li>
<li dir="ltr">Week 8: Optional competition</li>
</ul>
The central task was inspired by the time he spent working with the amazing engineering teams behind&nbsp;<a href="https://www.deepmind.com/">DeepMind Health</a> and <a href="https://maps.google.com/">Google Maps</a>. Andrew explained:
<blockquote>
&ldquo;The course tries to cover what a student needs to know to build and operate robust and trustworthy machine learning (ML) systems, while leaving the details of models themselves to other courses.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
The three month course is structured around a real-world example from the medical domain. It requires learners to work in groups to build a system. Andrew and his students worked on a real-world problem where students designed and trained a model to predict&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/acute-kidney-injury/">acute kidney injury</a> from synthetic blood test results, before working in groups to build a system around that model to alert clinicians in a simulated environment.&nbsp;Andrew added:&nbsp;
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Throughout the course, we use real data standards (eg <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Level_7#HL7_Version_2">HL7</a>) and deployment infrastructure (eg <a href="https://kubernetes.io/">Kubernetes</a>), rather than simplifications.&rdquo;&nbsp;The final assessment required running that system reliably in a simulated environment for two weeks.
</blockquote>
For anyone inspired to replicate this learning opportunity the&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/andreweland/swemls">infrastructure required to deliver the course</a> is available under the <a href="https://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">Apache license</a>. The resources available are provided under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 2.0</a> deed (though photos are covered separately when noted).
The course was a collaborative effort and Andrew acknowledged many:
<blockquote>
&ldquo;amazing people helped make it possible...<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rchatley/">Robert Chatley</a>, who talked me into doing it, and taught me how to design and deliver a course, Mari, who wrote and delivered the ethics content, Mili Ostojic and<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lacrendic/"> Luis Alberto Croquevielle Rendic</a>, my teaching assistants who signed up without knowing how much work they were actually getting into,<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/cianh/">&nbsp;</a><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/cianh/">C&iacute;an Hughes</a>, who made sure the course bears some resemblance to clinical reality, and lastly (but most importantly) the entire student cohort who tolerated a first-time lecturer building a course while delivering it, and helped shape it with their feedback".
</blockquote>
Andrew continued:
<blockquote>
&ldquo;The course was made possible by the 4-day week policy of my full time job at<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/diagonalworks/"> Diagonal</a>. I delivered the course while working on our urban spatial analysis tool, <a href="https://skyline.diagonal.works/">Skyline</a>. If you work with the built environment, check it out.&rdquo;
</blockquote>
Find out more about how you can join our early adopter community and become one of the first people to&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/skyline#signup">use Skyline by getting in touch here</a>.
To hear more about Diagonal&rsquo;s wider work and our commitment to social projects and education&nbsp;<a href="http://eepurl.com/iokXAo">sign up for our quarterly newsletter</a>. And if you are interested in discussing our work with students and educators <a href="https://diagonal.works/contact">please drop us an email</a>.&nbsp;
&nbsp;

Education resources on Software Engineering for Machine Learning

One of our Founders, Andrew Eland, gives us the benefit of his healthcare background with this software engineer&rsquo;s take on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), why we need them, how they work, and why they are important in our world.
What we are doing
At Diagonal we build tools to help people understand and solve urban geospatial data problems. Working with many different &mdash; often large &mdash; datasets, we often end up dealing with problems that touch upon public health and equity. These topics intersect with neighbourhoods, travel behaviour, and other physical markers of place. To address these challenges community organisers, public health officials, or local governments need to use data, including data that represents people and behaviours. Though the benefits of using such data are huge, there are significant risks to consider, in particular concerns around privacy.
We are building tools that respond to the need to embed more personal, sensitive data in planning decisions &mdash; responsibly. And reduce the risk of data breaches exposing personal data. These technologies are called Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).
PETs are not often used within data analysis for urban planning. They are techniques and tools developed for sectors like: consumer marketing, medicine, security or financial services. By applying our expertise to this field we can harness the benefits of privacy preserving techniques to solve problems for planners and place-makers, applying them to types of data that have been overlooked until now.
Our work in this area has already been recognised. We have recently been selected as Phase 1 winners in a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/winners-announced-in-first-phase-of-uk-us-privacy-enhancing-technologies-prize-challenges">UK-US privacy-enhancing technologies prize challenge</a>. The challenge seeks to develop PETs to unlock the sharing of sensitive data between healthcare providers, and use a federated learning approach to model infection risk to improve pandemic responses.
Why are PETs needed to enhance privacy?
Making sure that sensitive data has suitable privacy safeguards in place is a significant&nbsp;<a href="https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2022/09/30/doctors-not-dashboards-360m-palantir/">challenge</a>. Even in vast datasets featuring anonymised data from hundreds of thousands of individuals there may be methods of reverse engineering data and combining it with other public datasets, which can lead to the retrospective identification of individual users.
Well-known cases demonstrate the inadequacy of anonymisation. Harvard Professor, and founder of the Data Justice Lab, Latanya Sweeney, proved that combining zip code, date of birth, and sex, you could identify a huge proportion of the population from hospital visits data. She demonstrated it by finding a local senators&rsquo; data, for example. Cross-referencing very different datasets, such as timed and dated paparazzi photographs with NYC taxi data, allowed for circumventing anonymisation enough to find out where celebrities they had travelled. Such events reduce wider trust in the safety of protecting sensitive data. This potentially reduces the likelihood of the public giving permission for its data to be used, even in cases where there is an obvious benefit or &lsquo;public good&rsquo;.
It can also make data institutions or organisations holding large datasets decide they cannot analyse or share their data for the public good because data privacy cannot be assured &mdash; resulting in huge pools of potentially life-saving or life-improving data, about people, their behaviours and their movement around places, left underutilised. Effective PETs offer a solution to these problems.
How our approach to PETs is different
PETS haven&rsquo;t been widely used with location data in practice. Our place-centric approach attempts to redress this by focussing on predictions based on individuals&rsquo; activity and location patterns. We use the locations of infected individuals to help predict infection risk for other individuals.
We will apply two key techniques to obfuscate the sensitive data used in the infection forecast model: first through homomorphic encryption, a cryptographic technique that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data. It allows one party to run a calculation using another party&rsquo;s data, without being able to see the data itself. Second, we will introduce noise into the system to mask the impact of an individual. The purpose of adding noise is to thwart attempts to discover data about an individual, a concept mathematically defined as differential privacy.
Where we are going
While our approach is implemented in terms of geospatial data, it could easily be adapted to produce features based on other graph data, for example, the population contact graph rather than the place visitation graph.
We will be developing this technology as part of Phase 2 of the UK-US privacy-enhancing technologies prize challenge. We will be sharing more about what we mean when we talk about PETs in future blogs. And at the conclusion of this challenge, we will release our core technology as open source.
If you are working with sensitive data, and want to uncover new ways to gain value from that data through collaboration get in touch with us:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>

Diagonal is building Privacy Enhancing Technology

Last week, the United Kingdom and the United States' governments announced the winners of the prize challenges to drive innovation in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) that reinforce democratic values, at the second Summit for Democracy.
This challenge was designed to inspire organisations to build solutions that &lsquo;enable collaborative development of artificial intelligence (AI) models, while keeping sensitive information private&rsquo;. You can read more in the UK government&rsquo;s announcement here.
Organisations competed by developing innovative solutions to address practical data privacy concerns in real world scenarios.
We entered a white paper under Track 2 which asked for ideas to boost and improve the pandemic response capabilities in the UK and the US, by applying PETs to a federated learning model that simulated infection and behaviour information. The challenge focused on predicting individuals&rsquo; risk of infection, while ensuring that personal information remains protected from unauthorised systems and actors.
Organisers noted that the COVID-19 pandemic &lsquo;incurred an immense human cost and socio-economic impact across the globe&rsquo; and that it also highlighted the importance of proactive planning and a global need to prepare &lsquo;for public health emergencies by harnessing the power of data through privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics&rsquo;.
We combined our knowledge of managing sensitive place-based data, privacy enhancing data processing techniques, and our committed passion for developing open geospatial solutions in this White Paper. We worked with the Information Commissioner&rsquo;s Office (ICO) to design a solution that would meaningfully adhere to the regulatory frameworks that govern personal and health-related data. Our aim was to design a solution that is explainable. We prioritised accountability in our methodology, above optimising a black-box model.
Our entry was recognised with a special discretionary prize for &lsquo;effectively demonstrating meaningful consideration of the regulatory implications of their solution and its consequences for information governance&rsquo;.
We are honoured to receive this award. It is a recognition of our commitment to building responsible technology. We worked hard to ensure our solution fit with existing data privacy regulations and best practice. And we worked closely with the ICO to refine our approach.
The challenge included a multi-stage competition which involved a white paper submission, prototype development, and a &lsquo;red-team&rsquo; phase. We were given a synthetic dataset (from the University of Virginia&rsquo;s Biocomplexity Institute), which simulated a dynamic, real-like population.
A joint Demo Day will be held in London in May to continue building a transatlantic community of practice between innovators, privacy researchers and government.
The challenge was first announced at the inaugural Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Find out more about the challenge and hopes for future international collaboration in this area here.
Watch the full announcement of all the winners by Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology at the second Summit For Democracy late last week here.
If you want to build PETs with us, let us know: hello@diagonal.works.

Recognition for our Privacy Enhancing Technology

We spent the summer working collaboratively with our CivTech pilot partners to test Baseline, the beta version of Skyline, using a number of topical planning use cases.
We are testing out how partners can use Skyline to unlock diverse datasets, solve problems and promote place-based innovation. We hope it will help streamline how Local Authorities gather evidence for plan making, including Local Development Plans, regeneration plans and site specific masterplans.
Last week, we shared our beta product with a number of pilot partners. In our research process, we gathered initial partners&rsquo; feedback before letting them explore the tool in their own time. Then we set them a number of tasks, in order to gain more constructive and informed feedback. This research is helping to inform the look and functionality of the tool, how we prioritise features, what datasets clients expect. We are also honing into which users will be the most active, within their organisation, and how our customers want to share their analysis.
Our Pilot partners include:
<ul>
<li>Scottish Borders Councils</li>
<li>Aberdeenshire Council</li>
<li>Dumfries and Galloway Council</li>
<li>Manchester City Council and</li>
<li><a href="https://hometown-hub.co.uk/">Hometown Hub</a></li>
</ul>
Our work with pilot partners is a learning process and it has been intensive. It has involved identifying an analysis question relevant to each use case, exploring data, and building new workflows to support interactive data exploration (and lots of engineering work in the background!)
Sharing products is always daunting, even when you are proud of what you&rsquo;ve produced, and we&rsquo;ve been working with these partners on diverse projects exploring issues including accessibility.
The feedback has been encouraging, and given us the validation and insight we need to keep building and developing our product for place planning. Over the next couple of months our pilot partners will be using their own Skyline instances within their portfolios of work.
If you are interested in joining our group of Skyline Beta-Testers, let us know on our&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/contact/">Contact page</a>&nbsp;or email us on&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

Piloting Skyline

<section>
COP26 has put a spotlight on the urgent need for change, in the face of the climate crisis. We need to adopt changes in policies, changes in markets, and changes in our built environments. Diagonal&rsquo;s technology is built to help planners understand and imagine the future we want and need - at a city scale.
Backed by our analysis engine, we work with organisations who are changing our cities. We want our cities to become more inclusive, healthier, and more sustainable places. Our tooling is designed to work with very large and very sensitive data. We can rapidly analyse the context of new infrastructure or property developments- considering factors like population demographics, access to amenities, and space typology. Empowering architects, planners, and property developers to focus on the complex consequences of changes to our cities. With interactive, fast visuals of analysis, we also make it easier to share work and engage stakeholders in the analysis process.
Our technology-powered, data science consulting supports research, urban planning, and stakeholder engagement.
<h2 id="research">Research</h2>
We help organisations to understand city systems today and build the case for change. We enable transparent, rapid analysis of cities' systems. We work with any information that describes the urban form including environmental factors, transport networks, buildings, demographic and economic systems.
For example, to achieve the benefits of a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Why-every-city-can-benefit-from-a-15-minute-city-vision?language=en_US">15-minute city</a>, cities must first map access to amenities. With our analysis engine, we can calculate how many grocery stores are within 1km of every building in a city - in under 15 minutes. We can add in other amenities like, schools, green spaces, and health services. This approach can identify what neighbourhoods may be amenity rich, and where there are amenity gaps.
<h2 id="planning">Planning</h2>
We help planners, urban designers and property developers understand the impact of changing our cities. Our analysis engine allows us to compare the effects of change across multiple urban systems.
For example, we can reveal the potential consequences of extending cycle lane infrastructure in a city. We can integrate speculative assumptions about population change and development plans to build a picture of tomorrow&rsquo;s city. One new cycle lane is not going to address all the challenges of the climate crisis. If we can understand how a network of cycle lanes might change urban accessibility, and how many people might be impacted, then we can make better land-use plans and incentivise zero-emission travel. Our tooling can explore both the hyperlocal- and broader consequences of changes to the urban form.
<h2 id="engagement">Engagement</h2>
Technology alone is not the answer to cleaner, more equitable, healthier cities. We provide visualisation tools for engagement processes with stakeholders, members of the public, and domain experts.
How does our analysis engine support these outcomes? We do more than clean data. We built a cloud-based, semantic model of the world which means data analysis is more intuitive and faster.
If you are researching, planning or working on engagement in urban spaces - we want to work with you. From workshops to in-depth research, we help clients bring data to their ideas for positive change, and explore the impact these can have in the built environment.
Get in touch:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

The future of our cities- planning for 2030 and beyond

We are a remote-first company. But what does that mean in practice?
This blog asks how being remote-first help Diagonal provide the best solutions and innovations, while supporting its team?
We know home-based working remains an area of intense debate. Companies large and small are grappling with finding solutions around how and where to work. Many are exploring solutions from entirely remote or office-based working, to mandatory or flexible hybrid styles. For startup innovators and steward-owned companies, ensuring how we work reflects our mission and values is important. We are committed to accountability and transparency, and to social purpose. So how does our team feel about our remote-first set up? Does it work? How has it evolved, and does that need interrogation? And what does it mean for our work and structure going forwards?
<h2 id="a-remote-first-vision">A remote-first vision</h2>
In our founding documents we recognise that small, diverse, teams of people working together with a high degree of psychological safety are the best tool we have to address system problems. It is important to us to work in a way that epitomises that and brings its benefits to our people. If our team is empowered they can focus on building solutions that will empower clients and collaborators to solve the problems we identify in our sector and beyond.
Also, Diagonal started in 2020, remote working was the only option, with founding staff spread from Cambridge to Malta during the pandemic. So, being remote first also helped us start with minimal overheads.
&ldquo;Once we started, it seemed to be working, so there was no need to wrangle people into an office for two, three or four days a week,&rdquo; says Claire. &ldquo;And philosophically, we wanted to allow people to live complete lives. People have doctors appointments, kids&rsquo; schedules, and other interests - art, culture, board member roles, community participation, teaching - and I think these experiences strengthen our team. We want to let people participate in&hellip;life.&rdquo;
She acknowledges though that online meetings can be exhausting and aligning schedules can sometimes slow things down. The occasional meet-up, then, reminds us that &ldquo;humans are social beings,&rdquo; she says.
When we can, with a minimal carbon footprint and cost, our team meets up in person. To share ideas but also to foster relationships and understand the value of different roles and perspectives to support our underlying purpose. This does not usually happen more than a handful of times a year (though when we are in the shared time-zones or geographies for other reasons we try to catch up in a more ad hoc way). As we met recently we took the opportunity to ask the team how they felt about our remote-first policy.
Maddie welcomes the opportunity &ldquo;to focus more on my tasks, without distraction and spend more time with my children&rdquo;. Nevertheless, she says, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s essential to meet people in real life sometimes to forge a deeper connection.&rdquo;
For Mari, meanwhile, flexible hours allow her space to manage her workload at the right pace. &ldquo;I often solve the really tricky bugs while walking outside, and sometimes I need to look at something for more than eight hours to make progress; sometimes progress is made only after 6pm.&rdquo;
It is also a matter of trust. Veronica doesn&rsquo;t miss the old days of having to ask permission to work from home and also felt empowered to move out of the city. For her, socialisation can be something as small as working from a cafe once or twice a week. Similarly, Beatriz moved back to her native Lisbon, where she is &ldquo;closer to family, friends and vitamin D&rdquo;, adding: &ldquo;I visit places in my neighbourhood more frequently, and get to know it, and the people who live there better.&rdquo;
Here are several members of our brilliant team enjoying a wet Wednesday in Edinburgh last month, seeing the sights, touching the wee doggie and enjoying the city.
&nbsp;
<div style="display: flex; gap: 4px; flex-wrap: wrap;"><img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/5fd17ea9-4ca3-4c6c-bc46-903431948145?width=288&amp;height=512" alt="Photos from the Diagonal team in Edinburgh, people can be seen smiling and visiting sights." loading="lazy"> &nbsp;<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/021d9d5f-af99-4833-8a7e-0c4bd3a47fc5?width=288&amp;height=512" alt="Photos from the Diagonal team in Edinburgh, people can be seen smiling and visiting sights." loading="lazy"></div>
They also used the day to explore our future, including the development and launch of Skyline later this year and our consultancy offer. For team members who couldn&rsquo;t come, we created a hybrid environment for collaboration outside the rain.
For more information about how we work, our team, or our consultancy, PETs and data visualisation tooling get in touch&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

Being remote-first

<section>
Diagonal is committed to educative partnerships. As a purpose-driven organisation, we support new research that might bring us closer to addressing big challenges in place planning, like achieving net-zero, improving community health, and addressing social inequalities.
We&rsquo;ve already built a number of successful partnerships and working relationships with universities and academic institutions and we are putting out a call for new partnerships for 2024.
Join us as we create an enabling mentoring environment to support researchers and departments to uphold the rights to the city and develop better cities that work for everyone. Get in touch&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">here</a>&nbsp;and share this call with your networks if you would like to work with Diagonal. We are looking for research partners in the fields of geographic information science, city planning or a related domain.
We can act as a resource for students working on &lsquo;challenges&rsquo; or set challenges as an industry partner. We can join research groups interested in working with the private sector. We can work with you on mentoring, and give seminars in our work and sector. We approach all our projects with openness and transparency and bring data and tooling to help partners explore ideas for positive change, exploring their impact on city spaces.
Here are a few examples of our academic partnerships to date:
Strathclyde Business School
We are working with MBA students from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.strath.ac.uk/business/postgraduate/">The University of Strathclyde Business School</a>. They are applying their studies to build customer profiles for clients working with geospatial analysis tools in the built environment. This includes customer segmentation across the market for tools/services that people use when investing in the built environment. We have introduced them to our wider partnership work including that with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/civtech-7">CivTech Scotland</a>&nbsp;discussed in&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/civtech-experience/">this journal entry</a>.
UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
We are also excited to announce another partnership - working with an MSc student at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/civil-environmental-geomatic-engineering/ucl-civil-environmental-and-geomatic-engineering">UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering</a>. The MSc student is exploring &lsquo;Barriers to active travel&rsquo; as a topic for her thesis. Her research is relevant in understanding the 15-minute neighbourhood concept, which is an idea taking hold with planners currently working on city design.
The Covid-19 pandemic saw changes in cities, such as the addition of &lsquo;slow streets&rsquo; or active-travel-only streets. In many cases, these measures were implemented as temporary measures, as a reaction to the need for social distancing and stay-at-home orders. As we emerge into the recovery stage, many of these measures persist. Decision-makers for many cities and towns are rethinking how highstreets are used, with an emphasis on local vibrancy and support for active travel.
We proposed exploring conditions that restrict pedestrian travel, but which might represent low-cost infrastructure changes to improve accessibility. For example, gate closures, primary street crossings without streetlights or tactile paving might restrict accessibility or make travel feel unsafe. The MSc student is using our open source geospatial engine Bedrock (<a href="https://github.com/diagonalworks/diagonal-b6">b6</a>) to explore OSM data, define accessibility barriers, and run accessibility analysis.
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Geospatial Systems
We recently developed strong links with the&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/cdt-guest-blog/">EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Geospatial Systems</a>, including this collaborative partnership between Newcastle University and the University of Nottingham.
In that project Diagonal was the industry partner for the CDT&rsquo;s &lsquo;challenge week&rsquo; which ran 24-27 April 2023. Wee set the students the challenge of using&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/diagonalworks/diagonal-b6">b6</a>&nbsp;to explore the 15-minute city concept. We are committed to supporting the CDT&rsquo;s future plans and look forward to more collaborations.
Our team also has strong academic links and a commitment to positive mentoring.
UWE Bristol: University of the West of England Bristol and South West RTPI Young Planners
Over the past few years Veronica has established a strong working relationship with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.uwe.ac.uk/">UWE Bristol: University of the West of England Bristol</a>. Initially this was through her involvement with the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.rtpi.org.uk/find-your-rtpi/rtpi-english-regions/rtpi-south-west/young-planners-mentoring/">South West RTPI Young Planners</a>&nbsp;network which she also chaired, and then as a member of the UWE RTPI Partnership Board, whose remit is to support the planning school, accredit new courses and ensure the course content aligns with RTPI Effective Planning School criteria.
Veronica left the Board in order to more directly support the school by taking on a temporary Associate Lecturer role &ndash; teaching second year planning students, as well as taking on additional marking responsibilities and mentoring students through their final year dissertations.
Since then, Veronica lectures on an ad hoc basis and remains in regular contact with the UWE Bristol Planning School, exploring opportunities for future&nbsp;<a href="https://www.rtpi.org.uk/find-your-rtpi/rtpi-english-regions/rtpi-south-west/young-planners-mentoring/">collaboration</a>.
We are keen to set challenges, work with individual researchers, and work as industry partners bringing our tooling and expertise to forge lasting relationships. Start the conversation with us at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

Supporting research in the built environment

Andrew presented our location-based approach to Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/centre-for-data-ethics-and-innovation">Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation</a>&rsquo;s PETs Demo Day, on 22 May. The event celebrated the US-UK PETs Prize Challenge winning solutions. We wrote about our award for meaningful consideration of data governance,&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/pets-recognition/">here</a>.
At the Demo Day, Andrew introduced Diagonal&rsquo;s award-winning White Paper (<a href="https://github.com/diagonalworks/diagonal-pets/blob/main/REPORT.md">which you can read here</a>). The showcase was hosted at&nbsp;<a href="https://royalsociety.org/">The Royal Society</a>, which included presentations from all the prize winners.
The challenge was to use PETs and federated learning models to inform pandemic response planning, using simulated data. Andrew shared how we used a place-based approach, and an explainable approach in our solution. In our model, we assigned places, rather than people, with infection risk scores. This score was determined as a function of the total number of visitors compared with the infected visitors.
While this challenge was not initially framed as a city-planning challenge, we saw a strong link between it and our purpose: to improve the quality of life of those living in cities (as stated in our&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/charter">charter</a>). This challenge appealed to us because it allowed us to explore the opportunity for privacy-preserving technology in place-based models. The approach we used could be applied to other questions that come up in city planning, like: how are e-scooters being used in a city, and by whom? How do local communities use &ndash; or not use &ndash; public amenities? How might healthcare services and local authorities coordinate to make care more accessible to patients?
To design inclusive, equitable city spaces we need data about how people use spaces, which communities use &ndash; or don&rsquo;t use &ndash; services, and how people&rsquo;s needs vary by district. However, this data is very sensitive. Sharing this data for analysis should be governed in a considered, explainable and transparent manner. We talked about the challenges of anonymising location-based data in an earlier post,&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/pets/">here</a>.
At the Demo Day, Andrew explained how our approach to sharing sensitive data preserves the privacy of data subjects, and how this approach can be applied to multiple use cases. The challenge was to help predict the spread of infectious disease. Our approach was specifically designed to help to combat concerns around public trust. Government and organisational trustworthiness is key consideration when assessing the use of personal and potentially sensitive data. The method we developed offers transparency upon which public trust can be built and maintained, allowing for social approval when using sensitive data. This is crucial in the domain of public health, where relying on individual consent can make large modelling projects problematic or complex. But it is also very relevant in city planning and shaping the built environment.
Diagonal&rsquo;s presentation was part of the Demo Day&rsquo;s focus on &lsquo;bolstering pandemic capability responses&rsquo;.
The event included discussions around tech advances with stakeholders from government, the finance and healthcare sectors, representatives from industries adopting PETs, international agencies, privacy specialists and investors.
The Royal Society&rsquo;s Privacy Enhancing Technologies programme in 2023 included this report,&nbsp;<a href="https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/privacy-enhancing-technologies/From-Privacy-to-Partnership.pdf">From privacy to partnership: the role of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in data governance and collaborative analysis</a>&nbsp;(PDF), created in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute.
To talk more about our White Paper, our work in PETs or the new tooling we are building please do&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">get in touch here</a>.

Showcasing our award-winning PETs solution at The Royal Society

During our session at the CivTech Demo day Q&amp;A we were asked about what other use cases might be relevant beyond town centre revitalisation. We have been exploring this idea within our team with regards to the commercialisation of our MVP, which will form the basis of an exciting new web-application which we have called&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/hello-skyline/">Skyline</a>.
Understanding the starting point
To us it&rsquo;s clear that any project that requires an understanding of the local baseline in order to inform future investment in a place, be it financial or policy-based, would benefit from our tool. By baseline, we refer to the existing situation and status of a place, from its population and environmental make-up, to the movement and flux of these.
The tool we have developed allows non-technical users to easily, and rapidly interrogate the data shown on our interactive map. Our prototype focused on understanding accessibility to a number of key services and facilities, from all properties and vacant/brownfield sites in Galashiels, based on distance and mode of transport adopted. From this analysis, users can determine what parts of Galashiels are less well served, who does not have particularly good access to local services, and therefore where investment may be beneficial. Equally, the tool starts to highlight what uses may be most beneficial on a brownfield site or at the very least what uses should be included as part of a holistic masterplan.
There are many reasons why this process is key to inform town centre revitalisation more generally, beyond the specific example we used when developing our tool for Galashiels, including:
<ul>
<li>Any policy decision should be underpinned by transparent, reliable data sources</li>
<li>The starting point for place-based interventions has to be the current state of affairs, ie the baseline</li>
<li>In order to identify what uses may bring vibrancy and vitality back to a town centre, it is important to understand the current mix of uses in the town centre, how the centre is currently accessed and who it serves best</li>
</ul>
Considerations for rural applications
However the same exercise could be applied to a rural hamlet or look at a number of small villages as a cluster to understand how rural communities are served. This is not only a helpful exercise to stimulate conversations around need and demand where they may be stalling. It could also provide a useful tool to make a case for investment in facilities to serve more than one community, and to identify where to locate these facilities to maximise accessibility.
We are very aware that the matter of accessibility is critical in rural locations and that the approach has to be different to that taken in a more urban context. We are also aware that rural Local Authorities are under pressure to use the &lsquo;15-minute city&rsquo; concept as the basis upon which to inform policy and investment decisions. However, there are clear tensions between some of the principles of a &lsquo;15-minute city&rsquo;/&lsquo;20-minute neighbourhood&rsquo;, and rural settings.
How our tool could help in a rural context
We believe our tool could assist with teasing out what a &lsquo;rural 15-minute city&rsquo; model might look like by:
<ul>
<li>Allowing an understanding of the local baseline across as broad an area as required (beyond the hamlet/village)</li>
<li>Enabling open conversations with rural communities about their needs, accessibility challenges and travel patterns</li>
<li>Extend the concept of &lsquo;15min city&rsquo; by incorporating other sustainable modes of transport, appreciating that one of the trade-offs of living in a rural location means potentially reduced walkability to certain services and facilities</li>
<li>Support business cases for investment in better sustainable transport infrastructure, as well as e-bikes and e-scooters</li>
<li>Identify opportunity areas, such as the development of hubs that serve more than one community</li>
</ul>
Work with us or join our pilot programme
We are excited to test some of these assumptions with partners over the coming months as part of a programme of pilots that will commence shortly. If you would like to join the discussion, or get involved please&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/product/">sign up here</a>&nbsp;for updates or get in touch with us at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

Use cases for our Skyline prototype

We started Diagonal because we wanted to build technology responsibly and for the benefit of our cities. We made Diagonal a steward-owned company to ensure that we are guided by purpose, not profit above all else.
What is steward-ownership?
There are many articles that eloquently describe what defines a steward-owned company (like&nbsp;<a href="https://sifted.eu/articles/steward-owned-businesses-startups/">this one</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sharetribe.com/balanced/steward-ownership-is-capitalism-2-0/">this one</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://medium.com/@purpose_network/the-patagonia-structure-in-the-context-of-steward-ownership-e9db3d260dc6">this one</a>.) And there are many successful companies that follow a steward-ownership rather than a shareholder-ownership model. For example,&nbsp;<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/patagonia-chair-turning-capitalism-head-204019814.html?guccounter=1">Patagonia</a>&nbsp;recently joined this growing list.
Adopting a steward-ownership model meant making two principle legal commitments:
<ol>
<li>Our&nbsp;<a href="https://www.notion.so/Charter-Public-Copy-7641959989504a2ca6b8727a7d94ebd6">purpose</a>&nbsp;drives our business, not profit.</li>
<li>Ownership of the company must stay within the company (effectively locking capital in the company to serve our purpose.)</li>
</ol>
We added a third commitment, to lock our&nbsp;<a href="https://www.notion.so/Charter-Public-Copy-7641959989504a2ca6b8727a7d94ebd6">purpose</a>&nbsp;to a social benefit:
<ol start="3">
<li>We will develop technology that is responsible (definition at the end of this blog.)</li>
</ol>
Our steward is a not-for-profit, Guardian Shareholder &mdash; an entity which holds the right to veto key decisions. It is responsible for holding us to account on those three principles, and receives no dividends. In this way, we ensure a separation between purpose from profit.
You can see the detail behind Diagonal&rsquo;s steward-ownership in our Articles of Association,&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/company/articles">here</a>. Our Articles are open and available under a Creative Commons licence.
Why we did it
We started Diagonal because we want to&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/how-it-started/">improve the quality of life of those living in cities</a>. We want to uphold the right to the city, and support regenerative, inclusive cities. And use our skills as the builders of technology products for social good. To bind ourselves to this purpose, we need something stronger than a slogan.
We have all seen cautionary examples of tech companies founded with lofty aims that have ended up scaring the built environment or altering our social fabric for the worse. When shareholder profits become the driving success metric, a company&rsquo;s purpose becomes profit. We chose a steward-ownership model to prevent Diagonal from falling into the trap of growth-at-any-cost.
We know the potential impact of technology on people&rsquo;s lives. Our technology can be used to influence physical infrastructure in our cities, which may have a lifespan beyond our own. We want Diagonal&rsquo;s purpose to drive how we work, in the short and long-term. With a steward-owner we have a strong mechanism in place that guarantees our commitment to our mission in 10, 20, 50+ years.
And we want to work with team members, collaborators, and clients who share similar goals. If the challenge is to uphold the right to the city - we can&rsquo;t can&rsquo;t achieve this on our own! By establishing ourselves as a steward-owned company, we hope to find and inspire others to join us on this journey.
Working in a steward-owned business
While our steward-ownership model added complexities to the set-up of our business, we value many benefits of our governance structure. Employee ownership means:
We control how we work and what projects we work on. For example, we secured public innovation funding to open source our core technology. We spend our time on meaningful projects, like working with&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/citizen-weather-station-obstruction-profiles/">climate scientists</a>&nbsp;or the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.civtech.scot/blog/press-release-digital-innovators-announced-as-civtech-7-reaches-the-accelerator-stage">Scottish Government</a>&nbsp;to tackle climate modelling and inclusive town-centre revitalisation.
We can embed our definition of responsibility into our policies and the way we operate. For example, we created a parental leave policy that covers team members who might be contractors but are &lsquo;long-term collaborators&rsquo;.
The journey ahead
There have been some challenges, establishing and running a steward-owned business but it is worth it for us at Diagonal. Starting with a strong foundation will help us avoid forces that could make us a company that does not reflect our mission. And we know there are benefits for us, and any future employees or collaborators. Beyond our ethos,&nbsp;<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/01492063211006450">research</a>&nbsp;shows that purpose-driven organisations perform better than other companies across multiple factors, including: employee satisfaction, financial performance, and customer loyalty.
Our steward-ownership model attracts like-minded people, who also want to build responsible technology. We are excited about where these relationships will lead us.
If you are interested in creating a steward-owned business, or want to work with us, get in touch:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.
<hr>
Our definition of responsible technology
Our articles of association define &lsquo;responsible technology&rsquo; as: &lsquo;meaning the Company develops and deploys technology with a principled and transparent approach to evaluating its downstream effects on society as a whole; the Company is transparent about the ways in with the technology it develops will be monetised over the long term; the company develops and deploys technology with an appropriate level of human oversight and audit; the company neither develops nor deploys technology that contravenes any article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.&rsquo;
Over time we intend to dissect use cases to put more practical, applied detail around what it looks like to develop technology responsibly &mdash; and where the mark may have been missed. We will write more about this in the future.

Diagonal's steward-owner

Anamika Kinattukara

Ebin Cherian

Akarsh Valiya Valappil

Aiswariya Bindhu Ganeshkumar

This blog was written by MBA students at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.strath.ac.uk/">Strathclyde University</a>: Anamika Kinattukara, Ebin Cherian, Akarsh Valiya Valappil, and Aiswariya Bindhu Ganeshkumar.
As part of our capstone project, we, a team of four MBA students from the University of Strathclyde, collaborated with Diagonal to research the market nuances for Diagonal&rsquo;s geospatial mapping software, Skyline, with a focus on targeting UK local authorities. We synthesized this research to propose a tailored marketing strategy.
<h3>What we did</h3>
We conducted qualitative analysis through insightful interviews with key stakeholders in UK local authorities, uncovering their pain points and requirements. Simultaneously, we performed quantitative analysis based on demographic data such as council size, budget, and funding aimed at town regeneration.
This groundwork laid the foundation for a customer segmentation strategy, enabling a marketing approach finely tuned to the unique needs and advantages of the target market segment.
<h3>What we found</h3>
Our exploration of the UK geospatial information system (GIS) market unveiled a thriving and strategically positioned ecosystem. The UK acknowledges the transformative potential of location data and technology in driving economic growth, enhancing public services, and addressing environmental challenges, as outlined in the visionary&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-geospatial-strategy-2030">UK Geospatial Strategy 2030</a>. It was noteworthy to discover the UK ranks in second place in the global geospatial readiness index, supported by a &pound;6 billion annual turnover and a workforce of 30,000 within the geospatial sector. The government&rsquo;s substantial investments in research and development, accessibility to location data, and the fostering of innovation underscore its dedication to advancing geospatial capabilities.
This robust geospatial ecosystem is propelling economic, societal, and environmental progress across the UK. Surprisingly, we found that GIS applications within UK local authorities extended far beyond traditional urban planning and infrastructure management. Geospatial analysis is used across diverse areas such as public health, emergency response, environmental conservation, and social services. Local authorities are leveraging GIS to address an extensive array of community needs. However, there is potential for greater standardization and data integration to enhance usability.
<h3>How we worked together</h3>
Working with the team at Diagonal proved to be a profoundly collaborative experience. The company&rsquo;s unwavering commitment to cooperation was evident throughout our engagement, whether it entailed facilitating interactions with local authorities and external partners or generously allocating time for insightful interviews. Diagonal, as an early-stage startup with a steward-owned structure, showcased a clear dedication to values that prioritize purpose over profit. This ethos resonates with the company&rsquo;s objectives and is manifest in its proactive collaborations with universities.
The team&rsquo;s commitment to open communication played a pivotal role in ensuring the timely and successful completion of our project.
Diagonal is committed to educative partnerships. We are keen to set research challenges, work with individual researchers, and work as industry partners bringing our tooling and expertise to forge lasting relationships. Start the conversation with us at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.

Guest blog: How UK local governments can leverage geospatial data

At UKREiiF we will introduce and demo our new geospatial data visualisation platform,&nbsp;<a href="https://skyline.diagonal.works/">Skyline</a>. Whether you are implementing a regeneration vision, designing for resilient communities, or contributing to Net Zero; Skyline lets you understand the impact of your investments so you can allocate resources efficiently.
Not only will our team be happy to answer your questions about Skyline at the stand, we are also hosting an interactive panel session focused on &ldquo;GIS Across Domains: Working Collaboratively with Data and Digital Twins&rdquo;. Beyond the &lsquo;digital twin&rsquo; buzz-word, we are exploring the power of scenario planning for engagement, risk management, and investment prioritisation.
Our panel will discuss their experience of geospatial exploration in relation to urban planning, what challenges technology can help solve, and the impact of &lsquo;digital twins&rsquo; on place-based practices, using Skyline as an example.
The panel session takes place in the Barton Suite (Royal Armouries) on Tuesday 21 May between 13:00 &ndash; 14:00, so make sure to mark this in your calendar for right after lunch.
<h3 id="panel">Panel</h3>
We are excited to have secured some amazing speakers to share their thoughts on geospatial data and the future of the profession:
<ul>
<li>Adam Sheppard, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, University of Birmingham</li>
<li>Camilla Siggaard Andersen, Research Lead - Urban Design, Mobility &amp; Environment, Hassel</li>
<li>Duncan Welberry, Head of IT Business Partnering, Associated British Ports</li>
<li>Gala Camacho, Data Scientist Lead, Diagonal</li>
<li>Jenny Hartley, Director, Invest in Newcastle</li>
<li>Tim Fendley, Founder &amp; Partner, Applied</li>
<li>Veronica Barbaro, Principal Planner, Diagonal</li>
</ul>
In the run-up to the event,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/diagonalworks/">keep an eye on our LinkedIn</a>&nbsp;to learn more about the speakers and their professional background.
Come say hello!
If you are going to UKREiiF, we would love to meet you there. Send a message to&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>&nbsp;to arrange an introduction or catch-up. You can book a 1:1 appointment with Veronica&nbsp;<a href="https://calendar.app.google/PxNrZKj9JiEdi7GJA">here</a>.

Meet Diagonal at UKREiiF

It is our pleasure to reveal more about the speakers and the session which will take place on the UKREiiF Campus in Leeds City Centre, at the Barton Suite site, on 21 May 2024 at 13:00.
Alongside introducing Skyline, our new data visualisation tool, we will be demonstrating its features and hosting a panel to explore topics such as the built environment&rsquo;s challenges and opportunities, the significance of collaboration across sectors, and the contribution of the innovation ecosystem. We will also discuss the impact of digital technology on urban design.
Chris Outtersides, Head of Planning Strategy, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, from DLUHC will start the session with a brief on the progress of geospatial innovation in the UK.
After this Veronica Barbaro, Principal Planner at Diagonal, will lead the session, joined by experts with invaluable knowledge and experience:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-fendley-798385/">Tim Fendley</a>, Founder, CEO &amp; Creative Director, Applied</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilla-siggaard-andersen/">Camilla Siggaard Andersen</a>, Research Lead, Hassell</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-welberry-6905637/">Duncan Welberry</a>, Head of IT Business Partnering, Associated British Ports</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-hartley-4546b06/">Jenny Hartley</a>, Director, Invest in Newcastle</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-sheppard-urbanplanning/">Adam Sheppard</a>, Lecturer, University of Birmingham, Lecturer</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/galacamacho/">Gala Camacho</a>, Co-Founder and Data Scientist, Diagonal</li>
</ul>
To find out more about each of our speakers click on the links or read the short biographical information below.
Additionally, our team will be present at a dedicated stand. We invite you to stop by booth A40 in New Dock Hall for a personal discussion about Skyline and our broader range of projects. If you&rsquo;d like to arrange a meeting or simply catch up, please reach out to us at&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>.
Join the conversation and connect with us about our new&nbsp;#Product&nbsp;and discuss&nbsp;#Planning,&nbsp;#Infrastructure,&nbsp;#Urban development,&nbsp;#Cities,&nbsp;#Data analysis,&nbsp;#SyntheticPopulations&nbsp;at UKREiiF or get in touch via&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>&nbsp;to talk more about Skyline and becoming an early adopter. We&rsquo;re looking forward to engaging with you.
For further information about our session and to book tickets please visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ukreiif.com/event/ukreiif-annual-event-2024/#buy-tickets">UKREiiF</a>.
<h3 id="veronica-barbaro-principal-planner-at-diagonal">Veronica Barbaro, Principal Planner at Diagonal</h3>
Veronica is passionate about cities and positive place-making. She is a chartered Town Planner and brings over 10 years of experience working with major international consultancies (most recently Avison Young and Atkins) on significant infrastructure and regeneration projects including HS2 and key city centre schemes (e.g. Finzels Reach, Bristol and Redcliffe Quarter, Bristol). Veronica has a robust understanding of the development management process as well as development economics and viability considerations. She is an experienced project manager, having led and managed the submission of major planning applications for a range of clients, from both private and public sectors working with large multi-disciplinary teams and complex budgets. She is also a regular contributor to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theplanner.co.uk/">The Planner</a>.
<h3 id="tim-fendley-founder-ceo--creative-director-applied">Tim Fendley, Founder, CEO &amp; Creative Director, Applied</h3>
Founder and Creative Director of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.appliedinformation.group/">Applied</a>, Tim is a designer with over 30 years experience creating innovative wayfinding systems for some of the world&rsquo;s most important cities, campuses and cultural institutions. Tim is devoted to helping people discover more, be braver and feel less lost. Tim&rsquo;s company Applied creates projects which push the boundaries of information design and make our cities and communities more understandable. For example,&nbsp;<a href="https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/boroughs-and-communities/legible-london">Legible London</a>. Tim is also a tireless speaker and campaigner for the development of accessible wayfinding systems for public places including at the London School of Economics, Reading University, Sign Design Society and the International Institute for Information Design in Vienna. Tim is also an advisor to the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, and an editorial board member of IIID. He has established cultural conference programs for TYPO and POINT and founded&nbsp;<a href="https://www.livingmap.com/">Living Map</a>&nbsp;&ndash; a mapping technology company designed to deliver public access to Smart City initiatives.
<h3 id="camilla-siggaard-andersen-research-lead-hassell">Camilla Siggaard Andersen, Research Lead, Hassell</h3>
Camilla leads urban resilience research at Hassell, bringing together data and design to unlock social, economic, and ecological outcomes for people and place. Her experience includes working at the urban quality consultancy Gehl in Copenhagen and New York where she managed placemaking projects and led the development the Open Public Life Data Protocol, teaching Strategies for Urban Liveability at DIS, and working as a lead designer in Arup&rsquo;s Digital Studio, a multi-disciplinary strategic and UX design team. She joined joined Hassell in 2021. Through her experiences of working with cities and technology companies worldwide, she has developed new ideas, concepts, and solutions for how to use research and digital technology to design more innovative, sustainable, and human-centred places. Between 2022-23, Camilla managed the GLA&rsquo;s Property X-Change knowledge sharing platform and she currently chairs the New London Architecture&rsquo;s Built Environment Technology Panel. Her recent research contributions include &ldquo;Close to Home: Exploring 15-Minute Urban Living&rdquo;, &ldquo;Corridors: Designing Linear Infrastructure in a Non-Linear World&rdquo;, and &ldquo;Blurred Lines: Planning for Societal Change and Digital Disruption in the Built Environment&rdquo;.
<h3 id="duncan-welberry-head-of-it-business-partnering-associated-british-ports">Duncan Welberry, Head of IT Business Partnering, Associated British Ports</h3>
Duncan is an experienced technology leader across the Ports and Retail sectors delivering impactful transformational change. Currently leading on data transformation at ABP showcasing story telling through data visualisation. Have been at the forefront of deploying innovative 5G, IoT, AI and networking solutions as part of digitising ABP.
<h3 id="jennifer-hartley-director-of-invest-newcastle-newcastlegateshead-initiative-and-head-of-economic-development-newcastle-city-council">Jennifer Hartley, Director of Invest Newcastle, NewcastleGateshead Initiative, and Head of Economic Development, Newcastle City Council</h3>
As Director of Invest Newcastle, Jen works to attract new businesses, investment and job opportunities to the city region. She has many years experience and is responsible for developing and delivering inward investment activity for Newcastle, Gateshead and the North of Tyne Combined Authority and has led a number of campaigns to bring global organisations to the North East. Jen is also Head of Economic Development at Newcastle City Council, working to ensure that the benefits of economic growth are shared widely and opportunities are accessible to everyone. She is also a board member of the North East digital technology cluster, Dynamo, Vice Chair of Ouseburn Farm Charity, an advisory board member of the UK Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) and a board trustee of Newcastle Cathedral Trust.
<h3 id="adam-sheppard-lecturer-university-of-birmingham-lecturer">Adam Sheppard, Lecturer, University of Birmingham, Lecturer</h3>
Adam joined the University of Birmingham in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning. Prior to this Adam taught for over a decade and a half in the RTPI Planning School at UWE Bristol, as well as at the University of Gloucestershire. Adam moved into academia from industry in 2007, having previously worked in Development Management for a number of Local Planning Authorities. Adam teaches modules particularly focused upon community participation and engagement, development management, and aspects of planning history. He is currently involved in research projects concerned with enforcement, Biodiversity Net Gain, urban rewilding, development management, AR/VR, and GIS.
<h3 id="gala-camacho-co-founder-and-data-scientist-diagonal">Gala Camacho, Co-Founder and Data Scientist, Diagonal</h3>
Gala is a mathematician and programmer, with a background in education, optimisation and all-things data. She has worked at big corporates and startups within the civil infrastructure and urban planning ecosystem, leading analytics projects strategically and technically. Gala is passionate about using analytics to explore and break down urban and social inequalities. She is in the Expert Advisory Group (Governance Framework) for the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, and is a member of the Ethics Workstream for the OECD Geospatial Lab. Gala recently brought GeoMob to Edinburgh hosting the inaugural meeting at the city&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/codebasetech/">CodeBase</a> to talk &ldquo;geo-innovation for fun and profit&rdquo;.
If you are attending the conference you can book a 1:1 appointment with Veronica&nbsp;<a href="https://calendar.app.google/PxNrZKj9JiEdi7GJA">here</a>.

Meet the panel for Diagonal’s session at UKREiiF

<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/faa754c2-a383-477e-88ff-ed0ec259db56?width=720&amp;height=479" alt="1 Barton Pl214ah 720">
From left to right: Camilla Siggaard Andersen, Veronica Barbaro, Chris Outtersides, Adam Sheppard, Gala Camacho, Duncan Welberry, Jenny Hartley
Here is a recap on our session at the UKREiiF Campus in Leeds City Centre, at the Barton Suite site, on 21 May 2024 at 13:00.
The panel featured professionals from various sectors:
<ul>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-sheppard-urbanplanning/">Adam Sheppard</a>, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, University of Birmingham;
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilla-siggaard-andersen/">Camilla Siggaard Andersen</a>, Practice Leader - Landscape and Urbanism, Hassell;&nbsp;
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-welberry-6905637/">Duncan Welberry</a>, Head of IT Business Partnering, Associated British Ports;&nbsp;
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/galacamacho/">Gala Camacho,</a> Diagonal Data Science Lead;&nbsp;
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-hartley-4546b06/">Jenny Hartley, </a>Director, Invest in Newcastle;&nbsp;
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-outtersides-4905561a/">Chris Outtersides</a>, Head of Planning Strategy, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
</li>
</ul>
The session was chaired and introduced by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicabarbaro/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Veronica Barbaro</a>, our Principal Planner. She provided an overview of our work as a geospatial data science consultancy focused on creating tools that support transparent and equitable decision-making in the built environment.
Veronica&rsquo;s introduction included a demo of <a href="http://skyline.diagonal.works">Skyline</a>, our new geospatial data visualisation platform that&nbsp; enables scenario testing to inform planning strategies and investment decisions.
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=9e4c3656-2984-44e9-950a-3acb0d62468c">The panel discussion started with a question to Camilla Siggaard Andersen</a> about integrating digital technology into the design and planning processes. Camilla emphasised that while digital tools have great potential, their effectiveness depends on the quality of data and its interpretation. She pointed out that successful urban planning requires both high-level data analysis and ground-level collaboration with the community.&nbsp;
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=3ba5d9f7-9ea5-4689-b9bd-1b16a5414b8a">Adam Sheppard added an academic perspective, stressing the importance of building trust between society and the planning profession</a>. He highlighted the need for long-term approaches that show the positive impact of digital tools on urban development. Adam also mentioned the importance of transparency and community involvement in planning processes to rebuild trust and encourage meaningful engagement.
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=2482549b-9201-42ee-9091-c2111293d87d">Chris Outtersides discussed his experience of DLUHC Proptech funded projects in his previous role working within local authority and emphasised the importance of making data accessible</a> and understandable to the public. He shared insights on how synthesising data into non-technical language can significantly improve public engagement and trust.
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=836b173b-2b05-4502-af7f-7e0e1148fb35">Jenny Hartley shared how Newcastle uses data to attract investment and improve city planning.</a> She highlighted the role of the <a href="https://newcastle.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/">Urban Observatory</a>, which provides real-time, open-source urban data. This data has been instrumental in various initiatives, including the creation of an app during COVID-19 to help residents navigate the city safely.
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=3e469a53-3cba-4fd6-9843-716bacbb5640">Gala Camacho stressed the importance of involving the public in the data-driven decision-making process.</a> She advocated for transparency in how data is used and the necessity of allowing community input to ensure that planning decisions reflect the needs and desires of the people.
<a href="https://exemplary.ai/app/composition/shared?token=f08bf67e-d67c-4e40-b95a-9fefb7063ab6">Duncan Welberry shared his perspective from the private sector, emphasising the need for collaboration between public and private entities.</a> He discussed the potential of open data to drive innovation and improve urban planning outcomes, while also recognising the importance of balancing competitive interests with public good.
The panel concluded with a Q&amp;A session, where attendees engaged with the panellists on various topics, including the challenges of implementing digital tools in cash-strapped local authorities and the importance of long-term strategies for sustainable urban development.
Key insights from the discussion:
<ol>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Digital tools alone do not guarantee better urban environments; the quality and interpretation of data, as well as human decision-making, are crucial factors.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Engaging the public in the development and use of digital tools is essential. Data should be presented in an accessible, meaningful way that resonates with the target audience.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Continuous engagement and collaboration between the private sector, public sector, and local communities are vital for the successful implementation of digital solutions.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Planning education should foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, and knowledge-sharing to prepare future planners for the evolving digital landscape.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
The public sector faces challenges in adopting digital tools due to resource constraints and the need to balance innovation with the delivery of statutory functions.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Building trust is key to the successful integration of digital technology in urban planning. This can be achieved through transparent processes, evidencing impact, and involving the public throughout the journey.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Who builds digital tools matters.
</li>
<li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">
Digital tools should support strategies aiming to address pressing issues such as health inequalities, decarbonisation, and improving the well-being of people and communities.
</li>
</ol>
The panel emphasised that while digital tools can enhance the planning process, they should not be seen as a replacement for human expertise and decision-making. Instead, technology should be leveraged to support more efficient, collaborative, and inclusive approaches to urban planning and design.
If you missed the session, you can watch the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rMSpOYTQm8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recording here</a>.
If you&rsquo;d like to find out more about&nbsp;<a href="https://skyline.diagonal.works/">Skyline</a> and join our early adopters community <a href="https://skyline.diagonal.works/#signup">get in touch here</a>.
&nbsp;
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/14015ecb-5178-43cb-97d8-ebb224a18da5?width=720&amp;height=480" alt="1 Barton Pl232ah 720">
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<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/9ad577c8-8dc3-49fb-a73d-d8ebccf14e09?width=720&amp;height=480" alt="1 Barton Pl216ah 720">

Embracing digital innovation in urban planning and design: UKREiiF panel session recap

<section>
In our work, we analyse relationships between different features of the built environment. We start from questions like:&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/investigating-legibility-with-open-data/">&ldquo;How might we explore the legibility of a space?&rdquo;</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/citizen-weather-station-obstruction-profiles/">&ldquo;How might we calculate how obstructed these weather sensors are?&rdquo;</a>&nbsp;and we end with a visualisation of the data analysis results. Our aim is to unpack as much of the complexity as possible, not abstract away from it or oversimplify. We believe this leads to more transparency of the data analysis process and a better understanding of trade-offs when it comes to analysing complex systems in cities.
We recently completed a collaboration with Hassell, where we looked at how we might understand the impact of a green corridor in terms of accessibility. In this blogpost we want to talk about some of the design decisions that went into the&nbsp;<a href="https://diagonal.works/post/corridors/">corridor visualisation</a>, and our approach to visualisation more broadly.
<h2 id="our-process">Our process</h2>
At Diagonal, visualisation is a process that runs parallel to the analysis process, it builds on each twist and turn of the analysis model, evolving through each of its iterations. Our engine allows us to see the relationships we&rsquo;re exploring on the map, at each step. This in turn sparks ideas about what questions we could ask next. We can identify comparisons that are important to communicate visually.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/7246cc8f-cb82-4951-b224-a8b7da488164?width=2164&amp;height=1202" alt="image of the map section of the corridors data visualisation">
<h5 id="a-possible-corridor-design-with-4-gates-the-blocks-accessible-within-a-500m-walk-are-colour-coded-based-on-the-total-population-reached">A possible corridor design with 4 gates. The blocks accessible within a 500m walk are colour coded based on the total population reached.</h5>
We are a multidisciplinary team and our design process really draws on our diversity. It involves a lot of pairing (eg. between the data scientist and the designer) and discussion to get to the interesting, juicy details that we can each see, drawing from our particular domain knowledge, and experiences.
Our goal is to enable experts (be it domain experts, or local experts - such as community members) to explore data analysis of complex city systems. This means that our deliverables always involve some form of data exploration tool, supported by an interactive map. As we start seeing analysis outputs, we map a rough journey through these results and find the important elements that we would like to highlight visually. In the corridors example, those elements were:
<ul>
<li>What are the possible corridor designs optimising for?</li>
<li>What gates are open within each possible design?</li>
<li>What blocks are accessible, within a 500m walk, from each possible design?</li>
<li>What blocks are accessible, within a 500m walk, from each gate?</li>
<li>How do possible designs compare to each other in terms of population reached?</li>
<li>How do gates compare in terms of proximity to transport?</li>
</ul>
From these, visual groupings start to emerge, for example: a &lsquo;possible designs&rsquo; view and a &lsquo;gate&rsquo; view. It also gives us an idea of the kinds of graphs we can use to explore different design objectives.
<h3 id="whats-the-loop">What&rsquo;s the loop?</h3>
While mapping the journey we look for interesting exploration loops. For example - let&rsquo;s say someone is looking at a possible corridor design that looks good, and notices a gate that gives access to a particularly desirable distribution of people. They could then ask, &ldquo;What other possible corridor designs contain this gate? How do those &ldquo;score&rdquo; in terms of cost and total population served? In our design iterations, we look at: What can we pair visually to enable that exploration loop, so that people can make that connection? In our case, this meant creating a matrix of gates, to show which gates are present in each possible design.
<h3 id="distilling-down">Distilling down</h3>
The next step is to understand the most efficient, clear and engaging way to deliver this information visually. How do we condense the number of visual elements, and make them as data rich as possible? For this visualisation, that meant showing the numbers for the different population breakdowns (total population reached, senior population, children, etc) in one interactive chart, aligned with the possible designs.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/8912aec2-b9ea-44ce-bc05-119e6bd3a6c3?width=1130&amp;height=663" alt="image of the chart section of the corridors data visualisation">
<h5 id="the-chart-section-of-the-visualisation-users-can-compare-possible-designs-in-terms-of-accessibility-for-different-population-segments">The chart section of the visualisation. Users can compare possible designs in terms of accessibility for different population segments.</h5>
<h3 id="creating-shortcuts-for-quick-exploration">Creating shortcuts for quick exploration</h3>
What visual &ldquo;objects&rdquo; can we give the user to manipulate so that they can quickly make connections: in our case - a way to compare 2 possible designs on the map. In the data tool this meant duplicating the possible designs over 2 rows, for easy selection. In the map, it meant highlighting the blocks unique to each possible design, and visually deprioritising the blocks they have in common.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/ce1460cb-1a2a-484b-9680-e67a306a3a41?width=2666&amp;height=1294" alt="image of the map section of the corridors data visualisation">
<h5 id="map-view-comparing-2-possible-designs-a-and-g-users-can-see-the-areas-accessbile-in-both-designs-and-the-areas-accessile-only-from-a-or-g">Map view comparing 2 possible designs, A and G. Users can see the areas accessbile in both designs, and the areas accessile only from A or G.</h5>
<h3 id="unpack-the-analysis-model">Unpack the analysis model</h3>
We are firm believers in a collaborative approach to data analysis. This means working closely with domain experts who use data analysis as a tool, not necessarily do data analysis themselves. To avoid creating black box algorithms, we find visual ways to explain how we arrive at these analysis results. In this case, this meant having a diagram that showed the steps in the analysis, the inputs and outputs. This also served as a way to introduce visual symbols used in the data exploration tool.
<h3 id="experimenting-and-testing">Experimenting and testing</h3>
We want our visualisations to be as easy to use and intuitive as possible. But we appreciate that trying novel formats to explore geospatial data analysis brings with it the risk of users needing to spend some time with the visual to engage fully with it. By delivering consulting work alongside our product development, we test our tooling against a diverse set of concrete problems. Our visualisations evolve and change with each use case.
By making visualisation a part of the process of analysis, data scientists can place explainability and transparency at the core of their practice. Making the results of analysis explorable in a visual way can open up avenues for wider participation in the design of cities.
If you have a project where you think analytics could help make better decisions, and you are keen to co-create algorithms that derive from your domain expertise, and develop visualisations that let you explore the possibilities, get in touch:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:hello@diagonal.works">hello@diagonal.works</a>
</section>
<section id="authors"></section>

Unpacking complexity - Our approach to visualisation

How should GIS boost your planning capabilities and enhance your projects? Join us for a panel discussion that will explore how more accessible geospatial analysis can change the way practitioners, stakeholders and communities engage with the planning system.
With the push for planning practice to become more digital, the focus on the value of geospatial data is greater, alongside a renewed celebration of GIS as a technical specialism. Technological advancements have led to GIS becoming more accessible, however there are still challenges that need to be overcome to maximise the potential offered by new and evolving geospatial tools.
The 45 min panel session will consider:
<h3 id="understanding-geospatial-data">Understanding geospatial data</h3>
The capabilities of geospatial analysis in urban planning, spatial modelling, and predictive analysis.
<h3 id="urban-analytics">Urban analytics</h3>
How can geospatial analysis change the way we look at urban planning. From studying population changes to predicting urban growth, geospatial analysis offers valuable insights.
<h3 id="educations-role">Education&rsquo;s role</h3>
What is the role of universities and planning schools in integrating the use of geospatial data and analysis into the curriculum.
<h3 id="community-engagement">Community engagement</h3>
How can interactive tools, including maps, help involve communities in planning.
<h3 id="applications-beyond-mapping">Applications beyond mapping</h3>
In what different ways geospatial data and analysis are used in various sectors, from population health to environmental impact and other applications.
The diagonal team will lead this session, informed by insights from their experience working across built environment projects, and through moderated discussion bring in perspectives from academic and professional planning spheres.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/2997bdc3-4a4e-4f10-8b64-cacc266dc855?width=1376&amp;height=844" alt="View from our tool Skyline" loading="lazy">
<h5 id="view-from-our-tool-skyline">View from our tool, Skyline</h5>
<h2 id="the-panel-will-include">The panel will include:</h2>
<h3 id="adam-sheppard-mrtpi-frgs-fhea">Adam Sheppard MRTPI FRGS FHEA</h3>
Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences University of Birmingham
<h3 id="gala-camacho">Gala Camacho</h3>
Data Scientist, Diagonal
<h3 id="frances-summers">Frances Summers</h3>
Part Time Lecturer of Urban Planning at University of Gloucestershire and Senior Planning Officer at Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council)
<h3 id="lucy-styles">Lucy Styles</h3>
Planning Information and Delivery Team Leader Aberdeenshire Council
<h3 id="sarah-dakham">Sarah Dakham</h3>
Digital Business Partner Transformation, Innovation &amp; Digital Dorset Council
Open to anyone with an interest in the conversation:&nbsp;<a href="https://events.humanitix.com/gis-beyond-maps-the-new-dimensions-in-urban-planning">here&rsquo;s where to book</a>. We have designed the session to foster discussion around the broader capabilities of GIS, auditable data analysis, interactive data visualisation &ndash; and crucially, show how these things can impact your work positively.
<a href="https://events.humanitix.com/gis-beyond-maps-the-new-dimensions-in-urban-planning">Find out more and sign up here</a>.

Join our online panel chat on 6 December 2023, 12pm

Open data is a trending topic, but what are the benefits of defaulting to it as a standard for your work? In this long read, Gala Camacho (Co-Founder and Data Scientist) and Veronica Barbaro (Principal Planner) explore how using open data can add value to and improve place-making projects.
Open data is a trending topic in civic technology. It is now commonplace for public sector bodies to have open data portals, with dedicated teams maintaining this data. But open data is not solely a product of government. There are many open datasets produced by communities, organisations, and private companies. And yet the&nbsp;value&nbsp;of using open data is not always considered in planning projects. Why?
Habit, and not knowing how to implement the use of open data, may explain this. For overstretched local authority planning teams, the switch to open data may seem overly risky and time-consuming. For technical consultancy teams, there may be concerns about moving away from familiar data-gathering exercises. Others may fear open data is likely to be incomplete or untrustworthy.
<blockquote>
The benefits of using open data to inform both planning policy development and planning projects extends well beyond the value of a single piece of work. A serious consideration for defaulting to open data and introducing closed data as necessary, is, we think, well overdue.
</blockquote>
At Diagonal, we believe in using open data to inform the place-making process because we know it brings value to projects, communities impacted by a project, and future projects. That&rsquo;s why we are passionate about demonstrating why open data should be the starting point for all transparent data-gathering endeavours.
<h3>A useful open data source</h3>
A great example of a worldwide open datasource underutilised in the city planning process is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/about">OpenStreetMap</a>&nbsp;(OSM). Let us explain why we know it would help anyone working in this space.
<h3>What is OSM?</h3>
OSM contains crowdsourced volunteered geographic information (VGI) data about roads, trails, caf&eacute;s, railway stations and more, across the globe. It is community-built, so anyone can use the data (<a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/about">as long as they credit it</a>), and anyone can learn to edit, update, and add to it<a class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref" href="https://diagonal.works/post/working-with-open-data/#fn:1">1</a>.
OSM is already used by planners and built-environment professionals, including for humanitarian responses, mapping previously un/under mapped areas, for general web maps, thematic maps, and route planning<a class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref" href="https://diagonal.works/post/working-with-open-data/#fn:2">2</a>. It is also&nbsp;<a href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page">widely-documented</a><a class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref" href="https://diagonal.works/post/working-with-open-data/#fn:3">3</a>&nbsp;and supported by the&nbsp;<a href="https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page">OpenStreetMap Foundation</a>.
<img src="https://directus.diagonal.works/assets/6400c635-6dcd-4f70-a1e6-de313741004c?width=521&amp;height=160" alt="OpenStreetMap view of Liverpool" loading="lazy">
OpenStreetMap at (55.95542, -3.213810), <a href="https://osm.org/go/evfLOO9W0-" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explore here</a>.
<h3>The practical case for using open data as a default</h3>
The benefits of using a datasource like OSM as a default, over proprietary or published data (such as Ordnance Survey), extend far beyond the project, into the community and to future work.
<ul>
<li>Ownership&nbsp;- As anyone can improve, build and add to the data, people get to play a part in shaping the places where they live, work and play. When people can see and edit the data that underpins decisions about their communities, it allows them to feel part of, and influence, the place-making process.</li>
<li>Trust&nbsp;- Involvement with the data can result in greater trust and understanding in project and policy outcomes and help bring local communities on board from the project outset. Such transparency over local information gathering can also increase representation and spread accountability.</li>
<li>Positive investment&nbsp;- When the data is not complete, project budget can be used to complete, update, and improve it. This expense, different to when data is simply bought for a project, has positive trickling-down consequences. It can bring temporary employment to local people through mapping, and allow planners to engage with (or develop a community of) local mappers to maintain data in the future.</li>
<li>Future investment&nbsp;- Making data better and more available for community and industry use helps encourage grassroots innovation, and can help provide more evidence of local value. Also - anyone can build upon the data and your analysis as there are no restrictions to others using the data you used for your project, or any derivative data created from it.</li>
<li>Interconnectivity&nbsp;- Open data can be used for individual or multiple projects. It can break down silos, and enable metrics to be used or compared across projects, as the data consistency makes projects interconnectable.</li>
<li>Reproducibility&nbsp;- Any analysis can be reproduced in different geographies since the dataset expands beyond statistical boundaries. This has benefits in varied dimensions: efficiency gains, comparable analytics across projects, process automation, etc. It also allows for the reproducibility of the project itself, making it more transparent and auditable.</li>
<li>Democratic&nbsp;- Using open data to inform planning policy creates a more democratic planning system that better reflects the situation &lsquo;on the ground&rsquo;. It can also enable a more robust evidence base to inform initial feasibility exercises.</li>
<li>Co-production&nbsp;- Using open data in planning/masterplanning/urban design stops these practices becoming top down, or &lsquo;expert vs community&rsquo;, moving towards co-production as standard, which offers shared responsibility for change.</li>
<li>Availability&nbsp;- If a larger geography was considered, either for comparison or as part of some greater collaboration, OSM data is present worldwide!</li>
</ul>
<h3>The philosophical case for using open data as default</h3>
We are not the first team to think about the benefits of using open data. There is a bigger, more philosophical, conversation about &lsquo;why&rsquo; open data as a default is a beneficial approach for everyone involved.
Principles such as the FAIR Principles and the CARE Principles, explained below, align nicely with what is usually considered best practice in planning, particularly when considering bottom-up approaches.
The case for open data is supported if we consider the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618">FAIR Principles</a>, which state: data should be&nbsp;Findable,&nbsp;Accessible,&nbsp;Interconnectable&nbsp;and&nbsp;Reusable. Within the &lsquo;A for accessible&rsquo;, the quote &ldquo;as open as possible, as closed as necessary&rdquo; is often used. If we extend this ethos from the&nbsp;making&nbsp;of data to the&nbsp;use&nbsp;of data, then we can ask:
Within planning projects, could we be starting with open data and only turning to other data when we can show open data yields an infeasible project path?
Similarly, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gida-global.org/care">CARE Principles</a>, which were designed to extend the FAIR Principles for the purpose of Indigenous data governance, provide useful guidance that we feel can be extrapolated to the general community.
CARE stands for:&nbsp;Collective benefit,&nbsp;Authority to control,&nbsp;Responsibility&nbsp;and&nbsp;Ethics. Regarding &lsquo;collective benefit,&rsquo; the full CARE Principles state:
&lsquo;Data enriches the planning, implementation, and evaluation processes that support the service and policy needs of Indigenous communities. Data also enables better engagement between citizens, institutions, and governments to improve decision-making.
&lsquo;Ethical use of open data has the capacity to improve transparency and decision-making by providing Indigenous nations and communities with a better understanding of their peoples, territories, and resources. It similarly can provide greater insight into third-party policies and programmes affecting Indigenous Peoples.&rsquo;
Planning proposals should reflect the needs of the communities they affect. Therefore:
Isn&rsquo;t the default to open data in the first instance the option most aligned with best practice and values in this area?
<h3>How can we help?</h3>
We are passionate about the benefits of using open data as a default option and keen to talk with built-environment professionals about the value it can bring. Our aim is to facilitate this change by demystifying using open data and helping anyone interested in using open data, whatever their knowledge or experience.
We know that when it comes to analysing more than a single set of data sources, connecting all the data together to analyse it in a meaningful way can be tricky - this is what the Diagonal geospatial computation engine has been built for. To find out more about our technology, take a look at our case studies, or reach out!
&mdash;
Our commitment to openness is broader than just for data. To find out more about how we build open systems and principles into all our work, see&nbsp;<a href="https://www.notion.so/Charter-Public-Copy-7641959989504a2ca6b8727a7d94ebd6">our internal charter</a>.
<h3> Notes</h3>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
Have a go by registering and logging in here: <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/login">https://www.openstreetmap.org/login</a>&nbsp;
</li>
<li id="fn:2" role="doc-endnote">
A more detailed discussion can be found here:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog585/node/738#:~:text=OpenStreetMap%20(OSM)%20is%20a%20digital,volunteered%20geographic%20information%20(VGI).">OSM and its use as open data</a>&nbsp;
</li>
<li id="fn:3" role="doc-endnote">
There is even a conference dedicated to it called <a href="https://stateofthemap.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">State of the Map</a>. You can find previous talks&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/StateoftheMap">here</a>, including one by our own Gala and Simona, coming soon!&nbsp;
</li>
</ol>

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