CityForward
The award-winning free web platform from IBM brought together information about cities and communities in ways that led to new insights and supported decision-making.
More than 4 billion people – more than half of the world – live in urban areas
For most of human history, most people across the world lived in small communities. Over the past few centuries – and particularly in recent decades – this has shifted dramatically. There has been a mass migration of populations from rural to urban areas.
More than ever before, human life revolves around the city.
Share of the world’s total population living in urban areas over the past five hundred years.
Our cities generate vital signs
Today, almost anything - any object, process, or system - can be instrumented, interconnected, and infused with intelligence.
Data is lying in archives, published on government websites, being sensed from instrumentation in the environment, deduced from aerial imagery, and built from the ground up by citizens electronically communicating about city life.
Impact on everyday life
How safe is my neighborhood?
Which career is right for me?
What type of education do I need?
Building smarter cities
CityForward was a free-to-use site that made data from cities around the globe available for exploration. The portal also supported a community for sharing visualizations, analyses, and insights.
The site captured performance statistics on education, safety, health, transportation, land use, utilities, energy, environment, personal income, spending, population growth, and employment.
Much of this data had long been public record and available on the Web, but it was frequently delivered by individual agencies in disparate formats. The data were there, but it was a challenge to make any of that information useful.
CityForward made it easier for users to identify potential connections and similarities between cities by comparing visualizations of the various data sets in a central place.
Explore, Create, Collaborate, and Learn
Provide city data from around the globe
Reveal patterns in the data
Empower people to build compelling stories from these patterns
Give people a community to share these stories, discuss the information, and take action
global city data in one location
meaning from data
Insights into stories
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Collaboration & Discovery
“I want us to ask ourselves every day, how are we using technology to make a real difference in people’s lives.”
- President Obama
From the White House to local municipalities, government agencies, NGOs, and corporations are making more data and applications available to citizens. Government agencies promote not only data but application programming interfaces (APIs) and interactive widgets to help developers get access to timely data. Now anyone can look for patterns in data and identify trends that offer insight into issues facing people today.