Building a better world with sustainable urban development

Minimising infrastructure maintenance disruption

Geospatial data can drive efficiencies in construction, planning and infrastructure – improving access to services, reducing disruption and helping to move people around cities more effectively. Minimising disruption to transport infrastructure is a key consideration for the City of London, where 1% of the UK’s total workforce commutes into an area scarcely bigger than a square mile every weekday morning.

Every year in the City there are 400 road closures, more than 3,000 utility excavations and, at any one time, over 70 building sites in operation. All highway maintenance must be meticulously planned to minimise disruption to London transport and prevent gridlock on congested streets.

To help ease the impact of this, City of London authorities use reliable and detailed OS data, available free through the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), to calculate the extent of works and impacted areas to a sub-metre level of accuracy. This is essential, as even the smallest error in measurement could cause huge disruption for the City’s businesses and residents.

Ian Hughes, Assistant Highways Director, City of London says: “The new works planning tool has minimised disruption and streamlined the process for managing planned work in the City. Mapping data from the PSGA underpins the tool’s visual approach which makes it easy to use and useful for communicating complex issues with senior staff."

Building smart cities using geospatial data

Geospatial data can help your city move beyond basic service provision to begin to provide innovative digital services that improve the lives of your city’s residents. Projects that use data to manage cities more effectively are sometimes described as ‘smart city’ initiatives.

Despite the futuristic images the term conjures, a ‘smart city’ is merely a well-managed city aided by digital technologies, according to Dr Jennifer Schooling, director of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction.

Ordnance Survey has helped Dubai and Singapore deliver their smart city initiatives by undertaking geospatial readiness assessments to help them understand their needs and capabilities, and delivering strategic consultancy based on its 200 years of geospatial expertise.

The Happiness Meter is one of Dubai's first strategic 'smart city' initiatives. Dubai has adopted a unique metric for measuring success in contrast to GDP. Since 2016, the city has had a Minister of State for Happiness, as part of the city’s Happiness Agenda, which aims to make the city the happiest place on Earth. As the world’s first city-wide, live sentiment capture engine, the Happiness Meter represents a measurement gauge for the happiness goal.

Dubai required an up-to-date approach to geospatial data capture, management and dissemination to achieve its aim. To help deliver this, Ordnance Survey undertook a geospatial readiness assessment to identify the next steps that Dubai Municipality needed to take. Working with NXN, a leading smart city consulting and digital service provider for the Middle East and Africa, Ordnance Survey developed a smart solutions strategy for the Smart Dubai Government Establishment (SDGE).

"Geospatial data is a valuable tool for any smart city strategy, and by partnering with a leader in this domain, Ordnance Survey, we definitely demonstrated its effective usage through the Smart Dubai platform," says Kaveh Vessali, Senior Partner, NXN.

In Singapore, Ordnance Survey helped the National University of Singapore and the Singaporean government achieve their aim to make the city a world leader in smart technology.

Ordnance Survey developed data processing and 3D data modelling to help Singapore plan its future more effectively.

Digital models, sometimes referred to as digital twins, can help cities plan and evaluate interventions – work done by Ordnance Survey has shown that a national digital twin in the UK could save eight billion pounds per year across all sectors.

“Using location to link and visualise all the relevant information removes technical complexity, simplifying the case for investment to senior decision-makers,” says David Henderson. “Above all, it provides evidence to explain why it is worth investing in technologies that improve collaboration and the benefits this brings when planning cities for the future.”