Improving Districts with DILAX
We love the city. Its diversity, its energy, its speed, its open-mindedness. In order to keep it that way, people need to be given more space in urban environments. One of the key tasks in cities is to develop and maintain the quality of life and appeal of each neighborhood. This promotes social, open and active interactions. And improves our cities, making them livable cities.
Since the turn of the millennium, the world seems to be spinning faster and faster. Rapid technological leaps create profound changes. Even disruptions. We cannot live without smartphones anymore – and they have only been around since 2007. Start-ups are challenging multicorporate enterprises. There’s hardly any industry that doesn’t need computer programmers and data scientists for its digital future.
We do our shopping while sitting on the couch and forget about the retailers at our doorsteps. We read books on our tablets and the bookshop on the corner disappears. The small greengrocer is long gone, because rents are rising. Even the newsstand that has been around forever does not know what will happen next year. And what then?
What makes our city livable?
It cannot go on like this. There has to be a city beyond the traffic jam, the stress and the dirt. We support everything that makes urban spaces better. From working to living, shopping and going out, coming and going. A vibrant city is above all public. It invites you to be out and about on its streets and squares.
A Plan
For every neighborhood
When you want to make a city more attractive, you need to link its functions again and consider the human dimensions of them: mobility, work, utilities, institutions, housing, shopping, pleasure and recreation. We can ask people in the neighborhoods about their dreams and wishes. But we should also investigate how public spaces are actually being used: what’s missing, what’s annoying, what’s happening?
Re-thinking the city
With local data
Only if we know and measure what’s happening in a neighborhood today, can we give it a better design. Creating new spaces with new ideas and making people want to spend time there.
We can also use local data for neighborhoods still in the planning stage to simulate the effects a new office tower or tourist attraction will have on traffic, consumption and waste. And to see how these construction projects could contribute to quality of life and not cause more problems.
Make room
For quality of life
Quality of life really changes when neighborhoods become more friendly: for pedestrians, for parents with strollers, for slow-moving people with walking aids, for dogs and their owners, for cyclists, skaters and scooter drivers. Air quality improves immediately.
Parking spaces become sitting areas and streets turn greener. There is street food and kids play outdoors. Shop doors are open and invite you to take a look inside. Neighbors bring extra chairs to the concert on the street under the night sky. You line up at the bakery on the corner to buy fresh bread on the weekend.
Benefits
Local data is an important basis for city development
- Insights support decision-making: Reliable data is the best way to describe how people use the neighborhood and what needs could be met in a better way.
- Using resources better: The city as a community has only limited resources that must be used sensibly and sustainably for neighborhood management.
- Checking the success of measures: If it wasn’t good before, you can see and feel but also measure how the quality of the neighborhood has improved.
- Demand simulation for new neighborhoods: Local data also provides an outlook on future traffic routes and consumer needs related to residential projects and neighborhoods that are still in the planning stage.
Why is this important?
It’s time to go back onto the street
The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people – a city with less pollution, less noise, less stress – a more walkable city.
Gilles Vesco Deputy Mayor of Lyon
Many cities were built around cars in the last 100 years. Now we are experiencing the necessity to start building cities around people again, for people. We support this change with expertise and local data. These insights help cities design attractive streets and squares in their neighborhoods, improve quality of life and maintain and develop city centers as public spaces. Because that’s what makes a city livable – for young and old, for you and me.
