Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1333

A Kickstarter project called The Wabash Lights has just reached its funding goal of $55,000 to implement what it is calling the beta version of its project. 

The project is a site-specific and interactive LED light installation on the underside of the elevated train tracks that run along Wabash Avenue in Chicago.

The lights are completely customizable (color, patterns, pulses, and so on) and they will be controllable via web and mobile. So anyone walking down the street will be able to have some fun with the lights.

Here’s a video from the creators explaining more about the project:

[vimeo 131322692 w=500 h=281]

It’s a clever idea and I can see the lights becoming just as recognizable as Chicago’s bean .

But the true success measure will be whether or not it draws people to the area and it changes the composition of the street. Elevated structures aren’t great for street life. That’s why I fought ( unsuccessfully ) to have the elevated Gardiner Expressway East removed here in Toronto.

It’s interesting to hear the one woman in the above video talking about how Wabash isn’t really a street you go to. It’s just the street between Michigan and State that you have to pass through. That’s how I feel about most parts of Lake Shore Blvd in Toronto.

Here’s how CityLab described it in their writeup about the project:

“While the L tracks are as iconic to Chicago as some of its skyscrapers, their presence overhead doesn’t necessarily bring in the foot traffic compared to other nearby streets.”

But something like The Wabash Lights could really make a difference.

I am a big fan of Twitter.

I use it more than any other social network and any other app on my phone (according to my battery usage). In fact, I’m such a fan that I recently started buying shares. I don’t own a lot and the Canadian-US exchange is awful right now, but I do plan to continue buying (I like dollar cost averaging).

Twitter isn’t the darling of Wall Street like Facebook is. And I think the biggest weakness of Twitter is that it’s difficult for new users to really “get it.” Facebook solved this problem early on by recognizing that new users had to connect with X number of friends right away so that they received value immediately and the next time they visited.

But I digress. That’s not the focus of this post.

This morning a friend shared a Medium article with me that was written by the Laboratory for Social Machines at MIT. The article is about a small town in Spain called Jun (pronounced “hoon”) that has transitioned to using Twitter as the dominant platform for communication between government and citizens.

The initiative first launched in 2011 and since then the mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas , has been trying to get every resident onto Twitter. All 3,500 residents are even encouraged to go into the town hall to have their Twitter accounts verified. This way government employees know for sure that they’re dealing with an actual resident of the town.

Here’s a simple example of what this means for government-citizen relations ( the folks at MIT translated everything to English):

In the above example, a citizen tweeted the mayor informing him that a street lamp was out. The mayor then responded, tagged an electrician, and said it would be fixed the following day. Sure enough the electrician went and fixed it the following day, and then tweeted out a photo of the lamp.

This is great. And Twitter was made for these kinds of interactions. Facebook was not.

Here in Toronto we have @311Toronto , which I have tweeted many times before with problems and they do respond quickly (far quicker than if you try and call them). But I still think there’s room for us to improve transparency and engagement across the board.

All of this is a perfect example of how technology and cities are colliding in a big way. In today’s world I really think you need to be able to think across disciplines.

Airbnb is a platform that connects people who have extra space with people who need space. It’s a peer-to-peer hospitality company.

Yeloha , which is a startup I just discovered today, is a peer-to-peer solar company based out of Boston. 

In the same vein as Airbnb, it connect people who have extra roof space (that’s suitable for solar collection) with people who want to buy solar energy (but may not have a solar friendly roof).

Here’s an image from their website that explains how it works:

Basically, if you have a solar friendly roof, Yeloha will come and install solar panels on top of your place for free. You get to keep some of the energy that’s generated (about 1/3 apparently) which becomes a credit to your electricity bill. You are then known as a “Sun Host.”

The remaining energy gets fed back into the grid and, if you don’t have a solar friendly roof, you can purchase this excess energy, which also results in a credit to your electricity bill. The solar electricity is less expensive than the regular grid electricity. In this case, you are known as a “Sun Partner.”

I think this is a pretty neat idea. Neither party has to pay anything upfront. Both parties save money. And the result is more solar through a distributed and virtual net metering setup.