Planning for the future

It’s been an exciting and busy few weeks at LocationTech. We recently hosted the first webinar in our series on sustainability – diving into the future of creating sustainable cities and the impact of population growth. Thank you to our speakers, Kane O’Donnell, Kat Salm, Greer O’Donnell and Ryan MacVeigh, for the insightful discussion. You can catch the full webinar here.

A couple of points I’ve been pondering since the webinar is the idea of what defines a city and how we might intelligently plan for the future. To plan for the future, we need to understand where we currently are, where we’ve been and what the best outcomes for the future would be. Kane raised a great point: “If you don’t have the data, you usually need a history of data.” This is an interesting perspective, as it acknowledges the importance of capturing data before we need it.

But collecting quantitative data isn’t enough when thinking about building for the future. For a city, it can be easy to capture location data from a quantitative standpoint. But, naturally, cities are not only defined by the space they occupy, but more so the people that interact within it. We are evolutionary creatures - always moving, growing and adapting to the times we live in. However, the space that we occupy isn’t always as adaptable as we are. This is why it is important that we not only capture quantitative data, but also qualitative data to truly paint a broader picture of what is needed for the future.

We have also just finished Techweek22, which was a great success. We hope you had a great time, attended many events and were inspired by the great innovations being produced in our own backyard. LocationTech’s deputy chair, Chris Morris, and I hosted a TechweekTV session – Right Place, Right Time: LocationTech’s Role in the MetaVerse – where we discussed the future of location technology and whether it has a place in the immersive digital world. In case you missed it, you can view our session and all TechweekTV sessions here.