The Negative Space of Digital Twins
In art, the un-activated area around the subject is the negative space. The lack of activation adds to the composition, balance and maybe even the mystery of a piece of art. When I look at digital twins of cities, I see a lot of negative space. Or rather I see a composition where the roadways, transit, and ports are all in motion — their kinetic energy framed by negative space. In today’s digital twins commercial buildings are often displayed as charcoal-colored obelisks: immovable, passive, and inactive. That is not the reality. Even post-Covid, commercial and multi-use buildings still teem with activity, which changes hourly.
A digital twin of a city is incomplete when multi-use buildings that are widely used by the public and workers are displayed to suggest no activity. While elsewhere in the twin, streets and transit are represented with dynamic, real time data. The reason for that being — traffic and transit data collection and feeds have been developed, adopted and monetized. We can do the same for commercial buildings.
What we do know about commercial buildings from a city government’s perspective is static. The building heights, number of floors, zoning, and, ownership, etc., are all recorded in a number of different business systems — and sit often unchanging. The dynamic information that changes by the hour is occupancy. The who and the quantity. Real estate brokerage firms solicit occupancy information from current and prospective clients and maintain their own monetized databases as of leasable space (where and at what price). This data is vital to brokerages. However, tracking occupancy in the real estate industry is something of ad hoc process. The need to fill a vacancy by a building owner or property manager might trigger a disclosure of occupancy data for a specific building, but that data isn’t recorded publicly and is certainty not consistently captured for all commercial buildings in a downtown or office park.
Cities routinely count of vehicles on roadways, why not the quantity of humans in commercial buildings? I know privacy alarms are ringing right now. Yet the same rationale used by transportation engineers, economists, emergency responders, and policy makers to understand the dynamic capacity and congestion of roadways should apply to a city’s stock of commercial buildings too. Especially since the pandemic has upended all assumptions about the near and longer term use for commercial office and retail spaces. A dynamic accounting of occupancy would be extremely helpful for participants in the marketplace and for city policy makers. In the worst-case scenario, firefighters would know the number of people trapped in a building, and where by floor, as to better respond in real-time to a crisis.
It’s not the day to day uses that are likely the most significant use of the data, and that’s where the privacy concerns can be addressed. What’s valuable is understanding occupancy and how it shifts overtime and is impacted by events (e.g., Covid variants). Building managers and office managers would benefit from both daily and the longitudinal views of occupancy to evaluate which spaces are most to least utilized — in aggregate numbers of people and by concentration. This is space planning in the digital age. Sensors could count active WIFI and/or RFD signals from mobile devices without the need to resolve those signals to a person’s identity.
What is the incentive for sharing out that data, and at what frequency or location accuracy? I think city governments could promote a data sharing program with a combination of regulatory and economic incentives.
- Inform property managers of the benefits of a smart building and city digital twin technologies to track occupancy in real-time during annual building safety system inspections or business license renewals.
- Similar to requirements to disclose commercial/industrial building energy performance, a city could require that occupancy detection IoT systems be installed upon construction (with relevant data and personal privacy protections required).
- Discounts on licensing or permit fees could be provided to incentive joining a data sharing program with the city.
Not to dismiss that property managers may not want this information made readily available to competitors. To encourage participation, governments might limit the commercial building occupancy data to the ingest of digital twins used and accessible only by fire, police, and/or emergency management agencies. Proving the value of this data for public safety might be the best first step in encouraging this data sharing and for finally moving beyond a city digital twin of empty buildings.
