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How can children learn faster what brings an I've been to an emergency sooner how do you get the right man in the right job the answer is computers only computers can cope with a diversity of municipal demands and to help you understand some of the uses of computers we bring you the series computers in modern city government. Your host of these programs is the P.D. city administrator Dr E. as tough as today's topic databank breakthrough Dr Service governing a large city like New York and planning for the future growth and development of the city requires a great deal of information data about the city and its activities. When we talk about massive quantities of data naturally we think of the role of computers the computer is a modern tool which is helping city planners cope with the vast files of data that planners need in order to plan wisely. And our guests today to discuss the role of computers and data processing in city planning are Edward Robin the director of the office of comprehensive planning of the department of city planning of the city of New York and ROBERT AMSTERDAM project leader in the Office of Administration in the office of the mayor. Let's begin with Ed Rob And Ed you're the director of the office of comprehensive planning what does that mean what do you do what is comprehensive planning. I have usually so that nobody knows what comprehensive planning is. We. Basically are concerned with the various systems. In the city by systems I mean the functional systems how the sewers work how the. Communication systems work we're concerned with the patterns of change in the city as a whole and in each of the. Neighborhoods and communities and city this is a tremendously diversity it has all kinds of neighborhoods it has neighborhoods that probably reflect the nature of life every and every part of the country and we need. To understand where. Life is changing in these communities how it's changing what's happening and what's going to happen and in the next five to ten years what kind of information do you need then if you're concerned with planning and if you're concerned about the change of life the change of the physical appearance of the city changes in in the transportation systems changes and so in networks changes in school construction and so on. What does this mean in terms of information and data you know not once upon a time I think city planners are concerned more with the physical appearances of the city and kind of architecture in landscape architecture What's the changing environment now with the changing of facts of life in city planning Well of course the and department of city planning and the commission have been for a long time and still are concerned with basic problems of zoning and land use and. At heart what what these come down to our concerns with preserving adequate light and air and providing for circulation for pedestrians and vehicles and providing an adequate. Pattern of open space. The the nature of planning is changing to the extent that we have become equally concerned increasingly concerned with. Problems that deal with people problems of more defined as I as a matter of social concern we. For example the the. Has become clear that one needs to understand how. Housing deteriorates why it deteriorates where housing. Is deteriorating in various parts of the city what are the causes of the deterioration in order to to examine that and to do an appropriate analytical job on this kind of question we need to know. Some basic data where are housing maintenance of building code violations. Being placed where our tax the way one sees tax arrears taking place we need to be able to. Relate those kinds of facts to use them both to understand what's happening now and also to predict what will be happening in the next five to ten years what kind of problems do you have in pulling together this kind of data in this kind of information you have a geographic concern for information mostly we are concerned with. The organization of material by by neighborhood by community specifically we have not even by all the additional detail kind of detail or material you're referring to well to go back to the question of condition of Housing and. Which is reflected in large part by. Where what buildings on on on what buildings violations or housing and maintenance violations are being placed. We need to aggregate that kind of data by a geographic communities knowing that a particular building as going downhill is not in itself important in terms of the planning process knowing that. Buildings in a particular community are going downhill on a fairly uniform pattern is important in terms of determining where housing. New housing resources should be allocated now the problems are that these files files on which the planning department relies. Are maintained by other operating agencies and. Each agency has its own imperatives they have their own needs they have their own requirements. And. We have to then try to translate the files that are being maintained for one purpose. Translate them so that they can be used for an entirely different purpose Bob what the you've been investigating various data files throughout the city can you give us some examples with respect to let's say buildings and parcels in the city how of wide variety of different departments are concerned with data about a particular piece of property what a silly example of the partment in the kinds of data that they utilize collect utilize it in the normal course of their activities Well the most widespread interest is out of the property assessing he's responsible for knowing the usage valuation evaluating the condition of the improvements placed on each parcel of land in the city so that he. Has the responsibility of identifying every lot of land anywhere and the city limits how many are there by the way how many parts of land are there with the new roughly eight hundred thirty thousand. On which there are something like nine hundred thousand buildings and other words some lots have more than one building and in other cases there's a building on more than one lot. Which complicates accomplish identifying often if you know what you're talking about. Another complicating factor in this is that once a city we develop our oars and we develop a who's working and city guide and. Will receive a parcel of land under condemnation proceedings he'll identify this by a damaged parcel number which may cover several buildings several lots and this is a number that is adventurous to state authorities to federal authorities because this is the basis of funding and yet this has no relation and directly to the tax assessor's a block and lot numbers and again clearly the a building address. Does not necessarily relate back to the blocking law one thing that's always intrigued me is the fact that different apart Well let's see the first flight running through some of the various departments it turns out that there are departments in the city who are concerned with where a particular piece of property is located who owns it what is it worth how many how much taxes have been paid on it or are still do on it what is built on that property what is that property used for is there an incinerator on that property has that incinerator been upgraded have there been any fires reported in that building is the building used for residential purposes is there an elevator has the elevator been inspected and as you go through this list of different kinds of significant questions which really affect our daily lives. Start seeing that all sorts of departments get involved with tax assessors Department to finance the Palm which collects taxes the city planning which is a concern among other things among many things with the Land Use the the Housing and Development Administration which is concerned with issuing permits to build and to certify as fit for occupancy. The. Department of air resources which is concerned about the condition of the incinerators and the fire department which wants to have information about outbreaks of fires in certain areas then sure many of the city departments I guess are really concerned with that what are the different the identifying ways that one thing that tends to happen when you have different departments with kind of different interests in a building one when the partisans that who owns another the book Bomb is interested in the elevator of the building what are the different kinds of identifiers that are used to identify a particular building or property. Well you have good tax block Block front. You have census tracks you have health areas. Health areas maintained by the by the Department of Health. You have the census track which is the basic organization organizing unit for the U.S. Bureau of the census and all of the population statistics that are done by the under the Sonny of census Let's take the let's take those two items the health area and census tract. A key planning role is the prediction of where people are moving within the city and into and out of the city in order to know where to build new school capacity the city has to know. How many people are going to move into a new community. Three four and five years ahead of time it takes three to five years to build. A new elementary intermediate or more high school. You have to find the sites and so on and otherwise you have to play it's important to know how people are moving from one part of the state to another in order to plan to provide the municipal services like a school or so lines and transportation line that that's correct now to the basic components out of which one can predict population movements are the Health Department statistics which are the birth and birth some doubts they are collected on a health area basis they're collected annually another basic. Building Block is the are the descending all censuses that are conducted by the YOUR of the census the material here is organized on a census track basis so here you've got one set of data which is by health this strength and health systems have nothing whatsoever to do with the census tracts to different geography different map it's used and you've got the problem playing to try to. Pull in all your and all the info all the available information together no to proceed with your planning process Yes And just to make it even more complicated another piece of information on is is information collected via the schools the schools record transfers of students from one district to another from one school to another. Nor an enormous amount of material which would help quite a bit and being accurate on projections of where people are moving to yet the material is collected individually and as a substantial test organized by and related to any of the other measures that we're talking about the health areas these fences tracts or the community planning district so I see the problem each department because it has something to do with a particular building or parts of the city starts to maintain its own records its own files for its own purposes and that's as it should be but then the problem comes in in trying to for your purposes for some kind of comprehensive planning for some kind of citywide purposes the problem comes in trying to extract information from these files and try to reconcile data that comes in lots of different ways stored in lots of different places using lots of different kinds of identifiers tax block and lot number normal street address health district police precinct census track and block so I can see that there's a significant problem I can imagine Bobbie you know about this how the what are the problems involved in the in trying to relate the building violations with the with the building owners. Well the many problems. Come in. From the fact that building violations are collected by. The Department of. Met now doing maintenance and these are referenced by block and lot number. These are available. And computer form. The ownership records. Are not computerized at all these are also available these are stored by block and lot number. But I'd say the biggest problem here is that the registrar's office which is the recorder of ownership. Collects a great variety of data that is an owner could be an individual it could be a corporation it could be the descendants of Mr X. who died in one thousand nine hundred eighty. With names not known at all or it could be twenty call partners and the problems there are. Identifying all of this information on ownership in such a way that it can conveniently be related to the information on the at the address of the building that has some violations on it that tracking. The the picture that I get is one of total confusion that's probably an inappropriate but I can see that with this profusion of the partment and files and so on there are lots and lots of problems in trying to pull together information to try to get a comprehensive look at one neighborhood or the other these they are asked a question. The or agencies exist purely to be solicited for information do you ever. Lobby for things that you feel for example. You're going to can just to get him neighborhood you don't have to. Doesn't take much data to realize that you might need another school or do you ever you know approach the Board of Ed or I will whoever does the planning of new schools and say we have an overabundance of people living in this community you should. Build another school here or do you just simply sit back is your agency purely to be solicited for information you ever project what the needs already of the community basically the operating agency has the responsibility for making an initial assessment allocations of resources the responsibility of the. Planning Department and the Planning Commission is to assess the. Assess and review these not only in terms of their own the needs of any one program but also in relationship to the needs of other programs specifically on the on school program. It may well be that. That there there are perhaps five communities that have relatively equal. Space requirements for new schools. And one of those communities may be a community that requires a good many other kinds of of facilities as well as schools and there may be opportunities to combine schools and housing or schools and other kinds and recreation facilities and. So we try to. Point out to the operating agencies the developmental needs of the city and the relationships between their program and other programs that are conducted Bob tell us about the project that your coordinating among several city agencies in order to try to up improve our ability to bring together data on several different departments you're calling it just what does just stand for that's correct just stands for a geographic information system. And basically it's proposed as a method of relating. Let's say mappable information that. Different agencies do have an interest and a need in sharing and coordinating. With each other in order to gain a fuller picture but. They need the plans that they have to make to feel build their own responsibility and this is a computer based system just and just suggests the brevity and and the pulling together things in summary. What is what it would how will just work what kinds of How will what let's put that there's a department that has let the both at the point is a group of conferences why not put together some information from one department and that information is organized by tax block and lot number let's say and as another agency with information that's perhaps organized by street address how will just solve this problem how will just work what will that agency be able to do OK. What you say is it's corrected I think a point to make is that. Each agency is going to be expected to maintain and improve the quality of the or their own files what just will be doing is providing a core of information that does provide for relating the information in one agency's files to that of another so that like a translator isn't it that's correct so that when the example that you gave just will have the capability of translating from the tax assessor's block and a lot number to another department street address house address number. The one of the what are the important elements that are just or let's let's go to a specific example how might just be used for example to improve the the the ambulance service of the city of New York to merge the ambulance service well in this case we're working with the hospitals department to develop. A method so that. Each ambulance call can be translated into geographic coordinates what does it mean to have each ambience call in other words there is a call the ambulance call has the address the location of the call and computer programs will be able to relate this to a fixed geographic grid system so that we can determine the exact location of each call in relation to the hospital in relation to the location of the ambulance will so that you're actually generate a map showing the location of calls that's correct that one three have this basic geographic data we can generate a map showing the distribution of calls in a in a bar in a section of the city this could it this would indicate. We think very graphically where. Where an ambulance could be located that was these are the satellite ambulances that would not be at the hospital but would be located near the hard core areas this density map would show where the hard core area is not a very powerful tool that you just described Bob another words which any department in the city would be able to take information that's let's say organized by street address and pass it through the computerized just system and be able to produce a map showing the location of the various events in other words I can imagine the Afar the parliament using just to to develop very rapidly a map which shows the location of fires of a certain type I can imagine the police department showing the location and distribution of burglaries I can imagine the Board of Education using it to show the distribution of children of a certain age group I can imagine in the case of ambulance calls being able to generate all the kinds of maps that the people in charge of planning for ambulance service in the part of hospital. I. Would like to see for example of the showing how what the distribution of calls is like on a weekend what it's like on a weekday what it is during the day what it is during the night because all these different. The different data suggest different ways of locating ambulances different numbers of ambulances to use a different times of the day in different days of the week and I can see that for your purposes and comprehensive planning. Computerized mapping is a significant kind of accomplishment would you would you comment on on the on the role of computers in computerized mapping what we use maps constantly and we're concerned with seeing the relationships again between different kinds of programs how the for example the proposed highway improvements relate to proposed sewer improvements because the construction of those two is a key. Key element in saving time and inconvenience to communities and in cost savings. We need to be able to have that kind of material easily put on maps so that one can see it on. At will there's a very powerful powerful AIDS and because City Planning is characterized by lots and lots of maps and lots and lots of map making for the different factors you're interested in I think it's important to point out that this system that Ed Robin and Bob Amsterdam have been describing just geographic information system is something that is not just a pipe dream it's something that's well under development and in fact much of it is going to be operational this year. So with that positive note let me close by mentioning that our guests today were Edward Robin the director of comprehensive planning the department of city planning and ROBERT AMSTERDAM in the office of the mayor. Thank you very much Dr Saad as next week's topic deals with computers on campus you've been listening to another broadcast of computers and modern city government if you have any questions about today's program or wish to receive a free booklet titled introducing the computer right to computers W N Y C New York one hundred zero seven and join us again next week at this time for another look at computers in modern city government.