Barcelona’s Livability: The Mercè Project

300.000 Km/s, Data, Middle Density, Senseable Technologies, Technology and fabrication

Algorithms, Barcelona, Big Data, Citizen interaction, Citizen’s role, Collaborative work, Communication, Data, Demography, Design process, Designing Strategies, Digital technologies, Europe, Expanded Architecture, Experimentation, Greenery, Health, Housing, Internet of things, Mobility, Open data, Open data city, Participation, Sharing knowledge, Smart citizen, Smart tool, Spain, Street network, Urban environment, Urban planning

Mercè is part of the “Algorithms trained by citizens” project developed by 300,000 Km/s, an urban planning firm, focusing on exploring the potential of data and new computing paradigms to extract relevant information for urban planning and decision making.

Mercè was created and developed thanks to collaboration from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) - Ministry of Science and Innovation and support from the Barcelona City Council, the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, the S+T+ARTS Prize and urbanNext.

In this context, the Mercè project embodies a new line of research that applies novel machine learning techniques (one of the branches of artificial intelligence) to the disciplines of urban planning, geography, sociology, economics and urban health with the goal of building objective knowledge and open data about urban environments.