Techlines Today

Urban Planning 2.0, Nanaimo and Google

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 12, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Google

Time.com has an insightful piece on a collaboration between the city of Nanaimo and  Google. The city’s planning department has been feeding the search giant information on it’s public infrastructure for the last five years. Having launched just a few weeks ago, Nanaimo is being hailed as the “Google Capital of the World.”

The site [earth.nanaimo.ca] sorts and maps every business, from restaurants to car dealers, while a click of the mouse brings up the lot size for every property in the city, including the building permit number and zoning history. Homeowners can use the facility to find out specific information about their garbage collection schedule, while the city’s 150-year-old downtown core is rendered in 3D and dotted with 360-degree panoramas.

As Google continues it’s goal of indexing everything in the world, it’s amazing to think of the future possibilities. All too often, companies and, in this case, municipalities often fail to understand that just because something doesn’t make immediate (economic/political/business) sense now doesn’t mean that it won’t later. Information is power and having these types index, no matter how complete or incomplete is always better than nothing. Imagine if this already existed in your city, that everyone had an Google Andriod-type phone that seamlessly integrates and communicates with this backend – how does that change your day to day interactions with your environment. Privacy is dying, we might as well get some benefit to it’s demise.

Besides, just imagine when GPS enabled police squad cars are deployed!