HISTORY OF URBAN LOGIC

The Early Years (1990s) – Thinking Spatially
Urban Logic’s started as a quest to prevent extreme events.

Each extreme event led us to create options for prevention, mutual aid response and resiliency.

On September 11th Bruce Cahan was in his Midtown NYC office speaking with Doug Yoder (Environmental Coordinator for Miami-Dade County) when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. In the following months, Bruce assisted at the NYC Mayor’s Command Center, providing logistical support to find, use and disseminate fast changing spatial data and maps needed to secure, recover and rebuild Lower Manhattan.
9/11 significantly changed Urban Logic’s thinking about what cities need to be safer, equitable, sustainable and resilient. While cities need spatial readiness, markets need better ways to rate and reward sustainable and resilient urban environments. Terrorists exploited the post-war architecture of buildings sized out of all proportion to sustainable function in the urban built environment. The rate of re-building in urban settings lacked market drivers for sustainability and resiliency. Urban Logic set out to find more options.

Urban Logic is now pursuing a portfolio of projects aimed at enhancing urban sustainability and resiliency:

Thinking Spatially to Act Locally – Our basis for assembling data about impacts on cities relies on open source geospatial Web services and our alliances across industry, government and NGOs building spatial data and services.
Sustainable Resiliency® - Rather than a hodgepodge of scary statistics about cities, sustainable resiliency® normalize the performance benchmarks that experts and advocates generate to compile a layer cake of urban benchmarks and proactive solutions.
Means Meter® - Consumers have enormous untapped power to move corporate regional priorities, yet lack the information tools and financial incentive structures to use their power effectively. The Means Meter® is a Web service for mobile phone and desktop systems that pushes each shopper’s ethical values and choices out into the marketplace and earns them cash-back rewards for doing good as they individually define and see the good.
Ethical Banking – Too few banks grow regional sustainable resiliency®, or partner with the emerging socially-purposeful entrepreneur and their consumer to grow it. Urban Logic is researching and incubating a project that would launch a new ethical bank, first in the San Francisco Bay Area, then scaling nationally and globally to serve the emerging social capital ecosphere, the SC-Eco.
The Social Capital Ecosphere (the SC-Eco) – Throughout the economy are a growing number of initiatives to grow transparency, so that consumers and businesses can better see the impacts their activities have on sustainability. We see a grouping of “neighborhoods” for ratings services, finance, shopping and other services. By taking a SC-Eco meta-model view, collaborations will more readily emerge across former competitors, all trying to “save the world.”
Procurement Visualization & Transparency – Collectively, governments account for 40% of US Gross Domestic Product, and spend billions on goods and services. American corporations spend trillions more. Urban Logic has prototyped a way to detect patterns in federal government procurements, with the goal of chipping off pieces that can be better fulfilled by “buying locally” from socially-purposeful enterprises and nonprofits. Leveraging procurement patterns can add to the SC-Eco, grow sustainable resiliency® and generate a flow of projects ethical banks can finance. Visualizing and breaking the ties that bind procurement patterns to campaign finance enhances the democratic process and changes the insider cultures of Washington, state capitols and local politics.