Urban Logic

Urban Logic is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, organized in New York and qualified in California, co-founded by Bruce Cahan and David Kuhns in April 1991.
Work in New York City
On a hot August 19, 1989 evening, an ancient steam pipe maintained by Con Edison erupted, spewing 200 pounds of asbestos wrapping in a geyser of mud in front of 32 Gramercy Park South, leaving a crater in the street five feet deep and ten feet across,, killing three people, injuring 24 more, and evacuating the 200 residents of that apartment building.[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res950DEEDD1039F937A1575BC0A96F948260&scp6&sq=consolidated+edison+steam+] Bruce lived in that apartment building, and for nine months was one of the tenants made nomads, their clothing, apartments and lives pilfered, destroyed or forever changed. Among many possible factors, research showed that a Con Ed work crew at 20th Street and Third Avenue (also known as 32 Gramercy Park South) re-pressurizing the steam pipe on a hot August night, was unaware that two blocks away at 18th Street and Irving Place a New York City water crew was repairing a water main that may have allowed water to seep underground around the pipe at exactly the moment that the 135-year old pipe was most fragile - while re-pressurizing.
At the time of the explosion, Bruce was working for a Hong Kong merchant bank. Bruce had practiced law for ten years with Weil Gotshal & Manger,, specializing in corporate, municipal and real estate finance. He had programmed computers and saw the potential for creating a digital map of the entire City of New York, from bedrock to the top of the World Trade Towers. This vision became a 1991 proposal from Urban Logic to the Mayor's Office of Operations for NYMAP, as a public-private partnership. Urban Logic's implementation challenges included persuading the Mayor's Office and agency commissioners that their paper maps were outdated, incomplete, pilfered and inaccurate, and proving the cost savings of creating and using a common base map.
Urban Logic, aided by the City's Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Environmental Protection, , the Mayor's Office of Operations, the GISMO users group and then City Councilman Andrew Eristoff, estimated that unless a common base map were built for $20 million+, the City would ultimately spend $537 million over the next 10 years on projects that would partially map or depend on partially mapping various attributes of City operations, and none of such maps would necessarily align, or be interoperable. The DEP was then designing its digital water main and sewer main mapping project, the Department of City Planning was then designing its replacement land use and zoning maps, and the Transit Authority was designing its facility mapping system, the New York Police Department's crime mapping project was being expanded, the City's Department of Finance was enhancing its tax parcel assessment maps and the Building Department's building information system was being enhanced. Urban Logic used a survey of the many City Agency and safety functions that generated and relied on maps to estimate the ultimate benefits:costs of having the Agencies share a common base map. By arguing that the name of Fifth Avenue and its dimensions do not change annually, an accounting custom of City OMB was reinterpreted as well to permit "data," not hardware and software, to be treated as a capital asset eligible for capital budget (instead of operating budget) funding; like most cities New York's operating budget is frequently in deficit, while its capital budget is in surplus, so that the effect of making a project "capital eligible" is to get it currently funded. Urban Logic also advised the City against trying to sell its geospatial data at a profit, arguing instead that the economies of scale to the City Agencies of requiring and receiving standardized geospatial data would make operations more efficient and effective, at a cost savings far outweighing the historic Bytes of the Big Apple or similar digital mapping proceeds. Eventually, the Mayor's Office of Operations was persuaded through City Council hearings in which Urban Logic and other allies participated to create a "NYCMAP - A GIS Data Utility," to serve Citywide needs for accurate geospatial information. The NYCMAP was quality-assured by the CARSI Lab of Hunter College's Professor Sean Ahern and his team. Today, the award-winning NYCMAP Data Utility and its public portal NYCityMap are essential tools for managing New York City daily and especially in emergency situations.
Role as Emergency Responder after September 11th Attacks
NYCMAP was delivered six months before the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks. NYCMAP enabled dozens of federal, state and local agencies, and corporate and nonprofit groups to respond more effectively to the 9/11 event. Urban Logic's federal and corporate network of allies supplied data and resources to the Emergency Mapping and Data Center at the Mayor's Command Center. Through its connection to the FGDC leadership, by the afternoon of September 11, Urban Logic arranged to obtain the first aerial photographs of Ground Zero, which Bruce Cahan and Hunter Professor Ahern printed out at CARSI Lab, and then carried through Midtown traffic into the temporary Command Center, at the Police Academy, located at 20th Street and Third Avenue, diagonally across northeasterly from 32 Gramercy Park building, the site of the 1989 steam pipe explosion. In the months after September 11, Urban Logic provided liaison and logistical support for the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), the New York Police Department and dozens of other agencies, including arranging for CBS News to disseminate updated damage assessment and other maps to the global media, tracking the contracts, payments and work load of the EMDC, obtaining critical infrastructure data from Con Ed, title companies and other sources, and arranging for nautical maps in response to . Urban Logic briefed Congressional staffers and other professionals on the geospatial response to the 9/11 Attacks. With SUNY's Center for Technology in Government, Urban Logic led NSF-funded research to collect and understand the oral history and lessons learned in the first-person accounts of the geospatial and other emergency responders. The Council for Excellence in Government co-produced a video shot at the Command Center and distributed to all members of Congress that featured geospatial responders like Alan Leidner, director of the Emergency Mapping and Data Center, and architect of NYCMAP. Urban Logic arranged for cutting-edge technologies to be deployed in New York City after 9/11, including SensorWeb interoperability then being piloted by EPA and OpenGIS Consortium, so as to better detect biological, natural hazards or other threats.
Work on U.S. Federal Geospatial Policy
In the early 1990s, states and the federal government were increasingly interested in creating a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), whereby the geographic information of daily operations would be shared, updated and combined to understand regional quality of life issues more rapidly. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) was the steward on behalf of the federal Office of Management and Budget of coordinating the development and implementation of open NSDI interoperability standards. Beginning in 1995, Urban Logic undertook research for the FGDC to understand and leverage the economics of coordinated investments in geospatial information. With the encouragement of the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government Team and FGDC, in 1999, Urban Logic briefed agencies at the White House Conference Center and testified before Congress, at what was thought to be the first Congressional Oversight Hearing on geospatial information investment policy. Urban Logic's reports for FGDC, EPA and USGS renewed interest and commitment by OMB to fund coordinated investments in interoperable geospatial data and web services. For example, with Urban Logic as chief architect, the OMB created the I-Team Initiative so as to enlist commitments from state and local partners to co-invest in interoperable geospatial data and web services. Under the Freedom of Information Act, such data typically would become freely available to the public, thus ushering in a commercial era of high-value geographic positioning satellite (GPS) navigation services, and geospatial information tools like Google Earth and Google Maps. Urban Logic's financing and organizational contributions to the NSDI's implementation were shared in 2002 with the European Commission's INSPIRE Initiative , the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) and as an example of public-private partnerships [http://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?coteGOV/PUMA(2003)6/ANN&docLanguageEn] for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Sustainable Resiliency Underwriting and the Means Meter
The work at the Command Center had shown that in an emergency, New Yorkers would and could work together rapidly in common cause and with a mutual aid spirit. At a gathering of civil society technologists in Ben Lomand CA in 2000, Bruce Cahan saw the potential for using impacts-aware consumerism to reduce the environmental and social damage of developed economies. The 9/11 Attacks and the City's emergency response convinced Bruce that if a measure of regional quality of life impact could be created, municipal and corporate bonds, bank credit and consumer product choices would shift in response to transparently seeing their impacts. Such a composite quality of life measure was called sustainable resiliency, and the consumer tool to scan products and manage financial lives responsibly was called the Means Meter. With Apple's iPhone, the Means Meter would have the bandwidth and product SKU data to reflect impacts. With the thousands of performance benchmarks promoted by various expert communities as signifying the health of quality of life components, such as education, environment, public health, infrastructure and other domains, the data existed, geospatially, to compute sustainable resiliency. All that was needed was the "use case" for doing so, for making smarter decisions matter. In 2008, Bruce Cahan sketched such technologies at his Google Tech Talk.
SubEx Undergrounding Small Package Freight - An Example of Sustainable Resiliency Thinking
Operating in New York City for so many years, Urban Logic began researching the street franchises permitting utilities to run high- and low-tension electrical, gas, telephone and steam distribution networks. With Tim Reason a Columbia University graduate student, the research revived the City's memory of rights long-thought lost to demand data from its franchisees, Empire City Subway (a Verizon subsidiary) and Con Edison, that resulted in access to elements of the companies' geographic information systems' data, free.
The underground franchise research led Urban Logic to advocate reviving proposals from the early 1900s for delivering small packages throughout the City by subway, a project called SubEx. As proposed to the Transit Authority, SubEx would reduce the freight carrying demands by courier vans and trucks on the City's surface streets, and thereby reduce congestion, pollution and vehicular accidents, while simultaneously adding freight-based revenues to the subway system that could fund overdue Americans with Disabilities Act elevator and other capital improvements. SubEx was proposed as a franchise to be operated by a consortium of freight logistics companies, leveraging and providing synergies with their existing and future bar code and other package tracking technologies. SubEx was a finalist for the . SubEx is a practical example of the application of Urban Logic's sustainable resiliency underwriting principles to municipal finance, as it simultaneously would reduce energy demands within the City (gas-powered trucks) while strengthening mass transit system capital infrastructure, safety and revenues. As a City exposes to pothole lawsuits, undergrounding small package freight would reduce surface wear on City streets and thereby the incidents of "slip and fall" liability to the City and other drivers from courier van operations. NYSERDA had previously studied a similar proposal for pneumatic tube freight.
The Credit Crisis, GoodBank™(IO) and High Transparency Banking
Beginning in 2005, Urban Logic saw dark trends in the banking sector: a lack of transparency, little accountability for environmental or social impacts, and a high tolerance for breeding a professional culture on Wall Street and elsewhere of entitlement and rewarding the abject brilliance of pyramided schemes that generate no discernibly useful productive gain, only profits, to justify a bonus culture of Manhattanite excess. Gradually, a gloomy cynicism followed each debilitating moment of the subprime mortgage crisis, the 2008-10 severe recession, the widespread Ponzi schemes and subsequent discoveries. Urban Logic researched a more positive approach, wondering why the media focused so largely on disempowering solutions and solution builders.
Gradually, Urban Logic saw that Industrial Age banks seemed to be refusing to embrace the instant transparency and accountability of the Information Age. Worse, they used the technology to accelerate a more predatory user experience, where social web and browsing promotes gawking over-consumption, paid for on unaffordable credit, to buy things whose impacts globally (such as child labor) were unseen and unreported to the consumer. What if instead of camouflage, banks were highly-transparent? What if instead of "dumb money" that shows none of its impacts, banks were agents for showing such impacts, and creating "smarter money?" Rather than create a rating agency for sustainable resiliency, with its internal conflicts of interest, Urban Logic proposed to create a bank - GoodBank™(IO) - that would use sustainable resiliency to see its own and its customers' impacts and commitments to impacts clearly, transparently.
Further research showed that, while the data to determine the health of a U.S. bank was freely available, it is illegal for any FDIC-insured bank to reveal publicly its official rating of safety and soundness as determined by its bank regulators. What if in addition to showing impacts, GoodBank were to unleash a tool for comparing its safety and soundness data with any other bank's? That level of transparency would let a small bank compete more effectively with a big bank, based on safety, soundness and impacts. Sustainable resiliency, the Means Meter, a bank safety and soundness data analysis tool and other technologies represent an Information Age response to reforming banks and banking, and so by design, GoodBank would license these tools to other community banks and credit unions to let them more effectively compete and create user-customized experience for living their financial lives.
Three Layered Map of the World
In September 2008 at the New York City Center for Architecture, Urban Logic presented a design for a Three Layered Map of the World, so as to portray needs, capacities and money. The needs layer would level the playing field for indigenous peoples and regions to communicate directly their prioritized needs, with the benefit of, but without the monopolizing effects of, government, business and non-governmental organizations exclusively determining the needs of highest priority. The capacities layer would permit known solutions to a given need, say, sanitation or clean water, to be discovered from local or worldwide sources that would be viable in a similar cultural or climate setting. The money layer could track foreign aid, government and foundation grant, corporate investment and private philanthropy that is targeted to a given region's need or to deliver a given capacity. Using the Three Layered Map indigenous peoples would have a greater voice in calling for pre-disaster and post-disaster funding of prioritized needs to draw on proven capacities and offers of mutual aid and support, reducing the delays, waste and conflict of interest of forcing larger more complicated solutions, such as energy, clean water and other mega projects.
GoodBank's customers will earn cash-back rewards for saving, spending, investing and donating in accordance with their self-chosen ethical goals. Using the Three Layered Map to invest or donate to prove Tipping Points a social entrepreneur's or NGO's small solution or idea works will extend the impact of such cash-back rewards, and attract further resources to meet the identified need and grow sustainable resiliency.
Researching the Role and Viability of Publicly-Owned Banks
Along with research for GoodBank, Urban Logic was introduced to a small, cobwebbed cluster of financial history describing the role of public-owned banks, sometimes also called state-owned banks. In 2010, Urban Logic created StateOwnedBanks.com to share some of its research on this topic, and to put in perspective the parallel system of banks, globally, some owned privately and others owned or partially-owned by government as public trustee. Given the federal rescue of major and minor banks during the 2008-10 Credit Crisis, the role that publicly-owned banks play in modern economies for U.S. trading partners such as China, India, Germany and Latin America has been mentioned by political candidates and currency experts as a potential cure for moderating business cycles of expansion and contraction based on private bank "easy credit" lending policies that pump up the value of housing and other bubble assets.
Unaffiliated Companies
Urban Logic, Inc., the nonprofit described in this article, holds U.S. Trademark Serial Number 78146230, with date of first use January 24, 1994, for the trademark "Urban Logic." Urban Logic, Inc., the nonprofit described in this article, is not connected with others using a name or operating a website that includes the words "Urban Logic." In 2009, Urban Logic lost a WIPO Domain Dispute involving the domain UrbanLogic.com.

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