A Proposal to create the CUSP Urban Observatory Abstract CUSP will create a platform for the demonstration and exploitation of various synoptic sensing technologies in urban settings.  The accessibility of diverse urban scenes and activities, together with various “ground truths,” will allow an exploration of the phenomenology and utility of various sensor modalities, particularly when intercorrelated and/or combined with correlative data. Among the likely uses for observatory data are to improve building energy efficiency, to detect releases of hazardous material, to track pollution plumes, and to aid post-blackout restoration of electrical power. Data will be made available for analysis by CUSP personnel (by proposal?).  New sensors can be proposed and integrated with the existing systems.  Chapter 1: Introduction The rationale for cities can be stated succinctly – “it’s where the people are.” About half of the world’s population lives in urban environments today and by the middle of this century that number will grow to 80%. A great build-out of urban infrastructure in the developing world will occur in the next 4 decades, which will determine the quality of life and environmental impact of the majority of humanity. In North America, we’re already 80% in cities, rising to 90% by 2050. So cities are the loci for resource consumption, for economic activity, and for innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability problems but also where those problems must be solved. Cities have to be efficient, they have to be resilient, they have to be sustainable and address quality of life issues for their citizens. And any given city must be as good as it can be to thrive in the global competition for talent and capital. Making cities better requires understanding, else we fumble around unproductively. And that understanding needs data, both to know what to do and what impact it might have. Data is needed for the three elements of cities: The Infrastructure: We need to know the condition of the infrastructure (e.g., are the joints corroding in the bridges?, where are the leaky pipes?) and the operation of the infrastructure (e.g., how is traffic flowing?, is the electrical grid balanced?) The Environment: We need to understand not only the obvious meteorological variables but also the pollution and noise that people experience day to day. The People: Cities are built by and for people and so cannot be understood without studying the people: their location, health, economic activities, how they communicate, opinions, etc. Privacy and data access are thus very important considerations in this activity. Our ability to collect, transmit, store, and analyze data is growing rapidly. If properly acquired, integrated, and analyzed, “big data” can take us beyond today’s imperfect and often anecdotal understanding of cities to enable better operations, better planning, and better policy. Putting urban data in the hands of citizens will improve governance and participation; in the hands of entrepreneurs and corporations it will lead to new products and services for governments, firms, and consumers. In short, it is now not a fantasy to ask “if you could know anything about a city, what do you want to know” and to ponder what could be done with that information. Remote sensing of urban areas is a well-established set of technologies, traditionally carried out from satellites or aircraft. A variety of modalities (optical, infrared, spectral, radar, Landsat) have been shown to give useful. However, among earth’s locales, cities have unique characteristics in that their population and infrastructure density is high and there are almost always tall buildings within them offering vantage points from which significant populations and infrastructures can be “seen” by a single sensor. For example, at a nominal population density of 104/km2, there are 3 million people within 10 km of the Empire State Building. For these reasons, we propose to create CUSP’s Urban Observatory or Persisten Synoptic Phenomenology project as a unique facility that would be an integral part of the larger CUSP research program.