Detroit — Bedrock along with tech companies Bosch, Cisco and KODE Labs unveiled Wednesday the newly launched Urban Tech Xchange.
The collaborative lab, known as UTX is housed at 1520 Woodward and serves startups and technology providers. NextEnergy will operate the third-floor office space, which sits two blocks from where construction is underway on Bedrock’s Hudson Site project.
The partnership includes resources from global technology companies Bosch and Cisco and the smart building platform KODE Labs. Data will be made available from Bedrock’s more than 19 million square feet of urban real estate.
“There’s so much data being emanated from our buildings every day …” Bedrock CEO Kofi Bonner said during the launch event Wednesday. “We have the distinct pleasure to just partner with … the industry to bring this data to the fore so that they can take their brilliant minds and their innovators and plug into the data, the systems and get information. Information that they can take back and hopefully help us get a better understanding of how our buildings are operating, how our buildings are being used, how our energy systems are being used.
“And with that, we’re then able to design and build better buildings,” Bonner said. “We’re better able to design spaces between the buildings so that fundamentally our customer experiences, our energy demand systems are top of the mind.”
- Bonner said UTX builds on the momentum of the Detroit Smart Parking Lab, a joint venture between Bedrock, Bosch, Ford and the State of Michigan. That effort launched in 2021 and provides a platform for startups to test and demonstrate solutions for last-mile mobility, sustainable parking and electric vehicle charging infrastructure enhancement. Since its launch, 25 startups have gone through the system, Bonner said.
- “Eighty percent are from out of state,” he said. “That’s tremendous. That’s growing the economy, diversifying the economy and all we had to do was bring our real estate, 19,000 parking spaces.”
Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch in North America, said they want to take what they’ve learned from the smart parking lab and implement it in urban technology.
“As a technology company, we’re interested in all these interactions between people and buildings and sensors and technology,” he said. “And this allows us to do all that down here with the partners that we have and a great platform provided by Cisco. So we’re very clear about our intention: driving profitable growth across North America. That’s what I’m responsible for, and specifically in the United States and specifically here in our hometown of Detroit. So we’re really focused on identifying those products and services that meet the regional needs of our customers.”
- Mansuetti said it takes a team effort to develop the latest technology. That includes established companies, such as Cisco, as well as startups that ready to get involved, he said.
- “(There’s no one of us individually that can do this,” he said. “Kofi has great buildings. Cisco has great tech platforms. KODE has great tech that brings us together. We have some of the central technology. We also have some of the endpoints, but it takes all of us coming together collaborating, and collaboration is critical.”
Mayor Mike Duggan said that Detroit, as a place that designed and built the automobile, wants to be the city again where people come to design the future. He noted the collaborative effort among the firms, using the parking lab as an example.
“They get together with Bedrock and say let’s do another lab,” Duggan said. “Let’s open this up for anybody who’s got an idea, anybody who’s got technology because we’re going to deliver a message: The City of Detroit is the place you want to go if you want to design the future. You are making this city better for all of us.”
Data generated will include information for Bedrock’s East Riverfront Sensor Network, deployed on properties in the area where the firm has grown its portfolio in recent years. The network can measure air quality, ambient sound and includes camera technology that captures in real time data from the travel of vehicles and people on a city street.
During a demonstration Wednesday, Joel White, product and solution owner for intelligent traffic systems in Bosch’s video systems group, showed the traffic flow along Jefferson at Chene. White noted that the data is anonymous and does not capture license plate numbers or perform facial recognition.
Bedrock has cameras in the city’s east riverfront area and will start with an initial nine cameras around its parking structures, White said. One example of its usage is to monitor the flow of traffic during events at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre on Atwater Street.
“There they’ll look at, when there’s an event, what does the traffic look like?” he said. “What does the pedestrian flow look like? And all of that data will come through the system to better analyze how to manage parking, how to manage traffic flow.”