Book by Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Laurent Hérault, and Hideyuki Tokuda: “Smart cities are a new vision for urban development. They integrate information and communication technology infrastructures – in the domains of artificial intelligence, distributed and cloud computing, and sensor networks – into a city, to facilitate quality of life for its citizens and sustainable growth. This book explores various concepts for the development of these new technologies (including agent-oriented programming, broadband infrastructures, wireless sensor networks, Internet-based networked applications, open data and open platforms), and how they can provide smart services and enablers in a range of... (More >)
Power to the people: how cities can use digital technology to engage and empower citizens
Tom Saunders at NESTA: “You’re sat in city hall one day and you decide it would be a good idea to engage residents in whatever it is you’re working on – next year’s budget, for example, or the redevelopment of a run down shopping mall. How do you go about it? In the past, you might have held resident meetings and exhibitions where people could view proposed designs or talk to city government employees. You can still do that today, but now there’s digital: apps, websites and social media. So you decide on a digital engagement strategy: you build... (More >)
Designing an Active, Healthier City
Meera Senthilingam in the New York Times: “Despite a firm reputation for being walkers, New Yorkers have an obesity epidemic on their hands. Lee Altman, a former employee of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction, explains it this way: “We did a very good job at designing physical activity out of our daily lives.” According to the city’s health department, more than half of the city’s adult population is either overweight (34 percent) or obese (22 percent), and the convenience of their environment has contributed to this. “Everything is dependent on a car, elevator; you sit in... (More >)
Data as a Means, Not an End: A Brief Case Study
Tracie Neuhaus & Jarasa Kanok in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “In 2014, City Year—the well-known national education nonprofit that leverages young adults in national service to help students and schools succeed—was outgrowing the methods it used for collecting, managing, and using performance data. As the organization established its strategy for long-term impact, leaders identified a business problem: The current system for data collection and use would need to evolve to address the more-complex challenges the organization was undertaking. Staff throughout the organization were citing pain points one might expect, including onerous manual data collection, and long lag times... (More >)
Smart Cities – International Case Studies
“These case studies were developed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in association with the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS). Anyang, Korea Anyang, a 600,000 population city near Seoul is developing international recognition on its smart city project that has been implemented incrementally since 2003. This initiative began with the Bus Information System to enhance citizen’s convenience at first, and has been expanding its domain into wider Intelligent Transport System as well as crime and disaster prevention in an integrated manner. Anyang is considered a benchmark for smart city with a 2012 Presidential Award in Korea and... (More >)
Privacy concerns in smart cities
Liesbet van Zoonen in Government Information Quarterly: “In this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people’s concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people’s privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance... (More >)
The Ideal Digital City
Digital Communities Special Report: “With urban areas continuing to grow at a substantial rate — from 30 percent of the world’s population in 1930 to a projected 66 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations — getting the urban experience right has become paramount. To help understand the building blocks to a successful digital city, The Digital Communities Special Report looks at five key technologies — broadband, open data, GIS, CRM and analytics — and provides a window into how they are helping city governments cope with economic, educational and societal demands. The good news is that these... (More >)
What if Cities Used Data to Drive Inclusive Neighborhood Change?
Solomon Greene and Kathryn L.S. Pettit at the Urban Institute: “Policy responses to neighborhood changes that displace or otherwise harm vulnerable populations often come too late and at too great a price. This essay proposes integrating multiple data sources to develop neighborhood-level early warning and response systems that can help city leaders and community advocates get ahead of these changes. Using intelligence generated through these data systems, local leaders could adopt interventions that secure inclusion in dynamic neighborhoods. This essay is part of a five-part series that explores how city leaders can promote local economies that are inclusive of... (More >)
Revealing Cultural Ecosystem Services through Instagram Images
Paper by Paulina Guerrero, Maja Steen Møller, Anton Stahl Olafsson, and Bernhard Snizek on “The Potential of Social Media Volunteered Geographic Information for Urban Green Infrastructure Planning and Governance”: “With the prevalence of smartphones, new ways of engaging citizens and stakeholders in urban planning and governance are emerging. The technologies in smartphones allow citizens to act as sensors of their environment, producing and sharing rich spatial data useful for new types of collaborative governance set-ups. Data derived from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support accessible, transparent, democratic, inclusive, and locally-based governance situations of interest to planners, citizens, politicians, and... (More >)
Code and the City
Book edited by Rob Kitchin, Sung-Yueh Perng: “Software has become essential to the functioning of cities. It is deeply embedded into the systems and infrastructure of the built environment and is entrenched in the management and governance of urban societies. Software-enabled technologies and services enhance the ways in which we understand and plan cities. It even has an effect on how we manage urban services and utilities. Code and the City explores the extent and depth of the ways in which software mediates how people work, consume, communication, travel and play. The reach of these systems is set to... (More >)
