Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
The Smart Cities Library™ is a premier online resource that helps private/public organizations build/refine #accessible & #inclusive #smartcities that ensure no citizen is left behind or excluded
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e may have reached peak ‘smart city’. This trend depends on the continued densification of global urban areas and the exponential penetration of the internet into industries that were previously isolated from digitization. To see the peak in person, it’s best to get a glimpse at the Smart Cities World Congress in Barcelona; an event that brings together 17,000 people from around the world including 600 municipal leaders and over 500 international exhibitors.
At Urban-X, we see a new model for engineering the city as a service emerging; one in which top-down planning meets with bottoms-up participation and design that integrates people, businesses, buildings and other infrastructure. Open data and platforms that encourage creativity and economic vitality are a defining characteristic of the cities we want to live in.
The key to facing the climate crisis, security vulnerabilities and rapid urbanization is real citizen engagement and collaboration between the public and private sector. Startups have an important role to play, but the true economic potential of this space won’t be fully unlocked until we get good policy change and business model innovation from large companies.
Here are ten key takeaways from the Smart City World Congress in Barcelona that inform our path forward:
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The concept of a Smart City, as advertised by tech giants like IBM, Cisco and Siemens, is a city with sensors in every aspect of everyday life, gathering large amounts of data and using algorithms to optimize everything in the city like routing traffic, maintaining water and air quality, positioning of police officers and even the planting of trees to keep bees away from primary schools.
The Smart City concept has found its way from the R&D department of tech companies into academic research, agendas of policy makers and even into reality, like the Songdo Smart City in South Korea. The Smart City has numerous benefits, including the following:
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s more people choose to live in cities, local governments find themselves facing increasingly complex issues in city-making. Demands for affordable housing and public transit, tensions around gentrification and density, even connecting the dots between city planning and climate change, are just some of the more high-profile critical conversations our cities need. Solutions can come from many places, but smart cities realize that engaging the broad public in the city-making process leads to better answers and a deeper public ownership of our future.
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Often a City will begin their Smart City Initiatives with large infrastructure projects such as smart lighting, smart water meters, security, etc. but many of these programs have no direct influence on local citizens, visitors or help local businesses. Directly engaging citizens with information programs and helping local businesses to grow through smart programs have shown to have positive impacts on adoption and acceptance of Smart City projects.
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When: Thursday 1st February 2018 Where: Stamford Bridge, London Across the UK we are seeing more and more examples of smart city transformation. Key ‘smart’ sectors utilised by such Cities include transport, energy, health care, water and waste. Against the current background of economic, social, security and technological changes caused by the globalization and the integration process, cities in the…
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London’s ambitious Plan
The capital of Great Britain is the biggest city in Europe and with more than 200,000 people working in London’s technology sector the city has many resources they can use to make London more sustainable, effective and liveable. To meet current and future challenges the Smart London Plan was created. First published by the government on their official website in December 2013, it was updated in March 2016. Its intention is to show how the creative power of data and technology can be used to make the city of London function better and solve real-world problems. The idea behind the plan is to generate data that supports the city and its transport, social, economic and environmental systems. The Smart London Plan encourages Londoners to actively participate in shaping the cityscape of their capital and hence the future of London. Although the Smart London Plan focuses on London, the ideas presented in this plan can serve as inspiration for cities worldwide and help those cities become smarter as well.
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Here in the Science and Technology Innovation Program, we cover a lot of broad subjects under our little umbrella. We specialize in exploring the convergence of disparate technologies to illustrate how they can be interwoven – whether that be from serious games, biogenomics, citizen science or the Internet of Things (IoT). From outside, our multi-dimension may seem disorienting, but in reality our different programs present a multi-faceted understanding of science innovation. One way to see how these sundry approaches work together is through the phenomena of a “living lab;” a research concept with the ultimate goal of linking the scientific community to citizens with a desire to get involved.
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21 Features of the Future Sustainable City We already have many of the ideas and inventions that are needed to make cities truly sustainable, but there is a considerable delay in implementation caused by entrenched thinking and lack of training amongst those in administrative positions. Other ingredients that will arrive from left field are presently in development but will need…
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For a city to live up to its potential, investing in gee-whiz technology is not enough, say researchers at IESE Business School in Spain. A true smart city must score well in terms of sustainability, connectivity, innovation, as well as social cohesion, explains the most recent IESE Cities in Motion Index. Here, we present the top city in each of the regions described in IESE’s research.
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