Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
Urban Air Mobility must incorporate the needs of disabled citizens if the promise – and full market value – of advanced air mobility and urban air mobility systems are to be fully realized.
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When urban planners envision their work for the 21st century, many often say it’ll begin with fixing the shortcomings put in place in the 20th century. However, the question remains whether professionals can make those changes quickly enough to avoid the worst consequences of their mistakes. Here are four urban planning fails that should be near the top of the list as professionals assess what to address first.
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Seniors have the most to gain from pedestrian and cycling improvements—yet they often feel threatened by changes that provide alternatives to driving. Here are ways to include seniors in active transportation planning. The first time someone accused me of being “ableist” I was shocked. I was advocating ways to make downtown more walkable, including pedestrianizing some streets. I view walkability…
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One of the principles we lift up in our report is to “build with, not for” affected communities. For technology to deliver on the promise of increased inclusion, design and implementation need to be grounded in the needs and priorities of communities. To do this equitably requires actively engaging and listening to residents throughout the process.
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To ensure #SmartCities are correctly constructed for the elderly, it is necessary to include them in the planning phase. Young people cannot understand the issues faced by the elderly. such as climbing up the stairs or walking on an uneven sidewalk.
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When the Amazon Kindle was released, their ebooks didn’t work with commonly used screen readers, making accessibility difficult for the blind community. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in the United States campaigned to change this for years, in vain. Then Amazon won a $30 million USD contract with the New York City Department of Education in 2015 to…
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Public authorities, transport operators, civil society organisations and other public and private sector stakeholder in Greater Lyon have been successfully improving accessibility addressing it as a cross-cutting issue and investing substantially in creating a barrier-free and inclusive environment.
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The top-10 was rounded out by Montreal (6th), Boston (7th), Melbourne (8th), Barcelona (9th) and Shanghai (10th). A total of 140 cities of all sizes from around the world were evaluated based on existing smart city rankings, news articles and online resources to measure their commitment to building a smart city. Each city was then given a score of one…
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.page-header .entry-header “The role of smart cities is not to create a society of automation and alienation, but to bring communities together”. (Iain Stewart MP) In June, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smart Cities published a report outlining the findings of its recent inquiry into how the UK Government can support the expansion of smart cities and enable the…
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Barcelona’s carritos call urban planners to take the streets and encourage a more inclusive form of urbanism. Photo by Raons Publiques Community participation has become a checklist item for any major urban development project. But what does community participation actually mean? What would it look like if we flipped the responsibility of engagement from citizens to designers? What if, instead…
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How co-creation is shaping the future of cities As the famous urban activist Jane Jacobs once wrote, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” It’s a truth that lies at the heart of a number of urban co-creation projects, which tap into the collective knowledge of citizens to…
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IND: create a column 8/12 columns the width the parent container AND APPLY CONTINIOUSLY responsive text class to anything inside this column Against a backdrop of revolution and protests on Barcelona’s streets over the last 18 months, Francesca Bria has been conducting her own battle to tear up the strategy of her predecessors and put citizens at the head of…
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From pollution levels and the number of traffic accidents to safer public spaces and more efficient heating in buildings—to what extent can the smartness of a city be quantified? And is it possible to measure the quality of life for an urban area through numerical parameters? /4988204/Phys_Story_InText_Box It’s all about collecting data that is reliable and making sense of the…
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Sidewalk-Toronto is excited to announce their public engagement plan, outlining a series of events, activities, and opportunities designed to get citizens involved in the co-creation of their Smart City. Check it out: http://bit.ly/2BPhy8T
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Understanding the needs of the population helps to design effective urban projects and create better cities and public spaces. Photo by Mariana Gil / WRI Brasil Cidades Sustentáveis / Flickr Our impressions of a city are formed mainly by the quality of public spaces. If they are not pleasant and preserved, or if they transmit a sense of insecurity, we…
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Smart cities are getting more and more attention in the media, from technology companies and entrepreneurs, and increasingly from both local governments and civil society. On one hand, smart cities hold the promise to potentially make the growing number of cities around the globe more efficient, more tech-savvy, more wired–and with all that, they can hopefully improve the quality of…
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The spread of urbanisation is inexorable. In 1800, just two percent of the world’s population was urbanised, in 2000 the figure reached 47 percent, and on the current trajectory it is estimated to be 70 percent in 2030. In 2008, for the first time, the world’s population was evenly split between urban and rural areas. There were more than 400…
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n the Government, digital services projects too often fail to meet user expectations or contain unused or unusable features. Several factors contribute to these outcomes, including the use of outdated development practices and, in some cases, overly narrow interpretations of what is allowed by acquisition regulations. OMB is developing tools to significantly upgrade the ability of Government digital services to deliver better results to our citizens and improve the way we capitalize on information technology (IT [1]) to better serve the American people.
One tool is the Digital Services Playbook, which identifies a series of “plays” drawn from proven private sector best practices to help agencies successfully deliver digital services. Another tool is the TechFAR, which highlights flexibilities [2] in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR [3]) that can help agencies implement “plays” in the Playbook that would be accomplished with acquisition support.
The vision for the TechFAR is that it will be expanded in future iterations to address many areas of IT. This edition of the TechFAR is aligned with the Digital Services Playbook guidance to use contractors to support an iterative development process. In particular, it emphasizes Agile software development [4], a technique for doing modular contracting and a proven commercial methodology that is characterized by incremental and iterative processes where releases are produced in close collaboration with the customer. This process improves investment manageability, lowers risk of project failure, shortens the time to realize value, and allows agencies to better adapt to changing needs. Agile software development is geared towards projects where significant design and development are needed, such as digital services (e.g., healthcare.gov or recreation.gov) as well as internal digital services and business systems. It is not designed to be used for commodity IT purchases, especially where commercially available off-the-shelf items can be used as-is at a lower cost and lower risk to the Government….
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The age of the “Smart City” is upon us!
It’s just that, we don’t really know what that means. Or, at least, not yet.
So far, many “Smart City” pilot projects that we’ve undertaken here in Boston have ended with a glossy presentation, and a collective shrug. Nobody’s really known what to do next, or how the technology and data might lead to new or improved services.
We want to change that. We address this playbook to the technology companies, scientists, researchers, journalists, and activists that make up the “Smart City” community. In return for heeding this advice, we commit that we, the City of Boston, will not sit in City Hall and complain about the lack of solutions to our problems. We promise to get out into the City, find ways to help you pilot new ideas, and be honest with our feedback.
Our goal is to create a City-wide strategy for the use of sensor technologies that is people-centered, problem-driven, and responsible.
We need your help to get there.
*This playbook is a living draft being developed by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and is inspired by the US Digital Service’s Playbook. Please send us your thoughts for building it out further, and watch for new updates!
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ities all over the world are investing in infrastructure like fiber-optic networks, a range of sensors, and interactive touch-screens and in practices like open data collection in a race to become “smart and connected.” Cities are rushing to get “smart” in order to create new economic opportunities, to take advantage of potential systems efficiencies, and to not be left behind the technological curve. They’re making smart-city investments with the best of intentions to improve quality of life and increase opportunities for commerce, tourism, and their citizens alike.
As part of these smart and connected investments, many communities are developing smart-city strategies to guide development and implementation. For example, members of the Mayors Bistate Innovation Team published a digital playbook in 2011 in order to leverage a newly installed Google Fiber network to spark economic development, advance opportunities, and improve daily life in Kansas City. In 2013, the mayor of London formed the Smart London Board, which published the “Smart London Plan” to harness “the creative power of new technologies to serve London and improve Londoners’ lives.“ The plan lays out the numerous ways the city will utilize technology and big data to re-create London not only as a cutting-edge city, but as one able to handle the influx of people expected to move there by 2030. Creating and executing such a plan in a way that is intentionally responsive and relevant to the whole of a community can create the opportunity for a city to go beyond “smart” and instead become an “intelligent community.” This is, of course, easier said than done, but some essential steps toward enabling an intelligent community to flourish are outlined below….
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