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Category: Co-Creation

What We Learned From Smart Cities NYC ’17

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Smart Cities need to be for everyone

Bridging the digital divide was another major theme of the show, and premiere sponsor Microsoft led the conversation.

“This is not about cool technology,” Toni Townes-Whitley, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector and Industry, said. “This is about regulatory work and increasing inclusiveness across the board.”

During her keynote, Townes-Whitley unveiled the company’s Smart Cities for All initiative, which seeks to empower disabled persons by making today’s digital environments more accessible. We’ll be covering this initiative and Microsoft’s other big reveals later this week.

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Creative city, smart city … whose city is it?

Screenshot-2017-11-26 Creative city, smart city whose city is it

In 2007 US creative cities “guru” Richard Florida was flown up to Noosa to tell the local city council how they, too, could become a creative city.

Noosa was one of a long line of cities across the globe queuing up to pay big bucks to the US-based academic-entrepreneur. “Being creative” had become an almost universal aspiration. Who would not want to be a creative city?

And so Creative [insert name of city here] signs sprang up in the most unlikely places, along with stock shots of creative young things hunched over laptops in cafes.

Ten years later, different gurus are being flown around and the signs have been replaced by Smart [insert name of city here]. The stock shots are much the same, but now the young things are being innovative, disruptive and above all “smart”. That’s the trouble with fast policy: here today, gone tomorrow.

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Taking the smart route to inclusive, sustainable and connected smart cities

A view of Gangding Station of the Guangzhou bus rapid transit system in China

As digital data becomes a key resource to build sustainable cities, all urban stakeholders need to adapt. Development actors must step up efforts to integrate this new paradigm and broker impactful and inclusive partnerships around urban data, write AFD’s Gwenael Prie and Pierre-Arnaud Barthel in this guest column.

Inclusiveness is another key element of smart city, according to Philippe Orliange, director of strategy, partnerships, and communication at the French development agency, Agence Française de Développement.

“Smart cities are about changing the fabric of urban policy so that citizens are involved in the design of the city, so that policies address real needs, and are socially inclusive,” he said….

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People-Centered Urban Design Focus-Smart City Week 2017 Bangladesh

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Dhaka, 13 November 2017- To build the home-grown vision of people-centric smart cities for all with a theme of ‘Smart City Smart People’ – a ‘Smart City Week 2017′, from 29 november to 05 December has been organized by UNDP Bangladesh, Access to Information (a2i) Programme at the Prime Minister’s Office and urban sector stakeholders. The week will be inaugurated through a three day (29-05 Dec) ‘Smart City Innovation Hub’ at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Novo Theatre.

Having focus on building people-centered cities by not only investing in technology and infrastructures alone but also engaging smart people who care, respect and pay values to the society – the Smart City Week will be a part of ‘Smart City Campaign’. Apart from the three-day “Smart City Innovation Hub” and a range of events like hackathon, roundtable discussion, photo exhibition, kite festival, citizen’s forum, “City Day”, children’s art competition and many more are put under the week’s slogan ‘co-creating cities’….

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People, not technology, matter in #smartcities

Screenshot-2017-10-29 People, not technology, matter in smart cities – National Courier

Cities, the American-Canadian author Jane Jacobs once observed, are engines for national prosperity and economic growth. But in their current form, modern cities are also catalysts of inequality and environmental degradation. Today, the share of city dwellers in poverty is growing; 33 per cent live in slums; and 75 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions originate in metropolitan areas.…

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Who are smart cities going to help the most? | A #SmartCity Citizen Co-Creation Project

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There’s no one way to build a smart city. Cities are different and the wants and needs of their citizens, while similar in many ways, are different in others. As many cities have found out, it’s not always easy to get citizens involved with planning and engaged in the process or who actually benefits (or does not benefit) from the…

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Urbanising the ‘smart’ way : Social Innovation : Hitachi

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Cities at the National University of Singapore and Vice-Chair of the ITU Focus Group for Smart Sustainable Cities (FGSSC), agrees. Smart technology is an enabler of improving the quality of lives of citizens. “If you don’t improve the quality of life of urban dwellers, you aren’t doing something right,” he says. Nonetheless, improving the lives of city dwellers is in…

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