Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
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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Human rights must be put at the centre of development plans for smart cities. Civil servants should have a deep understanding of the technologies they are contracting, and enforce public procurement specifications that protect against abusive or wrongful use of the technologies. Technology needs to have safeguards to ensure that its use is consistent with human rights standards.
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Despite HK$1 billion in government cash to improve smart technology, Hong Kong scores lower than several other Asian cities including Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka and Taipei
Hong Kong has been ranked 68th in a global smart city index – way behind its main rival Singapore, which came in second.
Despite recent efforts by the government to make the city smarter, Hong Kong scored poorly in several factors including transport and mobility, sustainability, innovative economy, digitisation, and experts’ perception….
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It is very important for planners to understand the capacity of any city to hold the population, suitability for urban activities, geographical location, proximity to different hazards, present vulnerability and future risks to develop smart cities
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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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Many citizen engagement mobile apps (example – identifying pothole, drainage faulty traffic light, illegal parking, unattended, etc. issues) failed simply because it’s unable to sustain the popularity, usage, and continuous enhancement. Why? Below I listed some of the tips for the city authorities to consider avoiding these failures…
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Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) is the innovation platform of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area which contributes to the liveability and promotes sustainable economic growth. add
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What We Learned From Across America The response to the challenge was unprecedented – we received 78 applications. Cities from Albuquerque to Anchorage and Providence to Portland took the Challenge as an opportunity to create blueprints of their cities’ transportation futures.
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There is no rulebook for how to turn a city of today into a city of tomorrow. Only a few scarcely adopted guidance documents for the Internet of Things (IoT) have been created in recent years — most of them in Europe — with the idea of creating governance around a concept that has so far been a playground for technologists whose primary…
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What I did find surprising about the workshop day – and perhaps this is something generated by that whole notion of a town or city being understood as a lab – is that questions of culture and conflict weren’t broached at all. Smart cities are increasingly finding that to fulfill the vision of a good city that smart offers,…
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Turning a regular city into a smart city is not simple. There are a lot of challenges and issues to be tackled: Identifying the funding sources; defining the strategic plan; knowing the right benefits to the citizen and so on. But with well-defined standards and best practices, a complex path can be simplified into one that is easy to follow.…
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Australia’s Smart Cities Plan largely conveys a limited role for people: they live, work and consume. This neglects the rich body of work calling for better human engagement in smart cities. Cities are first and foremost for people. If our cities are to continue to meet their residents’ needs, it is essential for people to engage and participate in planning…
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I.B.M. has designed a new operations center for the city of Rio de Janeiro, coordinating all kinds of functions under one roof. The company hopes the project will lead to a huge worldwide business. However, such approaches revealed many shortcomings, most notably the lack of civic engagement. I 2010, Rio de Janeiro launched the Integrated Centre of Command and Control,…
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