Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
When we talk about people-centric urban planning, we are referring to a process that puts people, or end-recipients, at the center of the process. People-centric urban planning develops prototypes and solutions by performing embedded qualitative and quantitative research on those same people and end-recipients.
When we adapt this model to Smart Cities, we are describing a process by which the broader community (including people with disabilities and other historically undeserved or marginalized communities) becomes the center of the Smart City transformation process. All of our planning tactics and smart city solutions are informed directly by the needs, desires, expectations, and habits of the community.
This process requires urban planners to be nimble and flexible enough to adapt and edit their solutions based on community feedback—integrating and engaging the community into every step of the process from pre-design research and dialogue, to getting feedback on design concepts and prototypes, to noticing how the community uses the final product and making changes accordingly. So how exactly can we begin to integrate this approach into our process? Read On…
People-centric urban planning is mandatory for successful Smart City transformation because residents understand the strengths and weaknesses of their community and city better than anyone else.
A City isn’t smart if it doesn’t support the needs of all citizens.
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Can Phoenix become a transit city? It’s looking like more and more of a possibility lately. Phoenix’s Metro light rail system is less than six years old but has already surpassed ridership projections for 2020. The system is carrying 48,000 passengers a day, or 22,000 more than initially projected, according to the Arizona Republic. Extensions of the system, […] .entry-header Perhaps no other…
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Sidewalk Toronto is a joint effort by Waterfront Toronto and Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs to create a new kind of mixed-use, complete community on Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront, beginning with the creation of Quayside. Sidewalk Toronto will combine forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology to create people-centered neighborhoods that achieve precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity. Transcript ________________…
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close story-meta TORONTO — For a city striving to become a major technology center, it was a prize catch: A Google corporate sibling would spend the coming year planning a futuristic metropolis in a derelict part of Toronto’s waterfront. When announcing this fall that the company, Sidewalk Labs, would create a city of tomorrow, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada…
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How can we develop an IoT from a citizen’s perspective? What kind of projects have empowered citizens and what does it take to get these kind of projects of the ground? Those were the central questions we addressed at our panel at Thingscon 2017 that I had co-organized with Iskander Smit. Point of departure was to look at the design…
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Children play in flood waters after torrential rains in Kampung Melayu, Jakarta. Photo by Kate Lamb, Freelance journalist Rapid urbanization, economic growth and climate change are putting increasing pressure on urban communities around the world. While strong physical structures are important, social relationships play a key role in determining urban communities’ resilience during adverse weather events. Community resilience is…
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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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The term “smart city” has become common parlance in city planning circles in recent years. While there is no universally agreed upon definition, descriptions of smart cities typically refer to integrated and interoperable networks of digital infrastructure and information and communication technologies (ICT) that collect and share data and improve the quality of urban life (Allwinkle and Cruickshank 2011; Batty et al. 2012). However unlike related concepts such as the digital city, the intelligent city and the ubiquitous city, the smart city is not limited to the diffusion of ICT, but also commonly includes people (Albino, Beradi, and Dangelico 2015)….
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When it comes to dealing with the government, it’s rare that you find someone excited about the concept. City departments are notorious for mountains of paperwork, confusing rules and inefficiency. But according to a presentation titled “Reimagining the User Experience of Government” led by Brenna Berman and Mike Duffy, much of that is beginning to change.
Berman and Duffy are experts on the topic. Berman serves as Executive Director of City Digital, at UI Labs and was most recently the Chief Information Officer for the City of Chicago after spending more than a decade with IBM. Duffy is the Founder and CEO at CityBase, which is a company that “creates technology that makes government more personal and responsive.”
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My address to the first All Ireland Smart Cities forum which took place in Croke Park Conference Centre on Wednesday, 13th September.
“Good morning, I’m delighted to be here today. It gives me great pleasure to open, along with Dr. McCormick, the first All Ireland Smart Cities Forum.
As Minister with responsibility for Digital Development, I welcome the opportunity to be part of the sharing of information that is taking place here today.
The increasing use of digital technologies is impacting on every aspect of our lives: from transport, to education, to leisure and entertainment, to health services and beyond. And this trend is going to continue and will likely intensify. The increasing use of digital technologies is impacting on everyone – on individuals, on families, on businesses, on community and sports organisation, on Government itself.
Government is committed to transparent, collaborative engagement both with citizens and businesses, and use of digitisation and technology to continuously improve public services. The new eGovernment Strategy published this year sets out a vision to improve the delivery of whole-of-Government projects, expand shared services to increase efficiencies, and share data.
We need to continue to enhance the competitiveness of our cities, and build on existing smart projects. We also need to go beyond our cities and recognise the benefits that the smart agenda can bring to our regions because this is not and cannot solely be about cities such as Dublin and Belfast…
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We at the UN in Costa Rica are designing our next UN common plan for 2018-2022 to support the Government in its efforts to achieve the Global Goals by 2030. To do that, we are following the crowdsourcing spirit of the new development agenda. We are trying to adapt our decision making so that our new UN Development Assistance Framework is developed with the full wisdom of the crowd.
Read More![Screenshot-2017-12-8 Smart Cities Manifesto Ambassador Cities first results and Citizen Focus RoadMap for 2018 EIP-SCC Mark[…]](https://i0.wp.com/www.smartcitieslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screenshot-2017-12-8-Smart-Cities-Manifesto-Ambassador-Cities-first-results-and-Citizen-Focus-RoadMap-for-2018-EIP-SCC-Mark....jpg?fit=640%2C366&ssl=1)
On the 23rd of November 2016, the EIP-SCC Manifesto on Citizen Engagement was launched during the Conference Inclusive Smart Cities: A European Manifesto on Citizen Engagement. Being the result of a successful co-creation experiment, the Manifesto was in fact drafted with the direct engagement of more than 50 stakeholders that actively contributed to shape its contents. Thanks to a sound dissemination strategy and being co-promoted with ICLEI Europe and ERRIN, it has reached multiple European and international stakeholders, being endorsed by more than 120 public and private sectors representatives…..
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his May, urbanists around the world have been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jane Jacobs. The American-Canadian author and activist’s spirited defence of inner-city neighbourhoods inspired a generation of urban activists and place-makers. So what might Jacobs have to teach a new generation of urbanists and planners?
Much of Jacobs’ legacy stems from the successful “David and Goliath” campaigns she led in the late 1950s and 1960s against the development plans of Manhattan’s “master builder” Robert Moses.
Her first battle, to prevent an extension of Fifth Avenue that would have torn apart her beloved Washington Square Park, was followed by a series of protracted community campaigns. These ultimately saved some of Manhattan’s most iconic neighbourhoods – Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy – from “slum clearance” and demolition….
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Google has built an online empire by measuring everything. Clicks. GPS coordinates. Visits. Traffic. The company’s resource is bits of info on you, which it mines, packages, repackages, repackages again, and then uses to sell you stuff. Now it’s taking that data-driven world-building power to the real world. Google is building a city.
Tuesday afternoon, public officials gathered in Toronto to announce that Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary under the Alphabet umbrella that also houses Google, will pilot the redevelopment of 12 acres of southeastern waterfront. Today the area hosts a few industrial buildings and some parking lots. In just a few years, it will be a techified community going by the name of Quayside. Sidewalk Labs has already devoted $50 million to the project, and Google will move its Toronto headquarters to the neighborhood. Once the company has proven out its concept, it plans to expand its redevelopment to the entire 800-acre waterfront area.
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Growing urbanisation, sustainable development, digital challenge, users’ involvement, economic and cultural attractiveness, governance are part of the main stakes cities have to tackle. To face this plural urban reality, it has become necessary to find adapted means to conceive cities and territorial development. A better consideration of the uses, the creation of real consultation methods have priority.
Thus, the new processes to imagine have to respond to a main stake: to restructure urban places to live and to invent a creative, sustainable and citizen–centred city.
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Historically, the development of cities was spearheaded by kings but in contemporary times, cities are actively shaped by five types of socio-political actors: Agenda-setters (city councils/governments), Experts (urban planners), Sponsors (investors), Developers (contractors) and … Citizens (residents, public-interest groups, industry influencers, academia leaders, visitors)! However, much of the research and planning around smart cities is driven by technology rather than by the needs of the citizens. The citizen experience is often overlooked! To redesign this experience citizens need to have a seat at the table.
Smart cities can empower their citizens to design and shape their future. Toronto, for example, has been leveraging its “creative class” of financiers, healthcare researchers, artists, corporate strategists, lawyers, and social work pioneers to shape the future of the city the way citizens want.
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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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Our daily lives have changed radically in recent years thanks to new technology. But… how have people with physical or intellectual disabilities benefitted from this change? Experts believe technology hasn’t permeated society equally. Services have been developed that allow the rest of the citizens to be more involved through digital management of many spheres of community life, but people with disabilities still have many needs that have not yet benefitted from this. These may, paradoxically, set up new barriers in developed societies….
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For ICLEI, Smart Cities are the ones that look at the big picture, using resource efficiency and technological progress as well as taking overall urban governance into account to achieve a wider vision of sustainable cities and communities. This balanced approach ensures that the adoption of smart solutions in cities is people-focused, benefits urban citizens and ultimately leads to a safe, inclusive and sustainable future….
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The key to successful smart cities is addressing the current and future needs of every citizen. This is especially important for those who are aging or have disabilities. Inclusiveness should be at the forefront of every smart city strategy. The lens of design for inclusion is critical to make certain the promise of smart cities helps close the digital divide, rather than widen the gap. Moreover, cities are networks of diverse individuals and people who are aging and living with disabilities are integral to these networks—along with their families, neighbors and caregivers.
What’s the blueprint for building a smart, inclusive city? AT&T compiled insights and proposed guidelines in a new white paper, “Smart Cities for All: A Vision for an Inclusive, Accessible Urban Future.”
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