Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
Simultaneously a health crisis, social crisis, and economic crisis, COVID-19 is laying bare how well cities are planned and managed. Its impact is showing the extent to which each city is able to function – or not – especially during times of crisis.
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Around 68% of the global population might live in urban areas by 2050. Smart cities will likely be a part of this future, promising to make our lives more convenient, more secure and more sustainable. Mostly, the stakeholders of smart city projects are politicians, consultants, academics and tech companies. However, the most important group of stakeholders is often missing: the…
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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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Watch the Video! In our third public talk, author and community organizer Jane Farrow will moderate a conversation with three accessibility experts who are challenging cities to incorporate principles for inclusive design and ensure accessibility for all: Luke Anderson – Founder & Executive Director – StopGap Foundation; Consultant – AccessAbility Advantage Darren Bates – Founder – Smart Cities Library™;…
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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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How to foster dynamic civic participation, ignite citizen co-creation, and leverage human-centered urban design Lessons learned in the 20-year history of Smart Cities are testaments to the truth that successful and sustainable Smart Cities cannot be built solely upon the technology mainframe. Instead, cities must support and engage the broader community, prioritize and practice human-centered urban design, and provide diverse, accessible,…
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Carlo Ratti evangelizes the concept of a “real-time city,” where physical and social networks are in constant interplay, knitted together by a layer of digital sensors. Daniele Ratti The Sensory City Philosopher Architect, engineer, and inventor Carlo Ratti envisions a future for urban design that’s interactive. If you ever have two hours to kill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, skip the museums…
Read More As part of a #SmartCity #PeopleFirst approach, it’s incumbent upon everyone to acknowledge our collective responsibility as fellow human beings to remove access barriers preventing persons who are aging, #disabled and other underserved populations from equitable civic engagement. pic.twitter.com/vhweMbkyhi — Smart Cities Library™ (@SmartCitiesL) July 10, 2018
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For many local governments and cities, the initiatives around smart and connected communities are becoming more strategically defined, with many CIOs and IT leaders starting to orchestrate urban visions. During the Smart City Local Government Best Practice Breakfast at the Gartner’s Symposium and IT Expo in Orlando, Bill Finnerty (@digbfinn), Gartner Research Director, and I found a very collaborative and…
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Over the last years, there has been a shift from a top-down governance to a more horizontal governance. This new way of governing includes all the stakeholders of a public policy project, such as public organisations, businesses and citizens, into the implementation process. For instance, cities tap into their citizens’ wisdom through citizen engagement initiatives. The idea behind citizen engagement is that citizens should have some powers over the decisions that affect their lives. Yet, it is important to distinguish it from citizen participation. …
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The greatest advantage cities provide is the efficient utilization of resources- human, capital, land, water, and others- to achieve liveability objectives and also monetize the resources. The essence of the smart city concept is to achieve ‘more for less’. The proliferation of technology in the form of smartphones and super-fast wireless connectivity over the past decade has made it possible to give a technological angle to normal urban products and services….
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Technology provides a new dimension to urban development, which has often been overlooked by government, businesses and municipal bodies- the engagement and participation of citizens. As cities grow, they tend to cluster into districts with each having its own identity, cultural dimension, and character. These factors play a big part in the provision and appreciation of infrastructure and services. For example, if the majority of citizens in a city district oppose the development of overhead electricity transmission lines for safety or aesthetic reasons, and reach consensus on a solution to share a private land with the government to construct underground electricity cables, then it makes perfect sense to take those perceptions and consensus into account….
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Barcelona is acclaimed as one of the leading Smart Cities in the world, with studies such as those by Juniper Research, as well as the Hong Kong government, corroborating this statement. However, it begs the question – how did Barcelona manage to do this, and can their methods be replicated in other cities or locales, such as Malaysia?
In pursuit of these answers, the SITEC Media team managed to catch Maria Sisternas, CEO of Mediaurban, a Barcelona-based content creation agency that specialises in urban and smart technology solutions to answer these questions.
According to Sisternas, Barcelona believes strongly in citizen engagement, as well as cooperation between the private and public sector — the city is investing a large amount of money towards finding out what their citizens think about their projects….