Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
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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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What Should Be The Criteria For A Fully Accessible Smart City? Ask The Disabled! Smart cities are failing to satisfy the basic public needs of the disabled – say 60% of the global experts as per a new survey conducted by ‘Smart Cities for All’. Although activists and startups are working to provide a better urban environment for the disabled.…
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The transit systems and social services of major metropolitan areas should be appealing to people with disabilities. Managing a condition that affects one’s vision, mobility, hearing or cognition is often easier in these environments — at least it should be in theory. The disconnect between theory and reality starts with problems in urban planning and development.
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“Cities only work when you think about the people” One of the most important issues of our time is how we make better cities, writes editor Andrew Tuck in the introduction to The Monocle Guide to Building Better Cities. It is about “making places that deliver quality of life for all”. For a growing number of professionals in the real…
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With the government recently announcing plans to make Changing Places toilets mandatory in all new large public buildings, Nicholas Bungay, director of strategy and external affairs at Habinteg, examines how to ensure venues are open to everyone It’s reasonable to expect to be able to use a toilet when you’re out and about, whether for a football game, concert, show,…
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AV companies are understandably focused on trying to perfect their technology to address trust issues among the general public, but meanwhile, they’re working on designs for those who could benefit most from mobility technology — the elderly and people with disabilities.
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A Smart City Is an Accessible City. A new breed of accessibility apps can make life easier for people with disabilities. They can also make it harder. A group gathers on a Nashville street corner, some rolling in wheelchairs and others walking. They have arrived holding their smartphones and make friendly chatter while a coordinator helps them log in to…
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Inclusive ‘smart city’ development doesn’t necessarily mean we should ‘build for everyone’. Many desire to design products and services ‘for everyone’ — the wider we cast our net, the more fish we’ll catch. This is not necessarily true. It’s far too easy to make assumptions about how ‘everyone’ fits into our ideal ‘smart’ environment. It is easier still to assume…
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The Promise and Peril of “Smart” Cities Technology can help us govern better, but at what price to urban life? Technology can help us govern better, but at what price to urban life actual article chapter content Last year, American newspapers published more than 800 stories about “smart” cities. Readers could learn how municipal governments are deploying sophisticated technology to…
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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 56.7 million people — nearly one in five Americans — have a disability, such as vision loss, hearing loss or mobility impairments. People with disabilities face many challenges when websites are not accessible. For example, individuals who are blind may not be able to navigate a website using a screen reader if the website…
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Cities are serious business – economic powerhouses with their own delicate ecosystems – but that doesn’t mean designing them shouldn’t be fun. In Barcelona they made it a game. Like a Spanish translation of SimCity, the popular ’90s video game for imagining cities that plays on Nintendo’s moustachioed mascot Mario, SuperBarrio offers real residents the chance to determine how their…
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After launching the Ease of Living Index and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry plans to rank the 100 smart cities on their accessibility quotient for the differently-abled people or ‘divyang.’ “We need to do some sort of a survekshan – swachh survekshan, ease of living index, a garbage-free index and now an accessibility index across the…
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How friendly are public places in Hyderabad for the visually-impaired? Here is a visually impaired guy’s two cents of the accessibility off the places which he visit frequently in the twin cities. Being able to move on one’s own is a great achievement for visually impaired people (EPS | Vinay Mavdapu) Express News Service HYDERABAD: Being able to move on one’s own…
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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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For city governments, getting the most out of their digital transformations requires planning, engagement with residents and the ability to measure the impact of their investments. But because of limited resources and the demands of their day-to-day work, sometimes cities can be reactive to grant announcements or vendor pilot projects, leading to disjointed efforts. Several nonprofit foundations and academic centers…
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Over the past several decades, artificial intelligence has been besieged by rounds of hype that over-promised, under-delivered and nearly killed the field. Once more, Gartner positioned machine learning and deep learning at the top of its hype cycle, and all the publicity and potential often leads to a “trough of disillusionment” if the technology fails to deliver. Now that AI…
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Almost five years ago, amidst the initial hype of the technology-driven “smart city,” we published a report urging cities to take a step back. While talking to the early digital pioneers within city government, these leaders expressed to us that technological development was happening faster than their agencies could keep up. In response, we proposed judging “smartness” by whether places…
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India’s hill cities are unique poles of development. While they have managed to record some degree of economic growth, increasing urban population and unfavourable topography have also made such growth haphazard and unsustainable. In turn, this has threatened the quality of the built environment and of urban life in these cities. This report studies the case of the hill city…
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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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Homework is a drag for any high schooler, but for the class of 2006’s Laura Palmaro Allen, even starting an assignment required a laborious, multistep process. She and her family had to strip her textbooks from their bindings, run the pages through a high speed scanner, and digitize them — all before she could use text-to-speech software to actually ingest…
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