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There’s a revolution stirring in Barcelona (but not that one). It revolves around the ownership of data. ‘There is a new deal on data,’ says Francesca Bria, the woman charged with turning Barcelona into a truly smart city — a city that harnesses the power of technology and puts it to use solving the problems of its citizens. ‘We believe that data is a public infrastructure — like water, like roads, like the air we breathe — and it should be treated as such. It belongs to the citizens of Barcelona.’
“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”
All in all there is an active ecosystem of mutually re-enforcing and dependent commons and cooperative actors that are building products and services aiming to be more inclusive, that are produced following shared knowledge and participatory processes, with governance models that foster participation by workers and/or users. In many cases the economy and salaries are still fragile, but participants work hard to consolidate their projects, despite the fact that most institutions and support systems are catered for a capitalist mode of production. All in all, there is an alternative vision emerging, one that tells that yes, we can do it together, without excluding others from using, reusing and participating. One that puts the people truly in the centre and builds on shared missions, on people and planet before profit. Key will be to build further institutional support and strengthen interlocal and international collaboration, replication and reuse and co-development of needed infrastructures, services and mutual support.
On 23 June the second event of the Online Advisory Programme of the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN) took place. Building on the results and learning from the first event, this time the focus was on how we can engage citizen participation already in the strategy development for the digital transformation in our cities.
Finally how did Moscoso apply the metaphor of the actual city of Liverpool as a port with the human body? “Liverpool’s position as a port and hub of cross-cultural encounters, circulation, distribution and global transnational mobility – along with its difficult history of humans forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas and beyond – is central to the narrative of this edition. It is a bringing-together of the near and far with notions of movement and digestion; the stomach’s role within the body and the movement from inside to outside, on a global scale.”
Agility has become a common term when it comes to today's discourse on digitalization and government transformation. There is a widely held view that governmental bureaucracy with its laws, regulations, institutions, and `red tape' is unable to keep up with a rapidly changing and digitizing society. It is now often claimed that the solution is for governments to become agile. Along these lines, the resulting discourse on `agile government' posits that government is not agile now, but it could be, and if it were agile then government would be more e?ective, adaptive, and, thus, normatively better. We argue that while agility can represent a useful paradigm in some contexts, it is often applied inappropriately in the governmental context due to a lack of understanding about what `agile' is, and what it is not.
We have listed all 210 Resource Recovery Points of the Chennai Corporation. Buyers and Sellers registration is increasing every day.
Chennai has become the first city to have an online waste exchange for municipal solid waste.
Residents who want to sell their waste online will be able to contact 2,600 scrap dealers and other agencies across the city.
The Madras Waste Exchange, which is both a web portal and an application, has been conceptualised by the Smart City Mission, with support from the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The web portal is www.madraswasteexchange.com and the Android app can be downloaded from Google Play.
Residents who want to sell their waste online will be able to contact 2,600 scrap dealers and other agencies across the city.
The Madras Waste Exchange, which is both a web portal and an application, has been conceptualised by the Smart City Mission, with support from the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The web portal is www.madraswasteexchange.com and the Android app can be downloaded from Google Play.
An Online Marketplace for Recyclable Waste
The Zero Waste Cities approach is a continuous effort to phase out waste – not by burning or landfilling it – but instead by creating and implementing systems that do not generate waste in the first place
Firstly, scan cars – vehicles that are equipped with sensors to collect data on the urban environment – are becoming increasingly popular to help the municipality to carry out tasks efficiently. For example with parking policy enforcement, waste registration and advertisement taxation. Apart from making the city more efficient and clean, with this project we question and explore what public and democratic values should be embedded in the implementation of these scan cars.
Data: a promise for life in the city. Data enables us to tackle major problems of modern cities, making them cleaner, safer, healthier… but only as long as people stay in control of the data, and not the other way round. We – companies, government, communities and citizens – see this as a team effort and want to be a leading example for all other digital cities across the globe. To get started, we have come together to set out the following shared principles.
Smart cities and their protagonists are strong, and their incentives are high; the cards are stacked in their favor, including the self-logic of technological development. Nevertheless, creative resistance is not futile, as there are strong tail-winds blowing with people and earth, of dignity and inclusion.
The »smart city« is a term widely used to signal an urban environment that re-invents, or »updates«, itself. The smart city not only embodies techno-visions and uses of urban space, but also signals the existence of different perspectives within itself.
In this presentation, we will seek to outline some of these with an outset in »the urban metainterface«. Examples of everyday urban experiences with interfaces are numerous: »TripAdvisor« provides access to restaurants, and other sights that are otherwise not clearly visible in the urban landscape; with »Airbnb«, any apartment in the city holds the invisible potential of a bed and breakfast, etc. In other words »every street corner and every local pub leads a double life« as expressed by Martijn de Waal. The interface is however not just an interface to the city, but is a meta-construction that within itself holds a particular urban gaze. The urban metainterface depends on an ability to capture the user’s behaviors: the more the interface opens up the city – to diverse behaviors and signification – the more it needs to monitor the users and their milieu, and process these data. The more we read, the more we are being read. But what are the aesthetic mechanisms of seeing and walking in the city, whilst being seen and being guided?
In this presentation, we will seek to outline some of these with an outset in »the urban metainterface«. Examples of everyday urban experiences with interfaces are numerous: »TripAdvisor« provides access to restaurants, and other sights that are otherwise not clearly visible in the urban landscape; with »Airbnb«, any apartment in the city holds the invisible potential of a bed and breakfast, etc. In other words »every street corner and every local pub leads a double life« as expressed by Martijn de Waal. The interface is however not just an interface to the city, but is a meta-construction that within itself holds a particular urban gaze. The urban metainterface depends on an ability to capture the user’s behaviors: the more the interface opens up the city – to diverse behaviors and signification – the more it needs to monitor the users and their milieu, and process these data. The more we read, the more we are being read. But what are the aesthetic mechanisms of seeing and walking in the city, whilst being seen and being guided?
He says that it is possible for old cities to be smart with the right interventions, “but when they want to have ‘smart’ they build a new city. What should happen to the city that we have now, should we abandon it? What we try to do is to help people in existing cities, so that in 5 or 10 years those people will build their own smart cities, using their own technology that they developed,” Agbodjinou says.
Though IBM had capitalized for decades on terms associated with intelligence and thought—its earlier trademarked corporate slogan was “Think”—smart was by 2008 an adjective attached to many kinds of computer-mediated technologies and places, including phones, houses, cars, classrooms, bombs, chips, and cities. Palmisano’s “smarter planet” tagline drew on aspects of these earlier invocations of smartness, and especially the notion that smartness required an extended infrastructure that produced an environment able to automate many human processes and respond in real time to human choices. His speech also underscored that smartness demanded an ongoing penetration of computing into infrastructure to mediate daily perceptions of life.
There is an urgent need in the cities in the UK, especially in the north, for a new set of economic policies to kickstart local recovery.
The Treasury has no such plan. The cities themselves often believe they must wait patiently until the government, or the economic cycle, bails them out.
But a new economic agenda is emerging, borrowed often from the most successful cities in Europe and North and South America, which can effectively allow cities to take back control of their economic destiny. This is the outline of this agenda. It will vary between the places that put it into effect – that is the point – but the basic ideas are recognisable, and can be summed up in ten linked propositions:
The Treasury has no such plan. The cities themselves often believe they must wait patiently until the government, or the economic cycle, bails them out.
But a new economic agenda is emerging, borrowed often from the most successful cities in Europe and North and South America, which can effectively allow cities to take back control of their economic destiny. This is the outline of this agenda. It will vary between the places that put it into effect – that is the point – but the basic ideas are recognisable, and can be summed up in ten linked propositions:
Julia Kloiber: "If we're aiming for just futures, then equity has to be on the first page of our smart city strategies".
The UK as a whole is moving towards sustainability by reducing, re-using and recycling. Each nation seeks to preserve resources, minimise waste, send less to landfill, protect our ecology and make a positive impact on climate change. The future of waste is smart waste, efficiently tracking waste to it’s final destination and accountability for waste throughout it’s lifecycle.
Smart city systems and applications are shaping how we experience urban life. While some of these changes are obvious, many remain unseen. These technologies are intended to make our lives more convenient, and can be measured in quantitative terms like efficiency and cost-savings, but how do we gain a fuller picture of their impacts? This workshop explores the need to assess the social impacts of smart cities and the potential for different methods of data collection to be used to this end. Morning presentations and guided discussion will examine case studies, compare research methods and frame issues to be explored together. Afternoon group work involves imagining new ways to evaluate smart city projects, applying a mix of research methods to real scenarios and data sets. The call for participation invites researchers and practitioners to submit short position papers that will inform the workshop and lead to an expanded publication.
Flaws of the Smart City is a critical kit to explore the dark faces of the so-called Smart Cities. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities embed flaws. This kit aims to fix these weak spots or to exploit them to set chaos.
Via @jernejar
Via @jernejar
This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploitation. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
ReGen Villages, patent-pending VillageOS™ operating system software and ReGenerative Villages Simulator™ will enable the replication and global scaling of regenerative resiliency to meet the challenges of safe, healthy and secure communities in dynamically changing times.
Construction for Berlin's tallest building is scheduled to be completeled in 2023. Plans are for 3400 software developers to occupy 28 of the 35 stories. It will be located on the Warschauer Bridge, next to the East Side Mall, a relic of the Media Spree era. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg will be transformed into a hotspot for tech giants. The mantra of it brings jobs is repeated. Of course those jobs are not intended for local residents. The neighborhood will see a demographic shift, with tech firms disrupting the neighborhood staples: small businesses, schools, community initiatives and cultural centers. In Silicon Valley, the consequences of laissez faire capitalism is apparent. The recent victories in New York City and Kreuzber show that we are not simply at the mercy of real estate, but that we can successfully push back against tech giants through grassroots coalitions. This is exactly what we aim for. Together we creatively and loudly protest against the Amazon infestation in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. A conglomerate like Amazon, which harasses employees, pays no taxes while earning hundreds of billions, and propogates digital surveillance, has no business in Berlin or anywhere! The city belongs to us!
High-tech smart cities promise efficiency by monitoring everything from bins to bridges. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?
Guardian Cities is concluding with ‘The case for ...”, a series of opinion pieces exploring options for radical urban change.
Guardian Cities is concluding with ‘The case for ...”, a series of opinion pieces exploring options for radical urban change.
As cities, the closest democratic institutions to the people, we are committed to eliminating impediments to harnessing technological opportunities that improve the lives of our constituents, and to providing trustworthy and secure digital services and infrastructures that support our communities. We strongly believe that human rights principles such as privacy, freedom of expression, and democracy must be incorporated by design into digital platforms starting with locally-controlled digital infrastructures and services.
Affordable Land (or ‘Community Land’) is a form of leasehold that precludes speculation, and so allows councils to license land as a low-cost platform for society and the economy, instead of simply selling it to land traders. It requires no government borrowing, no new legislation and it can exist alongside the existing property market.
Todos queremos cidades com serviços eficientes e baratos que melhorem o transporte, a saúde, a moradia, a educação etc. Mas a questão é como evitar que nossas cidades se tornem máquinas de precarizar tra
Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data.
A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.
A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.
Sidewalk Labs is only footing the bill for the first 12 acres in Quayside–and not even that, entirely. The company would pay for the construction of its buildings as any developer would. (It might then bring in another contractor, or perhaps even a nonprofit, we’re told by a spokesperson, to handle leasing.) But much of the concept is dependent upon all sorts of other infrastructural upgrades to areas like sewage, which could run $6 billion on their own. Sidewalk Labs is offering to foot this cost as a loan, but Toronto would have to pay the company back. Sidewalk Labs argues that the increased property taxes generated by this new development would be new money for Toronto, and could therefore be used to pay back the loan over many years without being an additional tax burden on the city.
The idea behind the book is to ask what would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, and more), or a city where critical public services are delivered by these companies?
Residents living around Plaça del Sol joke that theirs is the only square where, despite the name, rain is preferable. Rain means fewer people gather to socialise and drink, reducing noise for the flats overlooking the square. Residents know this with considerable precision because they’ve developed a digital platform for measuring noise levels and mobilising action. I was told the joke by Remei, one of the residents who, with her ‘citizen scientist’ neighbours, are challenging assumptions about Big Data and the Smart City.
New York’s network infrastructure is a lot like the city itself: messy, sprawling, and at times near-incomprehensible. However, the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.
Faced with a digital transition with multiple societal effects for the territories, it is necessary to build community capacity in the area of development and governance of urban data services to make them instruments of the general interest encouraging the energy and ecological transition, the revitalization and accessibility of centers small and medium towns.
Over the past two years, Sidewalk Toronto has brought some important questions about cities – and our collective futures – into sharp focus. Some of those questions are new; others we’ve been asking for a long time. This is a collection of ideas to help build on and continue these discussions.
We asked contributors for a short, standalone description of an idea, policy, strategy, or best practice that might expand this conversation about cities. The people we asked met three basic criteria: a) people that have shown an interest in contributing to the discussion b) people that have a history of participating in public discourse and c) people with an explicit mission of inclusivity in their work. This list of contributors is not comprehensive or complete.
Within the collection there are conflicting ideas and world-views, which is exactly the point: to open up dialogue and create the largest possible tent to discuss what we want to see in our cities and spaces and how we might make those things happen. Our hope is that this convening will make space for more collaboration and conversation in the future.
We asked contributors for a short, standalone description of an idea, policy, strategy, or best practice that might expand this conversation about cities. The people we asked met three basic criteria: a) people that have shown an interest in contributing to the discussion b) people that have a history of participating in public discourse and c) people with an explicit mission of inclusivity in their work. This list of contributors is not comprehensive or complete.
Within the collection there are conflicting ideas and world-views, which is exactly the point: to open up dialogue and create the largest possible tent to discuss what we want to see in our cities and spaces and how we might make those things happen. Our hope is that this convening will make space for more collaboration and conversation in the future.
Half of a hundred cities from around the planet are part of the task force of collaborative actions regarding challenges and opportunities of the platform economy. Who is part of this working group? What are their objectives? How can your city join?
Strengthening existing foundations between UK and Indian academics and societal partners, the project will learn from three small cities which are all undergoing city-wide retrofitting and area-based improvements in smart technologies and infrastructures as part of India's national 100 Smart Cities programme. Using interdisciplinary approaches from urban studies, social and cultural geography, sociology and geoinformatics, it will contribute to evidence based policy related to SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.
If the ambition beneath the instrumentation of the body is ostensible self-mastery, and that of the home is convenience, the ambition at the heart of the smart city is nothing other than control – the desire to achieve a more efficient use of space, energy and other resources.
