Topic: smart-people

Over the past years, the smart city concept has reached a state of mainstream acknowledgment throughout the world. However, several important aspects are subject to constant debate:

• What is the best or a suitable smart city definition?
• Does the smart city concept apply to cities only, or does it include rural or smaller communities?
• Is the smart city concept technology- or human-centric?
• What are the key success factors of leading smart cities?
• What are the strategic governance approaches?
• What can be derived from best practices in smart cities development?

In our review on becoming a smart city, we will cover all of these topics that relate to the smart city evolution and defining the term smart city from a practical perspective.

Jamie Cudden is the leader of Dublin City Council’s Smart City program. The Smart City program focuses on embracing new technologies to solve the many challenges that the city faces to make Dublin a more liveable city for all of its residents. Using pioneering ideas, involving 5G, Internet of Things, and Big Data, Dublin’s Smart City program has been able to develop and deploy a wide range of solutions for challenges such as citizen engagement, sustainable mobility, energy management, and more.

Since Dublin is a prime example of a smart city in action (read our Smart Dublin City Portrait for more information), we decided to get in touch with Jamie and find out how he helped to steer Dublin into a smarter future.

As smart cities get smarter, citizens have begun to express concerns about the use of their data, and whether their privacy is being sacrificed for the benefit of big data.

Ever since the concept of a smart city first emerged, it has been clear that technological innovation, intelligent systems, and big data would be three key ingredients to a city’s success. While there’s no clear-cut definition of what a smart city is or has to include (see also our article Redefining the Smart City Concept: A New Smart City Definition), it has been universally acknowledged that the purpose of a smart city is to improve the lives of its residents.

According to statistics from the United Nations Population Fund, over half of the planet’s population lives in cities. By the year 2030, it’s expected that around 5 billion people will live in urban hubs. As cities grow larger and have a greater impact on the environment, local governments will have to adapt to ensure that the needs of their citizens are being met.

Civic engagement is a key part of a city’s evolution. Input from citizens can help define the dynamic of a city. Unfortunately, citizen participation rates are lower than ever. In the past, cities could use town hall meetings and surveys to connect with their residents, but due to a number of reasons, modern governments aren’t connecting with their citizens like they used to. This can have numerous negative effects on a city, from an alienated population to the implementation of unpopular policies.

Because of this, it’s necessary for city governments to embrace new methods of inspiring citizen engagement.

Bob Bennett, the former Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of Kansas City talked in our Smart City Leader Interview Series - while he still was the CIO of Kansas City - about the importance of smart cities and smart citizens. He emphasized the role of technology and the benefits for citizens.

The importance of smart cities & smart citizens: In our interview series, smart city leaders comment on the future of smart cities, the role of technology, and the benefits for citizens. In our second interview of the series, we have asked urban strategist and smart city expert Boyd Cohen to share his expertise, thoughts and insights with us on a number of important smart city topics.

The importance of smart cities & smart citizens: In our new interview series, smart city leaders comment on the future of smart cities, the role of technology, and the benefits for citizens. In our first interview of the series, we have asked Jonathan Reichental, CIO of Palo Alto, California to share his expertise, thoughts and insights with us on a number of important smart city topics.

As we discussed in our previous article (Blockchain: The Next Frontier of Smart Cities - Part 1), blockchain has the potential to transform our communities, making the places we call home more collaborative, democratic and sustainable places. It is no surprise then, that a whole bunch of cities - from Santiago de Chile, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Oslo, and Milan, to London, and Stockholm - are already developing blockchain-based projects. Dubai is going even further, aiming to become the world’s first fully ‘blockchain-powered city’ by 2020. Lofty ideals aside, as we examined in part 1, blockchain does actually seem to offer some concrete benefits for communities, as we shall see below.

Blockchain is a hot topic. Until very recently, it was associated almost exclusively with cryptocurrency - bitcoin, ethereum etc. However, the power of blockchain to revolutionize the way we exchange goods and services, and transform how we govern - above and beyond the cryptocurrency hype - is increasingly being recognized. When it comes to cities, the transformative potential of this technology is enormous. From enabling P2P energy-sharing systems, as in New York’s ‘Transactive Grid’, which allows local residents to generate, buy and sell their own solar energy, to encouraging behavioral change - for instance through SocialCoin’s blockchain and AI-based ‘social good’ currency (see e.g. the Citibeats solution) - and much more - blockchain is offering new opportunities to create more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable communities. As such, blockchain is likely to be an increasingly central enabler of smart city innovation worldwide. In this article, we will explore the potential benefits of blockchain in an urban context.

Innovating urban planning to foster community-focused development is a critical element in the creation of smarter cities. More than half of the world’s population currently live in cities. The UN estimates that by 2050, this figure will have doubled. The “financialization” of housing, among other factors, has led to a situation where many of the world’s cities are now defined by a chronic shortage of housing for the least advantaged, and in many cases, for the working and middle classes as well. The local connection between the financial institutions funding housing development and the people buying them has long disappeared, replaced by a new international financial system where real estate is a major asset. Indeed, a recent UN report estimates that the total value of global real estate makes up 60 percent of all global assets, with a value of $217 trillion, three-quarters of which is housing.

So how do we make housing more accessible in cities the world over? The ‘smart city’ movement presents cities with the opportunity to build and plan ‘smarter’, developing citizen-centered, tech-enabled living, working and playing spaces that respond to people’s changing desires and needs - that are ‘future-proof’ and ‘user-centric’. Whether in Sao Paulo, Brasil, or Todmorden, UK, smart city innovation, and the ideas and funds it brings, should be capitalized upon to drive forward and finance smart development projects that help to relieve the global housing crisis that we are facing. In this week’s article, we will focus on some of the ways we can innovate planning in order to ‘redistribute’ housing stock (both existing and future) to create more equitable, just and sustainable urban communities.