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Some 3.5 billion people — half of humanity — now live in cities. Cities magnify human endeavours: they account for much more than half of humanity's pollution, energy consumption, crime and disease spread, while also incubating the lion's share of innovations, technology, art and entertainment. A sustainable, equitable future on our crowded planet will require fundamental changes in how cities operate. In Smart Cities, Anthony Townsend examines how information technology is shaping the development of 'smart' cities. Information technology: Slouching towards utopia
Melanie E. Moses
Nature 502, 299–300 (17 October 2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/502299a Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
Anthony M. Townsend W. W. Norton: 2013.
ISBN: 9780393082876 http://tinyurl.com/mzyxmjz
Via Complexity Digest
A new online mapping tool wants to make better urban planning by comparing a standardized map experience.
Peter Jasperse posted a wonderful link to a brilliant dutch blog. Its gems like this that make you really appreciate google translate. Peter wrote: The leading urban planner Zef Hemel, publishes daily on his blog about the latest developments in his profession. Short, sharp and insightfull posts, all in Dutch but with the help of Google Translate still worth reading for the rest of the world. In this particular post he writes about the impact of technology on cities: how they become more local, while staying global. He stresses the importance of Open Data, the role of city governments as facilitators, but most of all the creativity of the urban dwellers. Very much worth reading. Click on the image or the title to learn more.
Esri announced this week the availability of CityEngine Web Viewer in ArcGIS Online this week, allowing anyone with a WebGL-enabled browser to navigate and explore uploaded 3D cities and environments created in CityEngine 2012.
Via Jed Fisher
A predictive data analytics team in the Mayor's Office of New York City has been quietly using data science to find patterns in regulatory data that can then be applied to law enforcement, public safety, public health and better allocation of resources. In a good interview Michael Flowers explains why applying data science to regulatory data is necessary to use city resources better. This is the other aspect of smart cities - better analytics and models informing policy and practise. Worth readig. Click on the image or headline to learn more
Showing that nothing is ever new, Mike Batty posts an example of an early flow map from 1906 and gives links to earlier examples by Charles Minard in the 19th century.
MEshCities.com is always worth a coffee break read. Interesting article on applying game theory to smart cities. Learn more...
Cities are systems of systems, with things interacting in interesting ways. How do we work with them to make things better. Smart cities aren't about growth - they're about prosperity. They're about making insightful decisions, predicting problems, and co-ordinating resources to operate effectively. Peterborough is one of the UK"s leading cities for sustainability. They're gathering huge amounts of data, but very little of its is being sued by business or public sector decision makers. So they're trying to produce it in new forms. They create visualisations to make the information more accessible. For exampe - a visualisation of water meter use. Learn more..
I loved sim city - it was a marvelous game and it got me seriously hooked on the design approaches used by Will Wright. For the latest game in the series, known simply as SimCity (EA, you’re only making things more confusing for us all), Maxis has built an entirely new and incredibly impressive simulation engine called Glassbox to power the game. It made for one of the most impressive demonstrations at E3, so read on to find out why and get a glimpse of future city teaching tools. Learn more...
Are "Smart Cities" the New Paradigm for Development? The recent book published by the World Bank "Geography of Growth: Spatial Economics and Competitiveness" has an entire chapter dedicated to the smart cities approach, and by taking a look at the table of contents it seems that the development debate has strongly shifted its focus towards cities rather than regions and clusters. It almost seems that, from the viewpoint of the academic and policy debate, we have moved from "regional innovation systems" to "urban innovation strategies". Learn more...
During Trento's Economics Festival, a conference on "Smart City - How Internet and ICT new technologies change people and generations lifestyles", will be held the 2th of June 2012, at 17:00, in the Kessler Room of the Faculty of Sociology, University of Trento. Learn more...
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. In France, a full-scale experimentation has been led in the south of Paris since 2007, in partnership with the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris to try and tackle exactly some of these challenges. Learn more
For me, Mike Batty is one of the defining thought leaders on the science of cities. He is Professor of Planning at University College London where he run's one of the UK's most important research centers for spatial systems - the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). This his blog and its a delight and information rich.. Read more...
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Moyan BrennPutting the “sit” back in “city.” Walkable cities are great. But once you get where you’re walking, you want to relax, right?
As we plan for the future of our planet, it is imperative that we consider the effects of development on both the environment and human populations. A city is only truly sustainable if it uses natural resources efficiently while still fully meeting the needs of its inhabitants and a decent standard of living. Recently, the UN Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) launched its “State of the World’s Cities Report 2012/2013” which addresses the prosperity of cities. According to the report, the first step to achieving prosperity is to define the goal: What does prosperity mean in 2012? This is a difficult question to answer given the vast disparity of living conditions throughout the world. Additionally, it is imperative that the definition of prosperity today consider the needs of future generations. To this end, UN-Habitat developed a “City Prosperity Index,” which translates the five dimensions of prosperity identified by UN-Habitiat—productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, equity and social inclusion, environmental sustainability—into measurable indicators (see page 15 of the report). This definition of the prosperous city is consistent with the principles of a smart, sustainable and just city... further reading at the article link
Via Lauren Moss
Wonderful interview with Geoffrey West - high energy phycisist and former president of the SantaFe Institute. This one reflects neatly a lot fo what we work on at Complex Insight: "..as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy? How it's related to cities? How does it affect global sustainability and have a predictive framework for an idealized system, so that we can understand how to deal with it and avoid it? If you're running a bigger company, you can recognize what the metrics are that are driving you to mortality, and possibly put it off, and hopefully even avoid it." Clic on the image or the title to learn more.
The Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation Ltd (DMICDC) is scouting for land to establish the proposed seven ‘smart cities’ alongside the 1,500-km industrial corridor planned across six states – Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The seven smart cities, to be developed as world-class manufacturing hubs, are to have individual master plans. Each of these would require different sizes of land, for which DMICDC, a special purpose vehicle comprising government and private entities, is in talks with the state governments to acquire land in the six states
Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a consequence of their interactions: they are said to be ‘self-organized’. Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that ‘top-down’ approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states. This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities.
Via Complexity Digest
Games and games technology often inspire and sometimes lead the simulation industry. Over the years Sim City has been instrumental in many people learning about simulations, urban planning and land use in and outside of a class room. The next generation of Sim City is likely to do that and set expectations on what City Simulations should look like. :-) Great article at Gamasutra on the design and aesthetic of the new version and how it relates to the underpinning simulation. Learn more...
http://youtu.be/OlIelAWikWQ New York City pizza delivery routes were tracked with GPS in this visualization from the "Food Machine" episode of the PBS series America Revealed.
Great blog post by Greg Neichin on the smarter city movement. It is this stark contrast between the emerging, and deservedly warranted, enthusiasm for smart cities initiatives and the reality of the lives of many living in the squalor and sprawl of the world’s mega cities that demands attention. The world’s poor vastly outnumber the world’s rich and smarter cities will be cities that are not only smart and data-driven, but truly sustainable for all of their inhabitants, not just those with smart phones. Much like the sustainability movement encouraged corporations to not only think about their carbon footprint, but also about employee, supplier, and community welfare, so too, the smart cities movement should be based on organizing principles that are holistic in nature. As we as technologists continue to do our part to enhance the intelligence available to public officials and individual citizens, let us never forget that we are doing this out of a fundamental drive to raise the standard of living for all and to make tomorrow’s mega-cities sustainable, healthy, vibrant ecosystems.
Mumbai Human Development Report 2009 provides valuable information and data on Mumbai slums. In her foreword to the report, Kumari Selja, the Minister for Housing and Poverty alleviation states:“…Mumbai contributes 33% of income tax collection, 60% of India’s customs duty collection, 20% of India’s central excise collection and 40% of India’s foreign trade…..yet the city’s slums get less than 90 litres per capacity daily. Studies have indicated that in certain slums of Mumbai there is an average of 81 people to each toilet seat available. And only 31% of Mumbai’s slum dwellers are likely to complete 10 years of schooling. In short, the quality of life in Mumbai leaves much to be desired….”. The report is worth reading and there are some useful stats on the summary page at d-sector.org. Learn more.
pv magazineUrbanTec China: Solar to be integral part of cities' clean futurepv magazineThis week brought encouraging news from China regarding the development of smart grids to help enable the smart and sustainable cities of tomorrow.
From BBC: Using bioremediation - applying natural processes to repair environmental damage - a new facility is transforming urban run-off into water clean enough for irrigation and fishing. The Wadi Hanifah scheme has benefited the environment and the economy, and brought gentrification to previously unfashionable neighbourhoods alongside the valley, transforming parts of the Saudi capital. Learn more..
Smart cities and energy efficiency: the Internet of things is changing the world. A new research project entitled The Internet of Things was recently launched in Finland with EUR 6 million funding from the Finnish Funding ...
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