Pixel Cloud is an eight storey tall 3D matrix of light globes that reacts in real-time to changes in environmental conditions broadcast from a worldwide network of offices.
The Living City
This second film further develops the concept of smarter cities. Initially, the focus is on smarter healthcare and how as cities become increasingly populated, the way in which health and social care is administered must change. The second half of the film highlights the need for an educated workforce; in essence, smarter citizens will lead to the creation of a smarter city.
Emergent Urbanism, or "Bottom Up Planning" - City of Sound
The city of Newcastle, NSW is the largest coal port in the world. Yet as the harbour has essentially become a giant open mouth belching coal to China, and people and other business have drifted to the suburbs (an over-simplification, but …), the historic core of the city has hollowed out, leaving numerous vacant buildings. Heading into the heart of all this, the Renew Newcastle project enabled small businesses, artists, entrepreneurs and various creatives to find a temporary home in these largely unoccupied city centre spaces. By liaising with the building owners, the project found a way of offering super-short-term leases at peppercorn rents in all kinds of pretty vacant spaces. They overlaid a free wi-fi network, enabling basic connectivity, and offered a few other basic amenities. The smart trick of the rolling 30-day lease gave start-ups a contract they could afford to get into, and landlords a secure way of getting them out of it should a better offer arise. Simple.
The project has been achieved without any meaningful funding at all (though funding came later - see comment from Marcus below). As a result, the almost derelict city centre is being used again, and the spaces are rapidly being reconfigured, becoming increasingly active, safe, productive.
Emergent Urbanism
Bottom-up implies a more sophisticated engagement with citizens, and from citizens. Genuine engagement in urban development is beyond manipulating dynamic viewsheds, browsing local census data, and poring over a developer’s financial projections. It means opening up the question of what the city is for to its citizens. It means putting many of the tools for design into the hands of citizens, to construct their own everyday city.
Visualizing a smarter city | A Smarter Planet Blog
Cities generate the vast bulk of the world’s CO2 emissions, and they account for 60 percent of all water allocated for domestic human use. As urbanization levels increase, how do city leaders ensure continuing water and energy supplies – while also promoting environmental sustainability? If you ask me, a good place to start is by making sure local utilities, government agencies, businesses and citizens alike are looking at the same information when making decisions about collective and individual energy use.
“Royal Haskoning and Green Ventures today announced a new collaboration which aims to transform Peterborough into the leading sustainable city in the UK. The collaboration has outlined plans to launch a Sustainable City Visualisation project, which will initially focus on building a new online platform to monitor and analyze data on Peterborough’s energy, water, transport and waste systems. This data will be used to produce a real-time, integrated view of the city’s environmental performance. Residents and city officials will be able to log on to the web portal and easily access the necessary information to make more informed decisions about resource usage. For example, the city will be able to make suggestions to improve home water and energy usage, while being able to work more effectively with the utilities to plan the long term energy and water infrastructure that is needed for a sustainable future.”
In IBM UK, IBMers are encouraging each other to volunteer in their community.
Throughout the week starting 9th November, locations across the country have been having fun days to show that you don’t need to spend days and days to help people in their community. There are opportunities in lots of places in all shapes and sizes.
My smarter city will make Chelsea tractors less attractive
London doesn’t need so many SUVs, Range Rovers and so on. These cars block the roads, are more dangerous to pedestrians… and use more carbon than smaller cars. In London we have experimented with lower road taxes in the form of “congestion charging” for greener cars - but its intriguing to see Richmond Council bring the idea to parking.
Generally people complain that parking fine collection companies in London are too aggressive in their approach, but I must admit I like the idea of low carbon preferred parking.
Thanks lowcarboneconomy for bringing this to my attention.
James Governor, London, UK.
parking, cities, transport
