Andrew Comer and Kerwin Datu via The Global Urbanist
According to UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities 2008-2009, 510 new ‘small’ cities, 132 new ‘intermediate’ cities and 52 new ‘big’ cities emerged between 1990 and 2000, with a combined population of 254 million.
“Many city governments around the world are encouraging agriculture in urban areas—so long as it stays small scale and doesn’t challenge the status quo. Mike Duff argues that cities must learn to embrace ‘urban ag’ social movements as a way to engage citizens in shaping their own cities, and encourage these movements to scale up to reduce the power of ‘big food’ businesses to subvert planning processes. The key challenge will be regulation—cities should create a new land use designation entitled ‘urban agricultural use’ to accommodate a healthy balance between urban lifestyles and urban farming.”
On Wednesday I hosted a round table event in Manchester in partnership with strategists Wood Holmes to look at what we mean by ‘smart cities’ and – more importantly – what we want from them. The event, part of New Start magazine’s series on the future of regeneration, included a mix of people from technology backgrounds (including IBM and Cisco); experts in innovation and governance; transport and policy leaders.
Part of the discussion focused on the infrastructure needed for a digital world. But while we agreed that we needed to think of digital infrastructure as a utility like water or electricity, it was the use of that utility that interested us.There are four broad ways of thinking about digital places. One is the infrastructuralist approach, which tends to be centrally driven and involve big contracts with big corporations. It involves digging trenches and laying cables, or creating software applications that can handle unimaginable streams of data and interpret them.
The second, more in tune with the zeitgeist, is to think of the endlessly networked self-directed infrastructure of savvy individuals. These are the developers, the creators of data mashups, the open sourcists and social media connectors. They collaborate and innovate; they are the kind of people who believe that whatever the problem, there’s an app for that.
The third approach, which most of us adopt one way or another, is as consumers. We increasingly expect high speed broadband so we can watch on-demand TV or share videos or pictures. We grumble when the service isn’t working or costs too much, but don’t spend a lot of time imagining what we could do with it. It’s just there to respond to our wants.
The fourth way is not to think of it at all – to consider it irrelevant or something for educated, technical people, or something that simply doesn’t address the important issues about people and the places they live in.The second group are most likely to drive change, and the fourth most likely to be sidelined. This could be bad news. Democracy and citizenship that relies on regular cycles of meetings and annual or triennial elections looks increasingly out of touch with ‘smart’, real-time decision-making. Smart citizens will demand much more responsive, immediate approaches – the kind pioneered by applications like FixMyStreet. As that grows you can see how the traditional role of the local councillor, and especially their party political role, might start to look increasingly archaic.
From The Urbanophile:
John Robert Smith on Transportation
I was able to catch up with John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America, and he recorded a short two minute video for me. If you only watch one of the videos I post, make it this one. He makes two incredibly important points that are too often overlooked when it comes to the livable cities agenda. The first is that we need to build an urban-small town-rural coalition around a new transportation policy. The other is that these issues are, or should be, non-partisan.
A city is not some abstract organizational entity, but rather the most massive social organization we create (well, at least until the Web came along). So what does a Smarter City mean to the legendary “man on the street”? How does an intelligence environment benefit him or her? How does he or she interact with this intelligence?
Information Technologies can do two main things: enable the flow of information and aggregate information. Information flows in Smarter Cities are both horizontal (P2P) and vertical (P2C). How does the co-existence of these sets of flows change the way that cities operate?
For example, how does this complement traditional democracy? Can it enable “micro-governance” in which quarters, districts, even streets have more direct control over “how the city works”?
That’s a lot of questions. And that’s where we start. Do you have answers?
Dr. Colin Harrison
Director, IBM Corporate Strategy
Smarter Cities
