Deconstructing traffic indices — “Real-time information is crucial for cities that want to take control of their smart city initiatives” says Eran Shir, Cofounder and CEO of Nexar in this Forbes article. Commercial traffic data suppliers have various strategies to promote the application of their products. It certainly is easy prey for the media…

Is smart city tech failing us? Commercial vendors are flooding the smart cities market (estimated to reach $774.8 B by 2021) with IoT and big data applications, spreading the vision of a Big Brother city, constantly sucking information from its citizens. It’s just a bold vision in most cases, inspired…

This article first appeared in Public Sector Digest. Technology companies have been leading the way in defining their vision of what Smart Cities of the future should look like. …

Originally published at www.mapbox.com. In September, we announced Mapbox Cities and started looking for three cities we can work with to solve the biggest urban challenges. Since then, more than 70 cities from six continents applied, laying out their communities’ challenges and goals. We’ve spent the last few weeks interviewing…

This is an article I wrote in 2013 for Urban Times, which is unfortunately not online anymore. A lot of what is said holds still true though, so here it is resurrected from its digital grave: Every architecture student learns early enough: despite the hard work university does not provide…

National history is important — I happen to be German, so for us this is especially true. In fact, I remember that I read Anne Frank’s Diary two years before the book was to be discussed at school according to the regular curriculum. I couldn’t wait, so I made our German teacher bring it up…

Design Thinking Gone Architecture” is a carefully responsive, iterative approach to urban planning, based on repurposing and innovating within existing structures as much as creating new ones. This is an article I wrote in early 2013 for Urban Times, which is unfortunately not online anymore. …

This is an article I wrote in early 2013 for Urban Times, which is unfortunately not online anymore. So here it is, resurrected from its digital grave: With the start of the New Year organisations often take the opportunity to publish outlooks on the next year(s). Now some take this…