3 Smart City books I will be reading this holiday season
It is the time to start preparing to close the year. I am looking forward to a relaxing time outside of the lush warmth of Singapore traveling to the cold winter of Japan’s countryside.
Leaving the cold and solemn serenity outside, I am looking forward to sitting in my cozy chair in front of the fireplace listening to relaxing music and reading a good book. For this year I selected three books around “Smart Cities” which I hope inspire me for 2018 to innovate even further. How will we move from the Smart City to the Mobile-ready city? How will the bike-share drop-off spots look like ? Will there be Park & Uber’s same as we have Park and Ride? How will autonomous cars drive when not in use by a human ? What are we doing with the open retail spaces? I hope the books I have chosen will give me some more insights to guide by thoughts. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
The first book is praised as a required reading for urbanist and futurists alike and covers the introduction of the Internet of Things ( IoT) into the urban blueprint.
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
“Smart cities” starts with a short historic introduction covering the ground-breaking role of IBM, GE, and Siemens in the soon to be USD 100 Billion market and then promises to quickly moves towards the future of urban ubiquitous computing.
I am especially interested in learning about where large companies have failed in the past and which clever solutions they came up with around the globe that worked well. How will this new “Utopia” look like ? If you look into Singapore’s innovative SmartNation activities, when will an urban data system become big brother same as Facebook swayed from it’s path of connecting people to influence public behavior to the benefit of large corporations ?
As a smart city hacker myself, I strongly believe urban technologies should be resilient and centered strongly around human needs. Water, Energy, Safety, Mobility+Parking, and Wifi (hey this is 2017) are services most urbanites take for granted these days.
Moving on towards the newest buzzword in the smart city community “Responsive cities”.
The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance
As large cities are rapidly digitally transforming I want to learn how civic engagement and service delivery can be improved. When we launched Qyu one of the ideas we had was to give urban citizens a better way to connect to the government and fellow citizens. Emerging information technologies are a fantastic way to achieve that. If you look into the connectivity between mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud in combination with analytics then Boom! we have a key enabler for new models of governance and business models.
As I wrote on E27, I strongly believe that cognitive services are an immensely powerful extensions coming out of the intersection of Cloud+Machine Learning+ Bigdata. I hope to learn here how we can further leverage the tools by adapting them to the needs to communities and their servants to build an urban environment that responds to their desires.
The last “Smart City” themed book I aim to complete is
The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life (The Future Series)
“The City of Tomorrow” is written by the well-known Italian Architect and Urban Planner Carlo Ratti, who is heading MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab. He argues that cities are currently at another point in their centuries old history of radical chance that redefine their very essence. Technology as we will learn to know it will likely change everything and I am really looking forward to learn how the technologies from tomorrow can help tenqyu build better solutions for citizens today.
I am looking forward to a relaxing break where I can refresh my batteries take some bike-rides around the country-side and get some rest from the busy hustle and bustle of Singapore, Tokyo, and all the other places I have visited this year. And maybe that is what we all should be striving for, to use technology effectively so it provides us with the free time to take a rest and be creative and innovative.
This article was brought to you by tenqyu, a startups making urban living more fun, healthy, inclusive, and thriving using big data, machine learning, and LOTs of creativity.
