City Flaneurs explore the smart cities. First stop: North America!

Hi! We are Maria Kalogeropoulou, Alexandra Koroxenidi, Chris Ntabakakis and Evi Stoubou or in other words “City Flaneurs” and we are part of Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project.

Α Flaneur is the one who constantly returns to town in order to understand it and fully experience it . Charles Pierre Baudelaire is the writer who introduced the term. As City flaneurs, we started a journey to cities all over the word to explore them and learn from them in order to end up to our beloved city, Athens.

Our first Stop America!

What makes a city smart? How can a city be sustainable and livable? What are the criterias? Is a city’s smartness something that we can measure and how?

All these thoughts were in our heads when we started studying the city branding. In order to find out how a city can be verified as innovative, smart and sustainable we looked for the answers in various papers and magazines. “Monocle” and “Mercer” have set several indicators: safety/crime, medical care, climate/sunshine, international connectivity, public transportation, quality of architecture, environmental issues and access to nature, urban design, business conditions, pro-active policy development, tolerance, stability, culture, education, infrastructure.

Our first field of research was North America and the Advancing Participation Smart and Sustainable Cities Project, a collaboration of high-level sustainability, technology and innovation practitioners from within 12 US and Canadian cities. We focused our attention to 4 cities, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago and Houston, that had some really interesting ideas to present.

The city of Boston aiming to improve everyday life created the Cityscore. The Cityscore is a platform, similar to a baseball board, where the overall performance of the city is presented in the form of numeral scores, located in a central square of the city. In that board all citizens can see anytime how the city is performing in various fields, such as public services, health care, education, infrastructure, transportation, crime prevention and road maintenance. In that way, the city manages to provide transparency and a sense of trust to the citizens and is able to focus rapidly on the domains that it lacks and fix the problems.

Close to Boston’s Cityscore, Chicago is using data to improve city life. The city program is collecting data from 31 different sources, such as arrival times of the buses, overflowing of garbage bins and location of vacant buildings. That plan aims at sustainability focusing on economic development, job creation, energy efficiency and clean energy, transportation options, water waste, recycling, parks, open spaces, healthy food and climate change.

Houston, also, uses technology to get smarter and more livable. The city is building a wireless municipal network that will provide 4G broadband wireless connectivity for city applications. The targets have to do with the everyday city life, like traffic safety, water meter accounts and free internet access.

Washington D.C., on the other hand, is focused on the green development and has been declared as one of the greenest cities in North America. The city holds the largest area in of green roofs across the country, something that helps absorb the heat and reduce the consumption of energy for heating or cooling. Along with that, the city makes a general effort in reducing energy consumption by planting more trees and promoting the use of bikes or electrically driven cars as means of transport.

Contemplating all these strategies, we realized that the key to make a city smart is finding the real problem that effects the city life in general and make a simple but radical change that will help fix many others significant problems.

Athens City Branding Panteion City Flaneurs North America Boston Washington D.C. Chicago Houston

Click here to check our classroom presentation for the smart cities of North America!

Click here to check the smart campaign Be Berlin!