On the smart city
Or, a ‘manifesto’ for smart citizens instead
Ed. Originally published at cityofsound.com on 1st February 2013, based on a couple of essays written, and talks given, during the closing months of 2012.
The smart city. I have “previous” here, over about a decade of writing about the interplay between cities and technology. And particularly, having written about The Street As Platform, and the Personal Well-Tempered Environment, and The Adaptive City, and about New Songdo City, and “new smokestacks”, and how it’s easier to crowd-source a revolution than a light-rail system, and so on. And then worked on many projects, from Barangaroo to Brickstarter, Masdar to Melbourne.
During this time, what we might call a Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex (led by IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens, Philips et al) has emerged and continues to try to insert itself into urban agendas; with little success, in comparison to the marketing spend, it must be said.
But it’s clearly not an idea that’s going to go away (for reasons both good and bad.) I was be asked by both the London School of Economics and Volume magazine, separately, to write about the smart city (both were related to different speaking engagements.)
The piece for the LSE was a contribution to their Electric City conference…
