the big question smart cities will take many forms car...

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CITIES GET SMARTER

Urban centers will add 2.5 billion residents over the next 35 years. Can technology help them cope?

Cities Get Smarter

The Big Question

Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies Mobile apps, sensors, and other technologies help cities handle growing challenges.

● Cities around the globe, whether richor poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smart-phones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.

Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will

CONTENTS

The Big Question

Data-Toting Cops

Tianjin: China's Future City

Smart Cities Will Take Many Forms

Car Technology to Invigorate Cities

Booming Lagos, Smart City

Plus: cities planning for storms, a guide to smart cities worldwide, and more.

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BUSINESS REPORT

INDUSTRIAL LIAISON PROGRAM EDITION

RESEARCH REPORTCity Science, Smart Cities,Urban Development

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TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM CITIES GET SMARTERMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often-strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing a large share of its greenhouse- gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.

But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty per-cent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.

Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hita-chi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful exam-ples of cities that have used their technol-ogy to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cit-ies already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.

To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direc-tion are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.

There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep gov-ernment support.

The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact

on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air- conditioning and pneumatic waste dis-posal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpen-sive and flexible digital technologies.

Since its launch in 2010, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Bos-ton has focused on small-scale initiatives that exploit technology and data, aiming to pull people into a practice it calls “par-ticipatory urbanism.”

The office’s first project was Citizens Connect, a digital hotline that allows peo-ple to use their smartphones to report trash, graffiti, and service problems to

City Hall. Since then the office has rolled out City Worker, which helps municipal employees track their daily tasks and report progress to their bosses and to cit-izens. Pilot programs are testing mobile parking ticket payments, smart parking meters, pothole reporting, and sensors in streets that would alert drivers to open parking spaces.

City Worker is the reason why, one sunny September afternoon, John Schallmo was taking a picture of an empty brick sidewalk on his Android phone. Schallmo, a 30-year Boston city employee, was in the brownstone-lined South End to document the cleanup of a pile of crum-pled papers and plastic bags. The mess had been reported through Citizens Con-nect, and with the trash cleaned up, the

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POPULATION (IN MILLIONS)

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The Big Get BiggerMega-cities often lag technologically

2013 population 2013 population using the Internet, by country

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TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMCITIES GET SMARTER MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

photo evidence would be sent to the per-son who had notified the city, proof that he or she had made a difference. The photo would go, too, into a series of departmen-tal maps tracking crew locations, pothole reports, and other problems.

Technology has had its failures in Bos-ton. A text version of Citizens Connect was a dud. And registering potholes and trash may seem relatively mundane, even futile, in streets that are marred by bro-ken pavement and litter. But Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, directors of the Office of New Urban Mechanics, say these small steps build greater trust between the pub-lic and government, creating a platform to take on bigger challenges in education and housing.

In the developing world, where most of the urban growth has come in recent years, mobile technologies offer a cost-effective way of managing environmental and civic challenges that figure to worsen (see “Booming Lagos, Smart City”).

In India, where the urban population is predicted to increase from 31 percent of the total to 38 percent by 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to invest $1.2 billion in 100 new and retrofitted smart cities. But in the western textile city of Surat, population five million, rel-atively inexpensive technology is making the greatest difference. A flood warning system uses temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and other data captured by new automated weather stations, combined with information from river gauges, satel-lites, and other sources, to create models of the nearby Tapti River and Ukai reser-voir. It cost less than $500,000 to set up, plus some land donated by the city, but the system was able to warn citizens two days before floods struck during the 2013 rainy season, giving them time to buy groceries and drive to high ground. A second proj-ect, connecting health workers around the region to centralized data via the Internet and SMS, has helped the health depart-ment predict outbreaks of malaria, viral hepatitis, dengue fever, and leptospirosis and take action to prevent their spread.

Technology is not just a tool cities can use to manage their tremendous growth; it’s a big part of what’s driving it, too. Har-

vard economist Edward Glaeser, author of The Triumph of the City, argues that fol-lowing a century of technological innova-tions that made distance less important, from the automobile to video games, tech-nology has more recently begun to boost

cities by creating a more “idea-intensive and complicated world.” As social beings, we tackle these challenges especially well in close proximity to one another. Tech-nology is “moving us toward an economy that very much rewards intelligence and innovation,” says Glaeser, “and that moves us in the direction of urbanization.”

—Nanette Byrnes

Technologies

Data-Toting CopsTwenty years after it first surfaced, data-driven police work is getting more pervasive but remains controversial.

● Mornings at 7:00, Wade Brabble has decisions to make. So in the last year, he has come to rely upon a computer-gener-ated forecast of where crime will happen on his day shift as a police lieutenant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Depending on the report, which comes out of a system built in a year-old partnership with IBM, he’ll move his 15 patrol officers around, telling some to focus on hot spots while assigning routine calls to everyone else. “I base a lot of it on numbers,” he says.

Twenty years after the New York Police Department pioneered the idea with a program called CompStat, com-puterized crime analysis is moving to a new level. Back then, the innovation was a map tracking past crimes, which higher-ups used to hold district commanders accountable. Now the push is for wide-

spread adoption of analytics that predict crime in close to real time, identifying tar-get areas to within 250,000 square feet. Bigger data sets, commercially available analytics and forecasting software, and faster computers are driving the improve-ment, say the Rand Corporation’s John Hollywood and Walt Perry, authors of a 2013 report on the trend.

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, fear that such proj-ects will promote racial profiling, and skeptics like Maria Haberfeld, a profes-sor of criminal justice at John Jay College, think they are as likely to move crime a few blocks away as they are to prevent it.

Some big departments, like the Los Angeles Police Department, simply base predictions on data about past crime loca-tions and time and type of crime, says UCLA anthropologist Jeff Brantingham, who is also cofounder of PredPol, the company that helped design the LAPD’s software. At the other extreme is Chicago, which has gone as far as using data to pre-dict whether specific potential criminals may be involved in violence. Fort Lauder-dale takes a middle path: it uses crime his-tory but factors in details such as events that are expected to draw crowds, and even the likely impact of weather.

The analytics aren’t good enough to say a specific store will be hit on Tuesday, but they can predict a 70 percent chance of burglaries in one area, or a 40 percent chance of muggings somewhere else.

The approach seems to work—but as with any experiment in a living city, it’s hard to be certain why crime is down. In Fort Lauderdale, crimes like murder, robbery, larceny, and sexual assault fell 6 percent in the first eight months of 2014. Assistant police chief Michael Gregory says that in addition to the computer ana-lytics, the department has implemented tactics such as distributing anti-theft kits in a burglary-prone neighborhood.

In Chicago, violent crime was down 13 percent year over year as of October, and the number of murders could be the lowest since 1965. Chicago’s “hot people” strategy was based on a list of the 400 Chicagoans, all with arrest records and connections to known criminals,

66%Proportion of energy consumed by cities

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that a computer model identified as most at risk of becoming either a perpetrator or a victim of violence, though it can’t pre-dict which.

Since 2013, people on the list have been getting personal visits from local cops—usually the head of their pre-cinct, according to Commander Jona-than Lewin, head of the department’s public- safety information technology unit. They’re handed a letter that explains the consequences of breaking the law and offers social services. The hot 400 are as much as 500 times more likely than aver-age to be involved in a crime, Lewin says, and most of the data used to build the list has to do with the level of connectedness to criminals: “It does not—repeat, not—include gender or race.” There have been some problems, including reports that minor offenders were listed. Soon the list will be weighted by probation history, out-standing warrants, and record of narcotics and weapon possession.

Los Angeles eschews modeling aimed at identifying specific criminals, and Brantingham warns that nothing in pre-dictive policing generates enough prob-able cause for a search warrant or justifies a stop-and-frisk. In the end, even the best systems can’t entirely replace human judgment.“It takes a little time for people to get out of the mind-set that it’s a cure-all,” Brabble says.

Video and social networks like Twit-ter are increasingly sources of data for analysis, and in time, systems with

more decision support built in may be deployed as well, putting more data into the hands of officers using mobile devices and in-car computers in the field. One thing that won’t change: controversy over what kinds of data are relevant, and politically acceptable, to include in crime forecasting. —Tim Mullaney

Case Study

China’s Future City China has put political muscle and technology into Tianjin Eco-City.

● Strolling along sidewalks shaded by plane trees, one might take Tianjin Eco-City for just another of the many residen-tial areas sprouting up all over China. But on closer inspection, this place is differ-ent. The roadside trash cans are covered with solar photovoltaic panels so they can light up at night; free electric buses connect different districts; the drainage wells for storm water are all embedded in the curbs.

There are less obvious features, too. The pavement is laid with pervious sand bricks for efficient drainage, and the water supply is designed to minimize leakage. Rainwater and wastewater are collected separately, and 18 submersible axial flow

pumps capable of pumping 42.1 cubic meters of water per second divert the rain-water to artificial wetlands.

Here, on a piece of land about one-half the size of Manhattan, is one of Chi-na’s first attempts at sustainable urban development. It aims to address two of China’s most pressing challenges: the rapid population migration stressing the country’s already-large cities, and its growing pollution and environmen-tal problems. The national government has praised the project as a success, but only 20,000 people have moved in, a frac-tion of the 350,000 the city is designed to house by 2020.

The Eco-City project, a collaboration of China and Singapore, is located on the eastern border of Tianjin, a manufactur-ing city of nearly 15 million people. Total investment has not been disclosed, but project officials say that as of 2012, 40 bil-lion yuan ($6.5 billion) had been invested in fixed assets. Tianjin is one of four cities directly governed by China’s central gov-ernment, and the Eco-City is located in its first “comprehensive reform and innova-tion area,” a designation associated with favorable investment and trade policies.

If it succeeds, Tianjin Eco-City would become a model. The country has 171 cit-ies with populations over one million, and its total urban population is projected to rise to about one billion by 2030. By that time, close to 70 percent of China’s popu-lation will be living in urban areas. China’s cities can be difficult places to live. Bei-jing’s smog has become internationally famous. Water is an issue too. According to China’s Ministry of Environmental Pro-tection, 57 percent of the groundwater in

198 cities tested in 2012 was rated either “bad” or “extremely bad.”

The goals set for the Eco-City include zero net loss of natural wetlands, a recy-cling rate of at least 60 percent, and a minimum of 12 square meters of pub-lic green space per capita. Six years after

$6.5 billionInvestment in Eco-City infrastructure

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Chicago Crime SceneTechnology has helped lower crime

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ground breaking, planners say they have achieved most of those goals, though Liu Xu, director of the ecological and environmental monitoring center at the Eco-City’s administrative committee, acknowledges “temporary deviations” from the standards set for ambient air quality, which he attributes to the impact of the surrounding environment.

The Eco-City’s small population is a worrisome sign, however, says Bao Cunkuan, a professor of environmental science and engineering at Fudan Univer-sity. By building an eco-city from scratch, Bao says, “more often than not, we build a city that is disconnected from the reality and without the human element.”

Other than the lunch rush of Eco-City managers, the only crowds on the quiet streets form when parents pick up the 2,300 students at the area’s kindergartens and schools.

It was the schools, not the environ-mental programs, that convinced 38-year-old Fan Hongqin to move to the Eco-City a year ago. Her daughter is in second grade at a school with an emphasis on foreign languages. The city encourages enrollment by offering free school bus ser-vice, free meals, and monthly subsidies of 1,000 yuan ($163) for apartment-owning parents of kindergartners. “The environ-ment here is more livable; that’s true,” said Fan, shortly after school pick-up one September afternoon. But the location is inconvenient. Even to buy clothes, Fan says, she must travel into other sections of Tianjin. The city center is an hour away.

The Eco-City is clearly a big environ-mental improvement from what sat on this land before: a one-square-mile waste-water reservoir. Containing mercury and DDT, it had lost all its ecological func-tions following years of heavy pollution by industry. Restoration cost one billion yuan ($163 million). “What used to be barren saline and alkaline wasteland has now been transformed into an emerging new green city,” says Ho Tong Yen, CEO of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Company. “We are not just a lofty plan but an actual, emerging city,” he adds. “We are for real.” —Yiting Sun

Q&A

Smart Cities Will Take Many FormsTechnology can make cities increasingly machine-like or more social and creative, says author Anthony Townsend. Both models can work.

● In cities across the world, mayors, urban planners, citizens, and, increas-ingly, tech companies are using power-ful new devices and programs to create smart cities, where transportation sys-tems, energy grids, and public services can be monitored and manipulated in real

time. We should be careful about how we enable ubiquitous computing to change and control our cities, cautions Anthony Townsend, a senior research scientist at the Rudin Center for Transportation Pol-icy and Management at New York Uni-versity and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. As a researcher, Townsend has studied how cities apply technology for the past 20 years. He spoke with jour-nalist Nate Berg for the Business Report.

The world’s urban population is expected to nearly double by 2050, to more than six billion people. What role can technology play in easing this transformation?I think the most interesting role is in enabling the livelihood of a large number of those six billion people, particularly in the developing world. Smartphones are the technology that I think is the most important. Pretty much everybody on the

planet will have a phone, and anybody who lives in a city will have a smartphone. We’re going to have billions of still rela-tively poor people walking around with networked supercomputers in their pock-ets. There’s been research that’s shown that mobile-phone service has a pretty detectable impact on GDP in poor coun-tries. Smartphone technology—all the ser-vices that can be delivered over it—I think will have an even more significant impact.

What does a city taken over by comput-ers—or perhaps smartphones—look like?A city that’s taken over by computers designed by a big technology company is going to look like a machine. It’s going to be highly automated, highly centralized, and very efficient. It may not be a lot of fun, it may not be terribly respectful of our desire for privacy, it may not be very resil-ient. On the other hand, we could design

cities that have a very decentralized, very redundant kind of infrastructure where the services that we create using sensors and displays and all these digital tech-nologies are trying to achieve objectives that are more in line with increasing social interaction, increasing sustainable behav-iors, reinforcing the development of cul-ture, creativity, and wellness. So there are very different possible outcomes. It’s really up to the choices we make.

Smart cities are being pushed by big tech-nology companies. Your book explores these efforts but also highlights some bottom-up approaches to making our cit-ies smarter. Which offers a better way of managing the modern city?A very promising development is we’re seeing mayors and other civic leaders take on the challenge of figuring out what the vision of the smart city should be and how to draw on all of the differ-

Cities are “basically taking the long-term vision they’ve already developed about what they want their city to be and trying to figure out how technology can be in service of that vision.” —Anthony Townsend

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ent resources that can provide technical expertise and innovations that will allow it to happen. This is why I’m so interested now in how cities are making long-term technology plans, because they’re basi-cally taking the long-term vision they’ve already developed about what they want their city to be and trying to figure out how technology can be in service of that vision.

Are we expecting unrealistic things from the ways technology can affect our cities?I think there are different kinds of utopias. The utopia of a perfectly controlled, per-fectly efficient, safe smart city may work in a place like Singapore, and in fact they’re well on their way to building that. But it

probably wouldn’t work in New York or São Paulo, where the expectations about what success looks like and what a healthy community is are totally different. Cities aren’t uniform. The thing about digital technology is it’s incredibly flexible and modular. So it’s really exciting to see all of the different combinations of parts that people can throw together to create often highly localized services that let people experience the city in different ways.

So even if Singapore creates a great smart city, we shouldn’t necessarily export those ideas wholesale to other cities.That command-and-control model is very expensive. Singapore can do it because Singapore is a very wealthy country. But

you’re probably not going to see that in Nairobi or Johannesburg or Lagos. And I think that’s where you’re going to see a lot more reliance on the kinds of devices that consumers are able to provide them-selves. We already see this in transpor-tation planning, where great strides are being made in understanding travel pat-terns in some of the poorest cities on earth because we’re able to see it in the mobile-phone data. Transportation is among the top barriers to managing a success-ful city in the developing world. It’s the thing you have to get right if you’re going to be able to do anything else, and we’ve just deployed [in mobile phones] the best transportation sensing network in the his-tory of mankind, completely by accident.

TRAFFIC Sensors under the pavement at the city's entrances track traffic volume and location, and the speed of cars.

PARKING To reduce driver frustration and emissions from idling cars, 400 ferromagnetic sensors, buried in public parking lots, track open parking spots.

LIGHTING Sensors embedded in lampposts in parks sense pedestrians and reduce lighting when nobody is around.

IRRIGATION Sensors at four parks record thousands of observations about the humidity, temperature, and moisture in the soil each day, enabling the city to conserve water.

ENVIRONMENT More than 2,000 sensors measure noise, light, temperature, and the carbon in the air, helping the city obey regulations on noise and air quality.

SOUND Sensors are building a sound map to help the city comply with E.U. noise regulations.

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SENSING SANTANDER Spain’s “smart” city

One beneficiary of an ¤8.67 million ($11 million) European Commission project, Santander, a city of 190,000, has created a sophisticated network of nodes, sensors, and network infrastructure to constantly measure air quality, weather, traffic, and other parameters.

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Emerging Technologies

Car-Based Technology That Could Invigorate CitiesU.S. carmakers are leading the development of vehicle communications technology, and it could be a boon to city planners.

● As declines go, Detroit’s has been spectacular. So it’s a little strange to dis-cover—just a short drive north of down-town, past countless deserted office blocks and homes—something that could help make cities safer, more energy-efficient, and generally more pleasant to live in. In Warren, Michigan, General Motors is testing technology that lets cars transmit and receive useful information wirelessly across several hundred meters.

Well before fully automated vehicles like Google’s self-driving car hit the roads, so-called vehicle-to-vehicle communica-tions should improve road safety by warn-ing drivers of an impending collision or alerting them to treacherous road condi-tions ahead. The technology should also complement greater vehicle automation, providing a clearer picture of surround-ings than onboard sensors alone and let-ting automated vehicles coördinate their actions. Eventually, connected vehicles should also benefit cities, acting as mobile sensors within vital transportation arter-ies and helping prevent accidents, control congestion, and reduce energy use.

Over time, the information gathered from connected cars could even reveal urban patterns to guide policy makers and planners. City planners armed with huge amounts of traffic-flow data could more easily identify problem intersections, for instance, or pinpoint the ideal spot for a new bus stop.

Before cities can realize the benefits of connected vehicles, however, the technol-

ogy required to network cars wirelessly needs to be worked out. And at its R&D facility in Warren, GM is testing what’s likely to be the first generation of car-to-car communications.

Hariharan Krishnan, a GM technical fellow, took me for a spin around cam-pus in a luxurious but otherwise normal- looking Cadillac. As we approached an intersection, one of Krishnan’s col-leagues accelerated toward us from the left in another car. The second vehicle was obscured from view by an inconveniently located bush, but a few seconds before impact, red lights flashed on the Cadillac’s dashboard, the front seats buzzed a warn-ing, and Krishnan hit the brakes. While some high-end cars are already equipped with automated braking systems that

rely on cameras, radar, or other sensors, GM’s wireless system has a longer range, and it can see hazards around corners or behind obstructions. “You can see that I was completely blinded,” Krishnan said as the other car flew by. “The technology is uniquely positioned to help in these blind-side collisions.”

Both cars were equipped with wire-less transmitters and receivers that relay position, speed, direction of travel, and other information to nearby vehicles 10 times per second. The equipment uses a frequency allocated in part for car-to-car communications by the Federal Communications Commission, and all data is encrypted. A computer stashed in the trunk of our vehicle recognized an impending collision and automatically sounded the alarm. The setup could help in other situations—preventing rear- endings, for example, by warning that a car ahead has hit the brakes. It might also warn of ice on the road ahead, based on other vehicles’ braking information.

Earlier this year the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Insti-tute concluded a two-year, government-

funded project called the Safety Pilot Study that collected data from nearly 3,000 vehicles fitted with wireless com-munications equipment. The results sug-gested that wireless communications could prevent more than 500,000 acci-dents and 1,000 deaths each year on U.S. roads, and the National Highway Traf-fic Safety Administration announced in August that it would begin drawing up rules to mandate the technology in new vehicles.

Some car companies are a step ahead. In September, GM announced that in 2017 it will begin selling the first car in the U.S. equipped with car-to-car com-munication as a safety feature.

The opportunities for connecting these vehicles to city infrastructure can be

found a 45-minute drive west of Detroit, in the city of Ann Arbor, where research-ers from the University of Michigan are experimenting with transmitters added to roadsides and built into infrastructure such as traffic lights. At one point dur-ing a demo, the display warned the driver that he was approaching a sharp curve too quickly; at another it showed when the traffic light ahead was about to change.

The real benefits of these systems will come if cities use this data to guide deci-sions about traffic management and long-term planning. And for many, connecting vehicles and infrastructure will create a vastly more intelligent traffic system.

But car-to-car communication could prove tricky for cities. The addition of such technology to city infrastructure is unlikely to be mandated, leaving it up to local governments to decide whether they can afford the cost.

Alexei Pozdnoukhov, director of the Smart Cities Research Center at the Uni-versity of California, Berkeley, says that in the end, it might be more cost-effective for cities to try to use smartphones to track drivers’ movements. —Will Knight

The real benefits will come if cities use this data to guide decisions about traffic management and long-term planning.

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The Eko Atlantic project is key to the city’s regeneration. It is a planned dis-trict being constructed on land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean. Upon comple-tion, the new island will house 250,000 residents and a daily flow of 100,000 commuters. Sand reclamation and the building of a seawall, sometimes referred to as the Great Wall of Lagos, are set to be completed by 2018. All infrastructure work is to be done by 2020, according to David Frame, managing director of South Energyx Nigeria Limited, the developers and city planners of Eko Atlantic.

Lagos has a strong technology startup scene that should help the city as it evolves. Its CcHUB, where technol-ogists, social entrepreneurs, and inves-tors gather to create solutions to Nigeria’s social problems, compares well with sim-ilar spaces in other parts of Africa and in Europe.

Still, basic challenges remain. Elec-tricity is not delivered consistently, and for every paying customer, there are countless others who illegally piggyback on utilities. Vandalism and theft of criti-cal network infrastructure are endemic. Moreover, while mobile-phone pene-tration in Lagos is high, smartphones have been slow to take hold. Hitendra

Naik, director of innovation for Intel Sub- Saharan and South Africa, says one promising development is local initia-tives that have helped companies lay down new fiber-optic lines in return for connecting or subsidizing rates to local schools. Another popular initiative uses data capture and analysis to let people submit applications for a vehicle license electronically, then walk into a bank to print it off—a quicker and simpler alter-native to chaotic queues at government offices with a waiting time of weeks or even months.

—Monty Munford

spent a month working with government agencies to analyze the city’s transporta-tion systems. Lagos traffic jams are epic. The drive to the airport from Victoria Island, home to the city’s embassies, top hotels, and biggest businesses, takes only 45 minutes at night, but someone with an 11 a.m. flight will need to leave before 6 a.m. when the traffic locks. One area of IBM’s focus was the expansion of transportation services using the city’s myriad waterways, which already carry more than 170,000 commuters a day but could carry many more if transport systems were optimized on the basis of cloud computing, analytics, and mobile data. Analytics technology applied to data stored in the cloud could predict water traffic, streamlining traffic flow. That would then feed into cell-phone updates for commuters about the best times to travel and how long their trip is likely to take.

The project was part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge initiative, a three-year, 100-city, $50 million competitive grant. One private-sector initiative is IBM’s work with Virtual Streets, a Nigerian startup, using cognitive computing sys-tems to provide location-based services to people in Nigerian cities. Using data

from geographic information systems, traffic cameras, and phones from sub-scribers, Virtual Streets gives subscribers real-time traffic data paid for by location-based ads for local businesses.

“There is already ample data avail-able in Lagos,” says IBM’s Stewart. “Cell phones, social media, traffic cameras, global positioning systems, banks, and retail stores are all producing terabytes of big data loaded with potential insight about how the city works and how its citizens move around within it.” The chal-lenge is figuring out how to actually use all that information.

Case Study

Booming Lagos, Smart City An African mega-city bets on technology and its native entrepreneurs to meet the many challenges of its population boom.

● For Lagos, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest city, any push to become a smart city will have to adapt to constant—and often unplanned—growth.

Its challenges are epic. The United Nations predicts that Lagos’s popu-lation—which the U.N. estimates at 12.6 million today, though other esti-mates are as high as 22 million—will almost double between now and 2030, greatly adding to demands on already strained services.

Can this city, where the poorest live in fetid floating slums, absorb another 12 million souls? “Keeping up with the state’s growing appetite for services and resources is a Herculean and continu-ous process,” acknowledges Lagos state governor Babatunde Raji Fashola. “The need to deploy innovative approaches that address civic challenges in Lagos state has never been greater, and technol-ogy is the key to the future.”

As Lagos lays out its vision for becom-ing a smarter city, international IT com-panies are vying for its business, betting that technology and data will be the keys to its evolution. Mobile phones, extraor-dinarily popular on the African conti-nent, are expected to lead the way.

Uyi Stewart, chief scientist of IBM’s Africa Research Lab, calls the city “one of Africa’s economic and demographic powerhouses” but argues that it won’t successfully manage its growth without IT, including mobile and cloud technol-ogy, social media, and business analytics. IBM launched a new innovation center in Lagos earlier this year, part of a broader investment in Africa.

Last year a six-person IBM team

"The need to deploy innovative approaches that address civic challenges has never been greater, and technology is the key to the future." —Babatunde Raji Fashola, governor, Lagos state

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Emerging Technologies

Weathering the StormCoupled computer models will help officials know what to do as intense storms approach.

● For four days in the summer of 2011, the National Weather Service predicted that a huge hurricane called Irene was headed for New York City. Some media reports discussed the possibility of an unprecedented storm surge that could cause massive flooding in Manhattan and major power outages. Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for the first-ever evac-uation of parts of New York City. He ordered 370,000 New Yorkers to leave their homes and launched a massive and costly relocation program for patients and residents in hospitals and nursing homes.

Meanwhile, upstate in Yorktown, researchers at IBM were getting results from an experimental forecasting system called Deep Thunder, and it was telling them something very different. Yes, the storm was headed right for New York, but Deep Thunder forecast a much weaker tropical storm that was likely to have little impact on the city apart from subjecting it to heavy rains.

It was right. The inaccurate forecast on Irene caused a public backlash. Man-agers at nursing homes and hospitals crit-icized officials for putting their sick, frail patients at risk by forcing them to move.

A year later, when the much more destructive Hurricane Sandy approached the city, officials were more tentative. They ordered an evacuation of 375,000 people, but they told nursing homes and hospitals to discharge those patients they could and not evacuate the rest. In spite of the order, thousands of people in the evacuation zone refused to leave.

When Sandy did hit, its unprecedented storm surge—a massive rush of water nearly two and a half meters higher than ground level in certain parts of Manhat-

tan—forced emergency evacuations at 35 facilities. In the scramble to get patients and nursing home residents to safety, many were shuttled to shelters without medica-tions or critical medical information, the New York Times reported. According to the report, some family members were still searching for their relatives more than a week after the storm. Among them was a 93-year-old woman who was blind and suffered from dementia. In the general population, 43 died.

For cities, storm forecasts have high stakes. They will never be perfect, but IBM and the National Weather Service are developing much more advanced

computer models that will help cit-ies make better decisions. The need for these systems is increasing. The number of weather-related power outages in the U.S. annually is at least double what it was a couple of decades ago, and some scientists say climate change could make storms worse in the future.

To improve accuracy, IBM is using finer-grained data and more complex

physical models, enabled by powerful computers. It’s also extending its models to predict three days ahead, giving city planners more time to begin making deci-sions about evacuation.

To gauge not just a storm’s force but its potential impact and the best way to pre-pare for it, IBM and other groups are also starting to couple weather forecasts with more detailed information about geog-raphy, infrastructure, and the resources that cities and utilities have for respond-ing to disasters. IBM can use a model of a utility’s power grid, along with histori-cal data about how previous storms have affected the grid, to recommend preparing for specific events such as downed power lines in one area or blown transformers somewhere else, says Lloyd Treinish, who leads the Deep Thunder project.

Finally, IBM creates a third computer model that suggests how utilities can opti-mize their resources given the predicted impact of the storm. How many workers do they need to have on call? What equip-ment is needed and where? Treinish says that the models can take into account the cost of different options and assign dif-ferent priorities—directing workers to restore power to hospitals first, for exam-ple, while initially ignoring the hard-to-reach single home without power at the end of a cul de sac.

375,000New Yorkers ordered to evacuate

before Hurricane Sandy

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Deep Thunder is still largely an R&D project. But the company has clients in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including both governments and utilities, which are already making use of its models. (Aside from a Detroit utility, IBM won’t disclose its clients.)

There is still one big question IBM can’t answer: its models don’t yet predict storm surge, a mounting swell of water created by hurricane winds. Histori-cally, that’s what’s caused most hurricane deaths and certainly much of the damage, says James McConnell, New York City’s assistant commissioner for strategic data in the Office of Emergency Management. But storm surge is more difficult to pre-dict than rain and wind speed.

On this, the National Weather Service is further along. It first depends on an accurate forecast for the strength, direc-tion, and speed of a hurricane—and some-times of other storms in the area. Then it requires a detailed model of the sea floor and the natural and man-made geogra-phy of a city.

Jamie Rhome, who leads storm-surge-related efforts at the National Weather Service’s Hurricane Center, makes monthly trips to New Orleans to keep track of the rebuilding still going on in that city after Katrina, the 2005 storm that killed 1,200 people and caused $108 billion in damage. A new construction project can make a big difference in where surge waters end up.

Rhome says some of the most impor-tant work being done at the National Hurricane Center focuses on ways to com-municate the information in its models. What was provided to city planners for Irene and Sandy was “like a foreign lan-guage” to nonscientists, he says. The out-put of the models was all numbers and text. What’s more, it didn’t account for a very important variable—the tides. “We were struggling to convey how far inland the water would go,” he says. Now the Hurricane Center is testing detailed and easy-to-read maps that show exactly where water could go in a worst-case sce-nario. The hope is that people will under-stand the reason for an evacuation, in very vivid and local terms. —Kevin Bullis

Q&A

Sascha Haselmayer on Solving Tricky Urban ProblemsAn online platform connects cities to a global network of suppliers and ideas.

● In Sant Cugat, Spain, near Barcelona, city officials worried that too much food was going to waste while high unemploy-ment had left many people hungry. In San Francisco, government leaders sought a way to save energy and money by control-ling street lighting and other urban sys-tems with one smart wireless network. In Lagos, Nigeria, video piracy consumed 80

percent of the profits of the “Nollywood” film industry, the world’s second-largest producer of feature films after India.

Rather than taking the traditional route of issuing a request for proposals for a specific product or service, all three cities instead used Barcelona-based Citymart, an online marketplace. The platform, founded in 2011 by Sascha Haselmayer, a German-born architect, urban planner, and social entrepreneur, turns traditional city procurement on its head: instead of putting a well-defined job request out for bidding, cities craft an open-ended “chal-lenge” that is published online. Citymart staff help frame the challenge, research solutions, and recruit potential bidders, but the cities choose the winners. So far, Citymart has run some 100 challenges for 54 cities in 25 countries.

Haselmayer spoke with Robin D. Schatz during a recent trip to New York, where he plans to open an office next year.

Don’t local governments usually want to choose local suppliers?

Local Problems, Global SolutionsCities around the world have found answers to a variety of challenges using Citymart.

Challenge Winners

Moscow Cut excessive traffic noise in residential areas.

Noise-cancelling window device from Austria; photovoltaic sound-absorbing noise barriers from Italy; noise-absorbing guardrail from Copenhagen.

Sant Cugat, Spain Reduce food waste and alleviate hunger.

From France, an online portal where grocers, farmers, and bakers offer surplus food free, and people in need receive e-mails.

San Francisco Use the city’s streetlight poles to house integrated, expandable wireless monitors for the city’s systems.

Lighting management system from Paradox Switzerland increases the efficiency of public lighting and integrates applications for other services, such as smart metering, parking management, and waste management.

Lagos, Nigeria Upgrade the city’s “Nollywood” film industry, the world’s second-largest, which is hampered by poor financing and distribution, low wages, and video piracy.

Project Upgrade, from Lagos and Cambridge, Massachusetts, includes construction of the city’s first movie theaters, antipiracy technology, and an advertiser-supported wireless network that allows citizens to rent movies.

Barcelona Improve the digital experience of the city for both tourists and citizens.

Paris-based Connecthings lets you tap a smart digital tag located in a public space to view bus schedules, upcoming events, parking availability, museum listings, city tours, and other information on your smartphone.

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Case Study

Barcelona’s Smart City EcosystemA big investment in data-driven city management starts to pay off.

● Gardeners making their rounds through Barcelona’s Parc del Centre del Poblenou these days are as likely to carry tablets as trowels. The city recently moved 178 of its irrigation points to an Internet-controlled system. While it is handy to manage water-ing at the keyboard instead of turning a knob on a pipe, much of the advantage

is in the data that the new system sends back to a central software system the city has built.

The irrigation system is one of about two dozen smart systems that the city is building. Data from their sensors flows to three open software platforms, where it is collected and analyzed for insight into how the city could be run more effi-

ciently. In a remade industrial neighbor-hood called 22@Barcelona, which was financed with $230 million of taxpayer funds, the data is put to further use creat-ing apps and other programs to be tested

in a sort of urban laboratory for smart city technology.

Barcelona is often cited as the quint-essential “smart city,” but like any city betting on technology, it must be care-ful to implement genuinely beneficial projects and avoid foisting unnecessary digital investments on its citizens. “One of the dangers [of the fashion for smart city development is] a tech push and not a pull,” says engineer Ramón Martín de Pozuelo, who leads the postgraduate smart cities program at Ramon Llull La Salle University in Barcelona. “The tech should come from needs.”

In the case of Barcelona’s irrigation system, sensors in the ground offer live data on humidity, temperature, wind velocity, sunlight, and atmospheric pres-sure. That means, for example, that gar-deners can decide what the plants need based on that data and adapt their sched-ule to avoid overwatering. Curious citizens of the city, or anywhere in the world, can check the data on a map online. The city

invested around $382,000 in building the first phase of the system, which began operations in March. As of this summer, the city council estimated that the sys-tem would cut water usage by about one- quarter for a saving of $555,000 a year, a smart investment for a city that not too long ago had to import drinking water by ship.

You have 557,000 city and local govern-ments around the world, whose budgets represent 10 percent of GDP. They often have no way of learning what others have done. By giving cities the full portfolio of what’s out there, we’re first of all giv-ing them amazing intelligence on what’s possible and the different ways they can tackle a problem. Then we’re connecting them directly to the company that has the solution.

Since the city is not specifying the solution it is buying, it allows different approaches to compete. You may have 50 companies competing instead of five. That brings the cost down, we estimate, an average of 5 to 10 percent.

What’s an example of the kind of solution you are talking about?In Moscow, 65 percent of the residents have traffic noise levels in their homes that far exceed what health regulations allow. Moscow was looking for ways of reducing that noise without reducing traf-fic, which is hard to do in a city of 12 mil-lion people. So we published a challenge for them to reduce traffic noise.

The city chose three promising solu-tions, but one of them is particularly groundbreaking. It’s a small device you put on your window that completely can-cels out the outside noise. It’s a really early-stage technology, but its potential is so disruptive that the city of Moscow is now working with the company to help bring it to industrial scale using local technology, venture capital, and other resources in the city.

Do you feel this approach has the poten-tial to change the way city governments operate in the future?Probably the biggest opportunity lies in redefining the role of government from something seen as this protector and disburser of public money to a partner in aiding change. Human ingenuity will solve any problem, and if you can allow those solutions to reach scale quickly, and if you can tap into some of the financial resources, both in the community, like crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, and by making government a real and active

$230 millionCost of remaking an old industrial

neighborhood into a laboratory for smart city technology

Like any city betting on technology, Barcelona must be careful to focus on genuinely beneficial projects.

partner, I think you can deal with a lot of things.

When you imagine the city of the future, do you foresee a lot of new technology?Probably everything that cities need for the next 50 to 100 years has already been invented.

What cities consistently tell us is they do not want to just buy technology. Cit-ies are less and less interested in buying technology from generic vendors. What cities are looking for is a technology with an entrepreneur behind it, who is dedi-cated to applying that technology to their specific problem.

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The software platform is a joint ven-ture between the city of Barcelona and private companies. It also collects and displays data from other kinds of smart meters. The city chose to make the plat-form open so makers of future sensor net-works or mapping or analysis software could use that data for their own purposes. The platform also allows city departments to share information and avoid repeat-ing each other’s work, explains city coun-cil spokesperson Laura Lahoz González. Today, nine other cities use it as well.

Would another platform, executed differently, have promoted more data sharing and more business uses? To try to answer that question, Barcelona is coöperating with an international orga-nization called CityProtocol, which aims to promote common data-sharing stan-dards for cities. That could allow data-sharing platforms from different cities to plug into the same data streams, enabling comparison and competition.

The infrastructure Barcelona is build-ing, from publishing its data to offering physical space in 22@Barcelona, has fostered successful private enterprises. Worldsensing is one example: it piloted a parking system called Fastprk by install-ing 100 parking sensors in the 22@Bar-celona district. The company’s product tracks parking and enables drivers to find available spots and pay for them. Barce-lona provided Fastprk with office space and permits to test its idea on the city’s streets.

In the end, Barcelona didn’t install Fastprk across the city, opting instead for L’apparkB, a mobile smart parking sys-tem developed by the city’s own software team. It’s now issuing 4,000 parking per-mits a day after one year of operation. But Worldsensing has found success else-where, installing a Fastprk system with 10,000 sensors in Moscow. This is one example of how the urban laboratory is beginning to create what Martín calls “a horizontal market,” in which tools devel-oped in one city are shared globally.

Outsiders have showered Barcelona with smart city awards, including the 2014 City Climate Leadership award for intelligent city infrastructure, the Euro-

Case Study

Mapping Disaster in JakartaOpen mapping tools help Jakarta plan for floods.

● December to February is the peak of the rainy season in Indonesia—a time when severe flooding often hits its capital city, Jakarta, and its 10 million residents. In 2007’s floods, 340,000 city residents had to evacuate their homes, more than 70 people died, and more than 200,000

people suffered disease, according to the World Bank. The bank estimates the cost of those floods at $900 million, a combination of financial aid and eco-nomic losses. Bad floods in 2013 caused another 29 deaths and displaced more than 37,000 people.

Jakarta’s disaster management agency wanted to improve the software models it used to help plan evacuations and aid efforts during the flooding, often a time of blocked roads and power

outages. But the agency needed better information about where people lived and worked and where facilities such as roads, schools, hospitals, and fire stations were located. To make more detailed maps of the city, it connected with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a charitable organization based in the United States that teaches com-munities how to edit an open map of the world. The system is free for anybody to use.

In 2012, with the support of other relief organizations in Indonesia and the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disas-ter Reduction (AIFDR), HOT began teaching local university students how to map their cities. During that flooding season, AIFDR made other maps using data from the workshops to track rainfall patterns. Teams from HOT then joined them during last year’s rainy season, mapping rainfall data provided every few hours from Jakarta’s 267 villages to cre-ate more than 150 maps illuminating the rainfall in each area. The data came in many forms—phone calls, texts, instant messages, and faxes—and took several hours to process.

The HOT maps helped villages iden-tify evacuation points and areas in need

of help. They became a way for citizens to show on social media how they were affected by the floods, and they helped communicate the overall scope of the floods so residents could avoid hard-hit areas of the city.

This December, HOT will deploy an Android application for recording rain-fall, allowing for quicker analysis of the information. The team is also working on ways smaller divisions of the villages can report data. —Kristin Majcher

On January 20, 2014, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team mapped the flood data reported by village leaders in Jakarta’s subvillages, which typically include five to 10 neighborhoods of 30 to 150 people each. Please click here to view the map, or visit

www.technologyreview.com/news/532516/mapping-disaster-in-jakarta/

pean Capital of Innovation prize from the European Commission last March, and the 2014 Bloomberg Mayor’s Chal-lenge. Businesses, too, are betting that Barcelona’s plans will benefit them. Ear-lier this year, Cisco, Schneider, and Philips announced plans to occupy part of 22@Barcelona and begin installing sensors, wireless networks, and smart streetlights.

—Lucas Laursen

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532516/mapping-disaster-in-jakarta/

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Case Study

Citizen TechnologistsAmsterdam wants its next data projects to be driven by citizens.

● Amsterdam is well known for its many smart city projects involving intelligent grids and electric vehicles. But now there is a push to put more of the onus for change on the residents themselves. One of the newest projects is called Citi-zen Data Lab; the idea is that Amster-dam residents will collect data to measure air quality, traffic, or trash on the street. The lab’s goal is to help “shift from smart cities to smart citizens,” explains Sabine Niederer, director of CREATE-IT, a research department at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences that will house the new lab.

The lab is already collecting data about one of the city’s main thorough-fares, Wibautstraat, a once-picturesque boulevard lined by universities, newspa-per offices, and cultural organizations. Locals now call it the ugliest street in the city. But Wibautstraat has an abundance of new apartment buildings and night-life. Air quality concerns, combined with its technology-savvy residents, make it a useful test bed for research.

In June, Niederer and her fellow researchers hosted a “data day” on the Wibautstraat to generate measurements about the city, to be saved as open data sets that anyone can download and use. Using smartphones, the group measured traffic, the number of people on phones, wheelchair obstacles, full trash bins, and the locations where people smoke. The hope is that the data will become the basis for new apps or visualizations that could help researchers develop useful new tech-nologies or motivate citizens to push for change in city management. One planned app would let citizens collect data about the health resources in their neighbor-hoods and the activities of residents. From

this data, it is hoped, a picture of the city will emerge that can help policy makers, citizens, and others visualize which areas are health-care-deprived and which have ample resources.

These efforts build on sensing apps that CREATE-IT is already developing. One works with sensors installed on bike racks to help people find a place to park their bikes, a daily problem in a city where 75 percent of people own one. Another

works with sensors in the Van Gogh Museum to help visitors plan their day, and to help the museum understand how people move thorough the building.

Not far from this stretch of Wibaut-straat is the Waag Society, an organiza-tion that also aims to put technology in the hands of citizens. Earlier this year the organization handed out 70 sensor kits capable of measuring aspects of air qual-ity, including carbon and nitrogen diox-ide concentrations, temperature, noise, light, and humidity. The original intent was to collect data that local health insti-

tutions could use. But that goal proved elusive. The inexpensive sensors, chosen for their adherence to open data stan-dards, were not accurate enough to gen-erate data for scientific use. Although the project did not satisfy its original mission, it provided plenty of valuable insight for future projects, says Frank Kresin, the Waag Society’s research director. Kresin says a bigger follow-up project in the works will invite several companies to

contribute their sensors to an ecosystem measuring air-quality levels and possibly other metrics like ground movements. An organization will test for accuracy before the sensors are deployed.

Citizen data projects in Amsterdam are still in experimental phases, but they build on a history of more than 50 smart city projects launched in Amsterdam since 2009, including car-sharing ser-vices, innovative ways of storing excess solar power, and experimental systems that heat buildings using stored heat from sewers and cool them using drinking water before it is purified. The city works with international corporations like IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Philips, Siemens, and Ikea on many of these initiatives; its focus has been on creating markets for local businesses and getting citizens involved.

“We don’t have one vendor who owns everything and decides who can join and who cannot,” says Ger Baron, who was appointed Amsterdam’s first chief tech-nology officer in March 2014. “Now every-body can join and develop.”

Amsterdam’s goal is not just to install the latest infrastructure or collect data, says Baron. It’s to create products and services for citizens that will be use-ful to them. Rather than create a long-term technology road map, Baron hopes smaller businesses will launch new ideas.

—Kristin Majcher

Citizen data projects build on a history of more than 50 smart city projects launched in Amsterdam since 2009, including car-sharing services and experimental systems that store heat from sewers to heat buildings.

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Geneva, SwitzerlandPopulation: 189,033

Geneva is testing a new electric bus system called the Tosa, a 133-person vehicle devel-oped by ABB that does not require over-head electrical wires. At select bus stops along its route, overhead “flash” charging stations deliver 400 kilowatts of power in less than 15 seconds. During a 10-month test of one bus line, the Tosa traveled more than 8,000 miles and charged more than 4,200 times without major issues. The city aims to expand the test, possibly saving 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per bus line and lowering costs 30 percent, according to the partners behind the project.

Hamburg, GermanyPopulation: 1.8 million

Hamburg is working to make its port smarter by improving traffic flow and transportation of goods. With the help of Cisco, the city is working to develop sev-eral pilot projects, including a system to manage the parking and loading of vehi-cles as well as ways to make lighting more efficient, capture emissions data, and monitor railways with sensors. The city is also considering developing mobile GPS sensors to keep track of heavy machin-ery like cranes and vehicles within the port. The sensors would be able to track metrics like temperature, wind strength, and air pollution. Also in the works is an app that pulls in data from bridges, ships, and construction sites to create a high-level picture of activities in the area for people in the water and on land. Other companies involved in Hamburg’s pilot projects include AGT International, Avo-daq, Philips, Streetline, T-Systems, and Worldsensing.

LondonPopulation: 8.4 million

The U.K.’s largest city is predicted to reach 10 million residents by 2030. To prepare for this growth, Mayor Boris

Industry Guide

A Closer Look at Smart CitiesCase studies, resources, and upcoming events.

Cities around the world are doing interesting things with technology.

Chattanooga, TennesseePopulation: 173,366

It may come as a surprise that Chatta-nooga has the fastest metro-wide Inter-net speeds in the U.S. Thanks to a gigabit fiber-optic network, connection speeds at least 50 times faster than the national average reach more than 150,000 house-holds and businesses in a 600-square-mile area. Since the network’s launch five years ago, companies have been coming to the Tennessee city to experiment with it. The Company Lab, a local startup, runs a 14-week program called GigTank for entrepreneurs around the world inter-ested in using the city’s Wi-Fi to launch businesses.

Last year the accelerator focused on 3-D printing, health-care, and smart-grid companies. According to a report produced by Siemens, consultancy Price-waterhouseCoopers, and law firm Ber-win Leighton Paisner, Chattanooga has implemented a self-healing smart grid that saved the city $1.4 million in 2011 when tornadoes knocked out power to 77,000 households. Half of the homes had power restored in two seconds. That would have taken 17 hours with previous grid technology.

ChicagoPopulation: 2.7 million

To support a new smart electric grid in the city, 300,000 smart meters have been installed, and all Chicago residents will have one by 2017. When completed, the grid is expected to reduce energy waste

and save customers $170 million. An ana-lytics platform built on Cisco technology has helped reduce the city’s crime rate: violent crime fell 14 percent year over year for the nine months ending in Sep-tember 2014 (see “Data-Toting Cops”). And by analyzing 311 data, the city cre-ated a model with more than 31 variables that predicts and prevents rodent infesta-tions. Analytics is also helping to identify buildings that are likely to become vacant and suggest how the city might inter-vene. The city’s open data portal of 600 data sets has been used to build apps that tell citizens where to get a flu shot and alert them that their street is about to be swept, among other things.

Copenhagen, DenmarkPopulation: 1.3 million

Copenhagen plans to implement several new technologies in its effort to become the first carbon-neutral capital by 2025. In May, the city and neighboring munici-palities of Albertslund and Frederikssund partnered with Cisco to build a network to connect technologies for smart light-ing, parking, and water management. Cisco has also partnered with Copenha-gen and Citelum, the Technical Univer-sity of Denmark, Leapcraft, and Silver Spring to form Copenhagen Intelligent Traffic Solutions, which will geolocate devices connected to the Internet to help officials monitor traffic throughout the Scandinavian city.

This anonymous data is fed into a dashboard that, when accessed over the Internet, can show current traffic move-ment. Planners can also use the tool to create models of traffic patterns, which allow them to see, for example, how traf-fic lights and speed limits affect certain bus routes.

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Johnson created a special board in 2013 to implement technology aimed at addressing anticipated issues with traf-fic, health care, waste management, and energy. London’s goals—to build a smart grid and cut transport emissions in half by 2020—are ambitious but build on ear-lier successes. The city has tackled con-gestion by charging a fee for driving in central business areas during the busi-est times of day, using cameras to cap-ture license plates and reducing cars by 70,000 per day.

Its London Datastore gives developers open data sets, visualized on the London Dashboard, to make new apps focused on topics like health care and elections. Lon-don’s next project involves turning four neighborhoods into living labs equipped with air quality sensors to collect data.

New York CityPopulation: 8.4 million

New York provides more than 1,100 sets of data for developers to use through its NYC OpenData platform, which encom-passes everything from restaurant inspec-tions to maps of Wi-Fi hotspots. In March, MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Gen-eral Electric, and Audi analyzed more than 150 million taxi trips captured in New York City from 2011, finding that the number of trips taken in the city could decrease by 40 percent if taxi-sharing services were made available. That could pave the way for technologies that help people plan taxi trips more efficiently, reducing road congestion.

New York’s Transit Authority also has a pilot installation of interactive touch screens at five train stations that pro-vide tools to help riders plan journeys, see maps of neighborhoods, and monitor elevator outages. New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress will help turn the 28-acre Hudson Yards development in Manhattan—the biggest in the city since Rockefeller Center—into a neighborhood that measures traffic, pedestrian flows, recycling, air quality, energy usage, and the health of the resi-dents themselves.

PhiladelphiaPopulation: 1.6 million

Chief innovation officer Adel Ebeid has been getting a lot of attention for the $120 million initiative he’s led to upgrade core city technology, including the sys-tems behind licensing, permitting, and revenue collection. The city is also work-ing to close its digital divide—over 40 percent of residents don’t have Internet access in their homes—with a network of 79 locations offering computer access and training. Despite some early con-cerns about fire risk, the city’s power util-ity, Peco, has accelerated the installation of smart electric meters, spending $282 million to finish the project five years early. The system will allow the utility to charge more in peak periods.

Rio de Janeiro, BrazilPopulation: 6.5 million

With the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics both bringing crowds to Rio, the city has inaugurated a new data-driven operations plan. Now data from 30 agen-cies flows into one centralized “command center,” a system built, and heavily pro-moted as state-of-the-art, by IBM. Data from sensors and video feeds is used to build maps to predict weather and other problems. Emergency response times have improved 30 percent since the new sys-tem launched, and according to IBM, it will be expanding to more city depart-ments, including public works, transporta-tion, and utilities. Though there has been some pushback from citizens concerned about overbearing security and privacy violations, the smart city plan has made a name for Mayor Eduardo Paes as a leader in using technology to improve urban life.

Songdo, South KoreaPopulation: 82,000, including roughly 35,000 in the central business district

Built from scratch on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea’s tidal basin, the

1,500-acre International Business Dis-trict in the South Korean city of Songdo has been touted as a model future city by developers and technology suppliers. The city is home to futuristic technologies that promote sustainability, such as water recycling systems and pneumatic waste disposal systems that eliminate the need for garbage trucks.

The city is also filled with Cisco’s latest telepresence software, a fixture in homes, which is used to connect Chadwick Inter-national School students to classmates in California. But while about 82,000 peo-ple live in Songdo, only between 33,000 and 35,000 people so far call its new smart district home. The city is about 45 minutes away from the bustling capi-tal, Seoul, and the BBC described Song-do’s cafes, streets, and shopping areas as “largely empty” when reporters vis-ited last year. Of the planned square foot-age for Songdo, only about half has been developed.

Vancouver Population: 603,502

Already regularly voted one of the most livable cities in the world, Vancouver aims to become the greenest as well. The Canadian city has written an action plan to achieve that goal by 2020 and annu-ally reviews its progress to date, includ-ing a 6 percent decrease in greenhouse gases since 2007, an 18 percent drop in water consumption since 2006, and 93 charging stations for electric vehicles. Extensive information on city assets, tax reports, city council meetings, cul-tural spaces, community gardens, road construction, city contracts, city council members’ expenses, bike racks, and other aspects of city life is available to anyone who wants to see it.

Vancouver is one of the first cities to visualize proposed projects and future growth with 3-D modeling. It’s using soft-ware from Autodesk to see how different city systems interact, and to ensure that the construction of new buildings doesn’t impede views of the mountains or other natural assets.

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ing open data projects in cities like New York, Philadelphia, London, and Ashe-ville, North Carolina, as well as people, such as O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly, who are involved in the movement in other ways.

Enabling City Volume 2: Enhancing Creative Community Resilience

Through a series of guest articles from urban experts, this e-book explores more than 80 projects from around the world. The projects in question seek to help communities solve a variety of problems. Some of the examples covered by the book include crowdsourcing maps of public drinking fountains in Paris, an attempt to build sustainable tourist destinations in Sierra Leone, and the deployment of portable solar-powered communications devices and lighting to areas like Haiti that lack stable electricity. Resilience, energy planning, and citizen participa-tion are some of the key topics covered by the book. A hardcover copy can also be purchased.

World Urbanization Prospects

In this annual report, the United Nations estimates that by 2050, 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in cit-ies. Graphs, maps, and charts bring the drama of accelerating urbanization into perspective, as do its eye-popping city-by-city population growth estimates.

“The Divided City”

Based on a longer report, this article by Richard Florida, a professor at New York University and senior editor at the Atlan-tic, examines the economic inequality that characterizes so many cities today, and the contributing factors.

“Against the Smart City”

In this pamphlet, urbanist Adam Green-field argues that the sterile, technology- centered smart city programs he sees as being pushed by large technology compa-nies are ill-suited to urban life.

Calendar

Transforming Transportation 2015: Smart Cities for Shared ProsperityJanuary 15–16, 2015, Washington, D.C.

CODATU 2015: Energy, Climate and Air Quality Challenges: The Role of Urban Transport Policies in Developing CountriesFebruary 2–5, 2015, Istanbul

Green Cities March 17–19, 2015, Melbourne, Australia

Urban Affairs Association 45th ConferenceApril 8–11, 2015, Miami

Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD)

April 12–15, 2015, Washington, D.C.

American Planning Association National Planning ConferenceApril 18–21, 2015, Seattle

ICLEI Resilient Cities CongressJune 8–10, 2015, Bonn, Germany

International Making Cities Livable ConferenceJune 29–July 3, 2015, Bristol, U.K.

Asia-Pacific Cities Summit & Mayors’ ForumJuly 5–8, 2015, Brisbane, Australia

International Green Building Conference September 2–4, 2015, Singapore

ICMA Annual ConferenceSeptember 27–30, 2015, Seattle

National League of Cities Congress of Cities and ExpositionNovember 4–7, 2015, Nashville

GreenbuildNovember 18–20, 2015, Washington, D.C.

World Cities SummitJuly 10–14, 2016, Singapore

Transport Research ArenaTBD 2016, Warsaw, Poland

Outside Reading

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

In this book, New York University senior researcher Anthony Townsend navigates the new landscape of building cities in a world that is constantly connected. He explores the successes and struggles of city-building by companies, startups, and, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, citizens themselves.

The New Science of Cities

Understanding how cities work requires seeing them as systems rather than just physical spots on a map, argues Univer-sity College London planning professor Michael Batty. In this book, Batty uses a scientific, data-driven approach to reveal the complex flows and networks of interaction that happen within cities, and shows how models and visualizations can aid in building future ones.

The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance

In The Responsive City, Harvard pro-fessors Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford provide case studies to show how community and government leaders in New York, Boston, and Chicago have used data analysis to improve city life and create tools to save taxpayers money.

Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

Chicago’s former chief information officer Brett Goldstein says he was inspired to create this “guidebook” on best practices for governments using open data after people kept asking how to replicate the city’s success. The result is a collection of 22 essays from the people implement-

TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COMMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

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BUSINESS REPORT — CITY SCIENCE, SMART CITY, URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Programs / Initiatives

City Science Initiative Co-directors: Kent Larson, Alex Pentland, Cesar HidalgoManaging Director: Ryan Chinhttp://cities.media.mit.edu/

L e veraging advances in data analysis, sensor technologies, and urban experiments, City Science will provide new insights into creating a data-driven approach to urban design and planning. To build the cities that the world needs, we need a scientific understanding of cities that considers our built environments and the people who inhabit them.

Compact, diverse, walkable and attractive cities are a luxury, but they should not be. The City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab is exploring technologies to help develop cities that facilitate the creation of desirable urban features, such as shared electric vehicles, adaptable living environments, and flexible work spaces.

Our goal is to design urban cells that are compact enough to be walkable and foster casual interactions without sacri-ficing connectivity to their larger urban surroundings. These cells must be suf-ficiently autonomous and provide resil-iency, consistent functionality, and elegant

urban design. Most importantly, the cel-lular city must be highly adaptable so it can respond dynamically to changes in the structure of its economic and social activities.

City Design and Development (CDD) ProgramHead: Prof. Alan Bergerhttp://cdd.mit.edu/

The Joint Program in City Design and Development (CDD) is an academic and research program concerned with shap-ing and designing the built and natural environment of cities and suburban ter-ritories. CDD is a collaboration of the MIT Departments of Urban Planning and Architecture, also involving the Cen-ter for Real Estate and the Media Lab. As such, it joins key actors and disciplines that are shaping cities. Together, we seek to better understand the changing urban environment and to invent new archi-tectural forms, public policies, develop-ment products, and technologies that will improve the quality of urban life. The program addresses both cities and urban regions. It examines ways that they have been designed, planned, and developed

in the past, while proposing new visions for the future. It is also international in scope with studios and research projects in the US and worldwide.

Digital City DesignDennis Frenchman, Carlo Ratti, Michael Joroff, Kent Larson

Digital City Design investigates the emergence of digital urban systems and their impact on the public realm. Recent projects have included Technology, Livabil-ity and the Historic City, enhancing mobil-ity, trash collection, public lighting, the craft industry, and the Arno riverfront in the historic center of Florence, Italy. The project resulted in a book: Technological Imagination and the Historic City published by Ligouri in Italian and English. Other projects have included the Zaragoza Digi-tal Mile in Spain, a new technology district with a responsive public realm, and design of the Seoul Digital Media City in Korea, a global industry cluster that is now under construction.

http://cdd.mit.edu/research/research-groups/

The following is a sample of MIT research in areas related to the changing city, smart city, and urban development.

A report on City Science, Smart City, and Urban Development by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Pro-gram is available to request at the ILP website (Resources/Publications section) at http://ilp.mit.edu/webpub.jsp?brResearch=Y .

For a complete list of research reports by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program, please see the ILP website (Resources/Publications section) at http://ilp.mit.edu/webpub.jsp?brResearch=Y or contact the Industrial Liaison Officer for your company. .

City Science, Smart City, Urban Development

Request ILP Research Report

MIT RESEARCH

• City Science, Smart City, Urban Development - 46 pages (PDF)

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http://cities.media.mit.edu/

http://cdd.mit.edu/


http://ilp.mit.edu/webpub.jsp?brResearch=Y

http://ilp.mit.edu/webpub.jsp?brResearch=Y

mailto:[email protected]?subject=REQUEST; City Science, Smart City, Urban Development&body=Please email me the ILP Research Report on City Science, Smart City, Urban Development.

http://ilp.mit.edu

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CityMotionProf. Christopher Zegras

CityMotion aims to develop techno-logical approaches for improving trans-portation system performance in major Portuguese cities and allowing more effi-cient use of their resources. This multi-year research project is being carried out through the MIT Portugal Program, a large scale international collaboration involving MIT, government, and indus-tries to develop educational and research programs related to urban systems.


Labs, Centers, Groups

Center for Advanced UrbanismCo-Directors: Profs. Alan Berger, Adèle Naudé Santos, Alexander d’Hooghehttp://cau.mit.edu/

The Center for Advanced Urbanism is committed to fostering a rigorous design culture for the large scale by focusing our disciplinary conversations about archi-tecture, urban planning, landscape archi-tecture, and systems thinking not on the problems of yesterday but of tomorrow. The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism is a premier research center focused on the design and planning of large-scale, complex, 21st-century metropolitan envi-ronments. The Center aims to redefine the field of urban design to meet contempo-rary challenges utilizing interdisciplin-ary collaborative practices and the most advanced analytical and representational tools.

Urban Risk LabProf. Miho Mazereeuw

http://urbanrisklab.org/

http://spectrum.mit.edu/articles/preemptive-design-saving-cities/

Operating as designers at the inter-section of disaster management and risk

engineering, hurricanes and earthquakes, ecology and infrastructure, rural and urban, research and action, the Urban Risk Lab is a cross-disciplinary organiza-tion of researchers and designers at MIT addressing the most challenging aspects of contemporary urbanization. The Urban Risk Lab is a place to research and inno-vate on technologies, techniques, materi-als, processes, and systems to reduce risk. We develop methods to embed risk reduc-tion and preparedness into the design of regions, cities, and everyday urban spaces to increase the resilience of local com-munities.

City Form LabProf. Andres Sevtsukhttp://cityform.mit.edu/

The City Form Lab at the Singapore University of Technology & Design in collaboration with the School of Archi-tecture & Planning at MIT focuses on urban design, planning, and architec-tural research. We develop new soft-ware tools for researching city form; use cutting-edge spatial analysis and statis-tics to investigate how the physical pat-tern of urban infrastructure affects the social, environmental, and economic quality of urban environments; and develop creative design and policy solu-tions for contemporary urban challenges. By bringing together multi-disciplinary urban research expertise and excellence in design, we develop context sensitive and timely insight about the role of urban form in affecting the quality of life in 21st century cities.

Sustainable Design Lab @ MIT Christoph Reinharthttp://mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/

http://mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/publications.html

The Sustainable Design Lab is part of the Building Technology Program at the Department of Architecture at MIT. The lab’s mission is to produce high quality fundamental and applied research that

facilitates the design of resource-efficient and comfortable environments at the building and neighborhood scale. The lab’s goal is to change current architec-tural practice by developing, validating, and testing design workflows and per-formance metrics that lead to improved design solutions as far as occupant com-fort and building energy use are con-cerned. The premise of the work is that a more informed design process will lead to better design choices and ultimately bet-ter performing buildings.

SENSEable City Lab Director: Carlo Rattihttp://senseable.mit.edu/

The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory.

Projects

Walkable CitiesSustainable Design Labhttp://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/projects.html#image-4

http://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/publications/SimBuild2012_WalkableCityConcept.pdf

(2012-2015) This paper presents an urban analysis work flow using a Rhinoc-eros/Grasshopper massing tool. The tool utilizes terrain elevation models as part


http://cau.mit.edu/

http://urbanrisklab.org/



http://cityform.mit.edu/

http://mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/

http://mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/publications.html

http://senseable.mit.edu/

http://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/projects.html#image-4

http://web.mit.edu/sustainabledesignlab/publications/SimBuild2012_WalkableCityConcept.pdf

http://ilp.mit.edu

http://ilp.mit.edu

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of the design process to subdivide sites and generate urban form to be explored parametrically. It can then be linked to various performance assessment meth-ods. As a proof of concept, the study uses a walkability calculator for three urban form alternatives and applies genetic algorithms to optimize generated designs through allocation of land-use. Results show a great diversity that converges to near optimal solutions. A discussion is drawn about the effort and time spent to model such iterations versus its automa-tion using this work flow, and conclusions show the potentials, limitations and direc-tions for future research work.

Project for Reclamation Excellence/P-REX

Prof. Alan Berger

P-REX lab at MIT (est. in 2002 as P-REX: The Project for Reclamation Excellence) is a sustained effort to rede-sign environments after large-scale land-scape alteration has taken place, urban or otherwise. P-REX is a groundbreak-ing design research lab developing non-traditional design solutions to push the boundaries of conventional practice and incorporate resilient thinking into large-scale strategic planning & design.

http://prex.mit.edu/

Baltimore Inversions: Shrinking City Urban Design Studio

Spring 2013 http://dusp.mit.edu/cdd/project/baltimore-inversions-shrinking-city-urban-design-studio

http://baltinversions.mit.edu/

The Spring 2013 studio BALTIMORE INVERSIONS questioned the current peculiar condition where urbanity is outmatched by reality. Taking a former petroleum refinery site whose owners themselves wish to invert the site’s history as an oil refinery and its reputation as a source of neighborhood blight, the

studio investigated Baltimore’s current condition in order to generate formal, programmatic, and socioeconomic reversals of that condition.

T h e s p i r i t o f B A LT I M O R E INVERSIONS was to investigate the site’s potential to invert its history, meaning, esthetic, and perception with design that embodies the surprising juxtapositions, unconscious polemics, and casual extraordinariness of the American city. INVERSIONS is motivated by the paradox that urban realities are often more provocative than urban proposals, and that the American city is often characterized by an abandonment and reversal of historic conditions.

Our site, a former oil refinery and tank farm still partially owned by Exxon-Mobil, is in its own process of inversion. Like most EM properties, the site has been cleared of all historic structures and displays little of its former character. When environmental remediation is complete, the site will be a ‘blank slate’ ready for transformation into whatever the owner, the market, or the city deem appropriate. It is this transformation that the studio will theorize.

Is urban design doomed to be either formally exhibitionist and programmati-cally banal or unintentionally extraordi-nary, as in the Baltimore examples above? BALTIMORE INVERSIONS is the fourth in a series of shrinking cities studios. Broadly considered, these past studios focused on new forms of neighborhood design (Buffalo); reappraisals of Balti-more’s relationship to its region (AFTER-CITY); and new forms and programs for industry (PRIVATOPOLIS).

AFTERCITY: Shrinking Cities Studio at MIT

Prof. Brent D. Ryanhttp://aftercity.mit.edu/

The AFTERCITY studio is a co-taught studio between Brent D. Ryan and El Hadi Jazairy at MIT. As one in a series of studios on shrinking cities, the studio addresses the question of what planners and designers can learn from the shrink-ing city phenomenon and how transform-ing the urban condition in the area of

Baltimore might reveal new urban para-digms.

The studio proposes to address the phenomenon of the shrinking city, char-acterized by extremes of population loss, degradation of the physical fabric, and socioeconomic problems starting with a plastic conception of scale of the city to identify the nature (subjects of negotia-tion of the urban condition), the extend (continuities and discontinuities), and the dynamics (development profiles of growing or shrinking spaces) of the urban condition.

http://aftercity.mit.edu/

http://11.338.scripts.mit.edu/aftercity/?page_id=23

MIT PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION COURSES (Summer 2015)

http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses_topic.html

BEYOND SMART CITIESJune 8-10, 2015, Tuition $3,000, MIT Campus, Kent Larson and Ryan Chin http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/beyond_smart_cities.html

This course explores urban innova-tions that move beyond today’s “smart cities” developments and can disruptively change how we design and live in cities. The course will cover evidence-based, high-impact, cost-effective urban sys-tems that can scale globally with a focus on high-density neighborhoods, shared-electric-autonomous mobility, urban food production, resilient energy net-works, and technology that is responsive to human activity.

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http://prex.mit.edu/

http://dusp.mit.edu/cdd/project/baltimore-inversions-shrinking-city-urban-design-studio





http://baltinversions.mit.edu/



http://11.338.scripts.mit.edu/aftercity/?page_id=23




http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/beyond_smart_cities.html



http://ilp.mit.edu

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Modeling and Simulation of Transportation Networks August 3-7, 2015, Tuition $3,300, MIT Campus, Prof Moshe Ben-Akiva http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/simulation_transportation.html

An in-depth study of state-of-the-art transportation network modeling and simulation methods including theory and applications of origin-destination estimation and prediction; traffic flow models and alternative simulation methods (microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic); dynamic traffic assignment methods; models of user behavior; public transportation models; equilibrium methods; calibration and validation; and real-time traffic information systems.

FACULTY BOOKS

Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data

Dietmar Offenhuber, Carlo Ratti, eds., August 2014

The MIT-based SENSEable City Lab under Carlo Ratti is one of the research centers that deal with the flow of people and goods but also of refuse that moves around the world. Experience with large-scale infrastructure projects suggest that more complex and above all flexible answers must be sought to questions of transportation or disposal. This edition, edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti, shows how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. It discusses the impact of real-time data on architecture and urban planning, using examples developed in the SENSEable City Lab. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. It also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control. The authors address issues with which urban planning disciplines

will work intensively in the future: ques-tions that not only radically and critically review but also change fundamentally the existing tasks and how the professions view their own roles.

http://ilp.mit.edu/webpubdetail.jsp?id=294

Sustainable Urban Metabolism

Ferrão, P. and J. Fernández, 2013, MIT Press

Us i n g t h e c o n c e p t o f u r b a n metabolism as a unifying framework, Ferrão and Fernandez describe a systems-oriented approach that establishes useful linkages among environmental, economic, social, and technical infrastructure issues. These linkages lead to an integrated information-intensive platform that enables ecologically informed urban planning. After establ ishing the theoretical background and describing the diversity of contributing disciplines, the authors sample sustainability approaches and tools, offer an extended study of the urban metabolism of Lisbon, and outline the challenges and opportunities in approaching urban sustainability in both developed and developing countries.


Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities

Brent D. Ryan, Univ. of Penn. Press, April 2012,

In Design After Decline, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes

how America’s two largest shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia “succeeded” in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning.

Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighbor-hoods with innovative design and plan-ning, can reignite modernism’s spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.


ReNew Town: Adaptive Urbanism and the Low Carbon Community

Andrew Scott and Eran Ben-Joseph, Routledge, 2012

ReNew Town puts forth an innovative vision of performative design and plan-ning for low-carbon sustainable develop-ment and illustrates practicable strategies for balancing environmental systems with urban infrastructure and new housing prototypes. The book begins by outlin-ing a series of principles that structure the ecological and energy goals for the community. It then develops prototypical solutions for designing, building, and ret-rofitting neighborhoods. The intent is that these prototypes could be applied to simi-lar urban conditions around the world.


http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/simulation_transportation.html





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the big question smart cities will take many forms car...

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