“We live in an era of Big Data and Open Data. By some estimates, more than 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone. Data is generated everywhere, and all the time, in our cities. It is extracted from sensors in buildings and vehicles, it is crowd sourced through innovative apps, and passively generated (often without our awareness) by mobile phones and other portable devices.”
“With at least 4,500 people dead, public-health authorities in west Africa and worldwide are struggling to contain Ebola. Borders have been closed, air passengers screened, schools suspended. But a promising tool for epidemiologists lies unused: mobile-phone data.”
Tomorrow’s cities – How do cities get smarter?
“Mention ‘smart cities’ to people and the first questions they ask are: ‘What is a smart city?’ and ‘Where is the smartest one’?”
The Future Smart City Will Be Built Around You and the Internet of You
“Cities have always shaped their inhabitants. The élan vital can manifest in an accent, the pace of service, or even how much time people spend outdoors. But this may be the first time in history that an individual citizen will have the power to push back on and shape her city in real time. We’re reaching a new level of engagement—a kind of symbiotechna.”
‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’
“In all too many cities, economic divisions are being widened and social capital destroyed due to the notion that only a competitive, wired city can survive in the cut-throat global market. This is just one of the harmful outcomes of the political ideology of neo-liberalism, the market fundamentalism that has gripped Western politics for the last three decades. The problem is not just a failure of participation — as citizens remain excluded from decision-making — but of imagination, as politicians refuse to intervene in markets except at the behest of corporate capital.”