Over the past six weeks I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with over twenty cities across the United States and Australia. Whether I was speaking with a small rural council or a large metropolitan city, the challenge of citizen engagement came up in almost every conversation; specifically, the ever-increasing gap between current engagement strategies and large pockets of the community.
Read MoreOver $14.85 billion have been spent on smart city initiatives in 2015. By 2020, the figure is expected to double and reach $34.45 billion.
Read MorePaying a water bill or filing a business license fee in Chicago is getting easier. The city has organized payments under one platform and launched the application on 50 new kiosks to be arranged around the city — in locations as varied as police stations to libraries — with the aim of making certain transactions with Chicago quicker and more seamless. The kiosks are expected to roll out this summer.
Read MoreUrban planning, rural planning, transportation planning: all of it is personal. This is something that practicing planners (and policymakers of all kinds) need to understand. The work we do influences where people can live, influences where people can work or go to school, and can transform the entire trajectory of an individual’s lived experience. This makes our work a very heavy responsibility.
Read MoreA CompTIA report shows that 6 in 10 US citizens are interested in living in a smart city, despite concerns about cybersecurity and budgetary constraints.
Read MoreInitiatives to redesign cities so that they are smarter and more sustainable are increasing worldwide. A smart city can be understood as a community in which citizens, business firms, knowledge institutions, and municipal agencies collaborate with one another to achieve systems integration and efficiency, citizen engagement, and a continually improving quality of life. This article presents an organizational framework for such collaboration and employs it to analyze Smart Aarhus, the smart-city initiative of Aarhus, Denmark. Based on the experiences of Smart Aarhus to date, it offers a set of lessons that can benefit the designers, leaders, and policymakers of other smart-city initiatives.
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