Urenio Watch Watch: Publications on Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities

New book: The Smart Enough City

smartenoughcity_cover

In this book “The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future”, Ben Green focus on how big data, AI and machine learning could promote more efficient and livable cities, without sacrificing civil liberties and social justice. Warning us against the exclusively technical view of urban life, he underlines the need to recognize the complexity of urban life rather than see the city as something to optimize. The book is part of the Strong Ideas series, published with the support of the MIT Libraries.

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Unlocking Sustainable Cities: A Manifesto for Real Change

book cover_unlocking sustainable citiesThis book, written by Paul Chatterson, seeks to explore the power of rapidly emerging constellations of connected experiments that can harness the creative power of the many and have the potential to radically unlock the latent potential of cities. It foregrounds that one of the central problems is the way that we approach the very idea of sustainability and questions the dominant urban project of the human species, which he defines as Capitalocene. Continue reading

New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times

new urban worlds coverWritten by AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, this book attempts to address the relationship between urban theory and practice in Asia and Africa. It is argued that we need to look at the neighborhood or district level to get the essence of urban lives. This book reads like a collection of authors’ thoughts on urban change over the past several decades. It reflects their concern for social justice in African and Asian cities, which is ever challenged by the commodification and technologization of urban spaces.

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