Urenio Watch Watch: Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities

Rethinking the Smart City: Democratizing Urban Technology

democratizing_technologyIn this report, Francesca Bria and Evgeny Morozov discuss how cities can regain control over technology, data, and infrastructure, as well as over the services that are mediated by smart technologies’”such as utilities, transportation, education, and health. Through a wide range of case studies from across the globe, the authors discuss alternative smart city models, which rely on democratic data ownership regimes, grassroots innovation, and cooperative service provision models. Continue reading

From Smart Cities to Experimental Cities?

Igor Calzada, lecturer and research fellow in Urban Transformations and the Future of Cities at the University of Oxford, has recentrly written a chapter in the book “Co-Designing Economies in Transition: Radical Approaches in Dialogue with Contemplative Social Sciences“, regarding the evolution of smart cities into a new category, the “experimental city”.   Starting with the deconstruction of the concept of “smartness”, Calzada attempts to foresee how citizenship could require a more active role in this new category.

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