Posts in Cities
Michael R. Bloomberg Announces $200 Million American Cities Initiative To Help U.S. Cities Innovate, Solve Problems, And Work Together In New Ways

MIAMI, June 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In an address at the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Annual Meeting in Miami, Michael R. Bloomberg today announced the American Cities Initiative, a suite of new and expanded investments that will empower cities to generate innovation and advance policy that moves the nation forward. In an era of unprecedented challenges – from rapid technological change to Washington D.C.'s deepening disengagement on urban issues to the climate crisis – cities need new tools that will allow mayors to do what they do best: innovate, solve problems, and work together to move the needle on the issues that matter to citizens and America's future.

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Fragmented but not broken: America's smart cities bind together

Perhaps because they played SimCity-style games in their younger years, many technologists working in government today are excited with the prospect of using "smart city" technology to transform the administrative process from one that is unpredictable, bureaucratic, opaque, slow and clunky into one that responds to the push of a button or the twist of a knob. The purpose of the smart city concept is to transform a busy, complex and unreliable metropolis into something that works precisely the way the people in charge want it to work. 

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Chinese R&D, Innovation, and the Search for Zhōng

Learning Mandarin isn’t easy. Establishing a system of innovation and catalyzing R&D isn’t easy either, especially in a country with over one billion people. This is particularly true with successive generations of poverty, a structure established to punish failure, and an education system that emphasizes memorization over original thinking. Technologically and economically, China has emerged from a model of seclusion to imitation. My time in China revealed a consistent emphasis on and need for that next step, from imitation to innovation.

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The rise of smart cities

With more than 60 per cent of the world's population expected to be urban residents by 2050, the challenge to build more "smart cities" has become urgent. With the advent of digital technology and big data, changes are afoot, be it in public transportation, citizen services or the way businesses are run. To discuss these changes and evaluate the processes under way, one of France's leading newspapers, Le Monde, in partnership with The Straits Times, is organising a conference titled "Smart Cities: Which visions and models for the 21st century?" at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy today. And, in a four-page special, The Straits Times and Le Monde showcase Asian cities that have, in their individual ways, applied smart city solutions to enhance the quality of life.

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Indiana General Assembly Sets State on Path to Accelerate the Innovation Economy

The Indiana General Assembly’s 2017 Legislative Session recently adjourned with the passing of a two-year $32+ billion budget.  The new budget contains key wins for technology and innovation. The General Assembly’s legislative priorities included venture capital, entrepreneurship and advanced infrastructure.

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Austin middle schoolers design innovative flood sensor

For their school science fair, the two developed HydroAlert, an innovative flood warning sensor. The device shoots an ultrasonic sensor into the surface of Bull Creek, measuring how far it currently sits from the road. The data is then uploaded to the HydroAlert app–which the students also designed–every 15 seconds. LED lights on the device changes colors (green, yellow or red) depending on how close the water is getting to the roadway.

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6 inconvenient truths about Smart Cities

The last year has shown a huge acceleration of interest and action in the Smart Cities market – in the UK, and around the world. What has long been a topic of interest to technology companies, academics, urban designers and local authorities was covered extensively by mainstream media organisation such as the BBC, the Independent newspaper, New Statesman magazine and marketing magazine The Drum.

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If it's not smart, it's broken: Atlanta burns, other cities learn

In this feature series, the Smart Cities Dive team will take an occasional look at the practical, logical and down-right genius innovations that are transforming urban centers. Our aim is to ignite a thought or fire up a discussion that impacts the way you perform your job. We can't do this alone; pitch topics, talk to us and help us set the agenda. 

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Smart Cities at the Crossroads: New Tensions in City Transformation

The Smart Cities movement has produced a large number of projects and experiments around the world. To understand the primary ones, as well as their underlying tensions and the insights emerging from them, the editors of this special issue of the California Management Review enlisted a panel of experts, academics, and practitioners from different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. The panel focused its discussion on three main areas: new governance models for Smart Cities, how to spur growth and renewal, and the sharing economy—both commons and market based.

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A Smart City Is a Collaborative Community: Lessons from Smart Aarhus

Initiatives 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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The Open Kimono: Toward a General Framework for Open Data Initiatives in Cities

The article presents a framework for exploring the drivers, structure, and dynamics of open data initiatives in the city context. Drawing on a case study of the city of Barcelona complemented with other cases, it develops a stepwise framework that can serve as a practical guide for both urban and private leaders to implement open data strategies. Following this model can enable managers to minimize risk and effectively harness the power of open data.

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Portland making the most of ‘Smart City’ momentum

The city of Portland made headlines last year when it was one of seven cities from across the country in the running for a total $50 million prize in the Smart City Challenge – a national competition that asked cities to come up with transportation plans for systems that would use data and technology to help people and goods move more efficiently and cost-effectively.

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