smart cities

Big Smart, Small Smart, smartest A thought that starts with parties and an LCD screen

October 10, 2019 6:35 pm By Ted Cuzzillo (Latest edit October 10, 2019)

An LCD display hanging in a neighborhood art project's entryway for any passerby mapped a neighborhood's parties. That posed a risk. But small as it was, did it offer a long term, unseen benefit?

“Local” is a nonphysical network “The enlightening place to look is always local”

September 13, 2019 4:14 am By Ted Cuzzillo (Latest edit September 13, 2019)

If you were in ancient Rome looking for signs of the big fall, you wouldn't look in the headlines. You'd have to look closely for small signs, faint signals. You'd have to keep watching day after day and year after year. That's roughly what Eric Schnurer argues in a long comment to a recent article in The Atlantic on Rome's slow fall, "Why Local Innovation Is the Answer." Small things, he writes, often have "large-scale effects but play out on the level of individual grains of sand."

How one San Francisco-area city found its own “cool” "You have to ask who it's for."

September 6, 2019 6:51 pm By Ted Cuzzillo (Latest edit October 31, 2019)

Smart cities sounds magical, but civic tech gets it done "You have to be tenacious and cool"

August 16, 2019 9:58 pm By Ted Cuzzillo (Latest edit August 19, 2019)

Louisville, Kentucky's chief technology officer works with the Code for America Brigade captain every day. That sounds to me like a good way to start building a smart city. But there's more to it than that. “My job is to help us chart the course forward” for what he sees as the new IT. If as the metaphor goes, data is the new oil, or technology is the new steam engine, or “smart” is the new “rich and famous,” Ed Blayney has just sprung the gate. This former second-in-command of an Army infantry company in Afghanistan says civic tech's not going away.

Opaque top-down systems vs do-it-yourself Look around, find data, invent, repeat

August 5, 2019 11:31 am By Ted Cuzzillo (Latest edit August 12, 2019)

Many people by now have resigned themselves to the ways of smart because they like the features. But smart cities are still new and mysterious, even a little bit unsettling. A friend asked me, "What's a smart city?" I give her the standard spiel about smooth traffic, sustainable garbage, on-demand this and that. She rolls her eyes. "Another top-down miracle," she says in disgust. What's it going to take to win widespread trust?