Smart Cities

by Germaine Halegoua

July 30, 2020 — August 1, 2020

Los Angeles, CA

This book was very insightful, yet for a book of its size, it’s surprisingly dense and technical to the point it has a slight feeling of being an academic textbook squeezed into 185 pages where each page feels important and will not allow you to let go of your pencil. I’ve begun writing an article on LinkedIn to be published within this month that summarizes this book into an article; If you want to learn about key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions about the pros and cons of this fascination and how it approaches urban problems and the future of technology integrated into urbanism, then this is for you.

A summary of a few (because there were so many) of the major highlights that I circled in the book: Smart cities are cities that rely heavily on information and communication technologies (ICT) and aggressively use it to collect data, monitor, and improve urban infrastructure and urban activities & behaviors through different technologies that translate urban activities into data, allowing those who analyze the data to prejudice trends of future urban activities, conditions, and environments. Computational modeling could more accurately identify roots of urban problems within complex systems than humans could, especially since corporate-driven perspectives translate all urban issues into engineering problems that can be solved through quantitative methods and design thinking with the city being treated like a computer it can be programmed to produce desired outcomes and structure urban interactions. By collecting and analyzing data about ongoing interactions within urban environments, municipal organizations can make more informed decisions about how to regulate them, make the city more resources and ecological, and able to accommodate growth and change safely and cost-effectively.

However, there are many challenges and cons that come with the potential prosperity and pros. I share more details from this book and discuss insights in this article, published in September 2020.