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by Anthony M. Townsend
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In 2008, IBM launched a marketing campaign that would change how the world thought about cities. The company called it "Smarter Planet," and its message was seductive in its simplicity. Cities were broken. Traffic choked streets. Power grids wasted energy. Water systems leaked. Governments moved too slowly. But the same technology that had transformed global business over the previous quarter century could fix all of it. Sensors could monitor everything. Software could optimize everything. Algor
**Author:** Anthony M. Townsend **Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes
How digital technology is reshaping cities around the world, why the most successful urban innovations come from citizens rather than corporations, and what it takes to build a smart city that serves everyone rather than just the technologically privileged.
Urban planners, technologists, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who lives in a city and wants to understand how the digital revolution is changing the places we call home. If you have ever wondered whether smart cities will solve urban problems or create new ones, this book is for you.
In 2008, IBM launched a marketing campaign that would change how the world thought about cities. The company called it "Smarter Planet," and its message was seductive in its simplicity. Cities were broken. Traffic choked streets. Power grids wasted energy. Water systems leaked. Governments moved too slowly. But the same technology that had transformed global business over the previous quarter century could fix all of it. Sensors could monitor everything. Software could optimize everything. Algorithms could predict everything. The city, IBM suggested, was just another system waiting to be computed. The campaign worked. Within a few years, "smart city" became the hottest phrase in urban planning. Mayors from Rio de Janeiro to Singapore announced ambitious plans to wire their cities with sensors and dashboards. Technology companies promised billions in savings and dramatic improvements in quality of life. Consultants wrote breathless reports about a coming urban utopia where traffic flowed perfectly, crime dropped to zero, and governments anticipated citizen needs before they even arose. But Anthony Townsend saw something different happening on the ground. While corporations sold top-down visions of centralized control rooms and algorithmic governance, citizens were building their own smart cities from the bottom up. They were writing apps to report potholes. They were creating open data platforms to expose government inefficiency. They were building community wireless networks in neighborhoods the telecom companies ignored. They were using cheap sensors to measure air pollution and noise in their own backyards. The real smart city revolution, Townsend argues, was never going to come from corporate control rooms. It was going to come from the messy, chaotic, creative energy of citizens who understood their own neighborhoods better than any algorithm ever could. This book is about that tension. It is about the battle between two visions of the technological city. One vision sees urban problems as engineering challenges to be solved through optimization and efficiency. The other sees cities as living social ecosystems that need tools for empowerment and participation. One vision centralizes power in the hands of experts and administrators. The other distributes it to citizens and communities. The stakes could not be higher.…
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Get the complete summary in the appCities are ecosystems, not machines. Treating them as machines leads to solutions that fail in practice.
The corporate vision of smart cities prioritizes efficiency and control over equity and participation.
Grassroots innovation is often more transformative than top-down planning because it is grounded in local knowledge.
Open data and open platforms enable distributed creativity and distributed problem-solving.
Smart city technologies create risks of surveillance, exclusion, and discrimination that fall most heavily on the vulner
Human-centered design starts with people and asks what they need, rather than starting with technology and asking what i
"Smart Cities" is a strong fit if you want practical ideas around urban planning, technology, cities, especially themes like cities are ecosystems, not machines. treating them as machines leads to solutions that fail in practice; the corporate vision of smart cities prioritizes efficiency and control over equity and participation. The MinuteRead summary distills these concepts into a focused read, whether you're deciding whether to buy the book or applying its lessons at work.
Motivated to help readers with "The same technology that fueled the expansion of global business over the last quarter-century can compute, Anthony M. Townsend wrote “Smart Cities” to package those ideas for a fast, focused read. In “Smart Cities”, Anthony M. Townsend focuses on "The same technology that fueled the expansion of global business over the last quarter-century can compute. Through “Smart Cities”, Anthony M. Townsend distills the core ideas on urban planning into lessons readers can …
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