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TECHNE Issue on Smart Cities
Everything you want to know about the future of smart cities and more.
Check out the TECHNE | Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment issue on smart cities freely accessible in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Here's the link.
The article A Minimum Set of Common Principles for Enabling Smart City Interoperability is particularly noteworthy since equal open data will be critical to the future success of smart cities. The authors lay a groundwork of guiding principles for global cities to move in forward in a shared direction.
The result is a proliferation of services for citizens and public administrations with many new data sources, applications and data managers. Unfortunately, they are designed as single applications with their own specific objectives and functions.
As we know it, most data sources operate in silos. With a shared framework and guiding principles architects, designers, and urban planners can openly share data to develop the smart cities we all envision. We wrote more about this issue in our Data and City Planning post.
Speaking of silos, in the summer Sidewalk Labs released the master innovation and development plan for a chunk of Toronto's waterfront. With an emphasis on sustainability and affordability the plan is exciting for anyone. However, little effort seems to be made to share widely how they will accomplish this which undoubtably requires complex networks of shared data. From what we know, the project appears to want to operate as a prototype that can be dropped into any North American city. It's a step forward for sure, but it's a silo that would benefit from some much needed transparency.
