Honolulu is, somewhat surprisingly, the 10th largest municipality in the United States. IBM is working with the local government to update its technology—to “build a smarter Honolulu,” as they would say. Here is an interesting video on efforts to provide data to citizens, and the results from those efforts, namely, citizen-created apps. A bus-tracker app …
This TED Talk is a good reminder why big data, as David Brooks recently put it, is “good at some things and not at others.” In this talk, Edi Rama, mayor of Tirana, Albania, discusses how residents started to take responsibility for their city after he initiated beautification projects, and how he attributes decreases in …
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Here’s a great video by Bruce Katz, director of Brookings’s Metropolitan Policy Program, on reimagining federalism as a mechanism to spur state and local innovation. For my thoughts on related topics, see my posts on why cities are American’s greatest laboratories of innovation and why federalism is a useful concept for state and local interactions.
IBM is working with Zjenjiang, China, to build a “smart” city; here’s an interesting promotional video:
This video is from March 2011. It features Carlo Ratti from the MIT SENSEable City Lab discussing how they track real-time data from cities, particularly cellphone data. I like the video because it moves beyond visualizations to some useful analysis. It also covers some of their cool projects, such as trash_track. The lab is also …
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Today I’m spotlighting a few websites that track real-time health information. One neat site is Healthmap.org, a site that scans news reports and gives an hourly update about health concerns worldwide, pinpointing the location on a map. It says it’s a go-to place for disease-surveillance experts, and I can see why: The site does a …
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The State of Michigan recently appointed an emergency manager for my hometown of Flint, ousting the mayor and other public officials. The manager, Michael Brown, held his first public meeting last week and defended the legality of his position against residents questioning whether it was constitutional, perhaps because of high-profile criticism of Michigan’s emergency managers …
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This week’s video is a fun one; it’s a concept video about Urbanflow, a collaboration between a NYC-based design company Urbanscale and Finnish designers Nordkapp. They want touchscreens everywhere in Helsinki, so the public can access maps and transit info, interact with each other, and report municipal concerns like potholes. John Pavlus has raised some concerns about their …
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Here’s an inspiring video that showcases a teacher in Detroit who is coaching low-income kids from Malcolm X Acadamy competing in a regional Future City competition for city planning. They win the rookie prize. I think that teaching kids this form of civic engagement is vital to our future.