Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Big Data and Smart Urbanism

How smart are 'smart cities' ?
Unknown street artist, Poland


Big Data and Smart Cities are fairly recent buzzwords in the media and in the academic community. To be honest, these words are so commented that I cannot help rolling my eyes when I read researchers and journalists using them in a sloppy way, as they often do.

So I would like to share this presentation Rob Kitchin gave in Oxford Internet Institute (oii) on March 2014. Rob gives a broad picture of the cutting edge literature on smart urbanism. He also makes the concept of big data pretty clear by contrasting  it with more traditional types of data, like population census.  



In case you're interested, Rob's presentation is based in this paper recently published: The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism.