Perspectives and challenges of Smart (and inclusive) Cities in Brazil

I will be on a Facebook Live today discussing some of the challenges of developing Smart and inclusive (!) Cities in Brazil. The Live is being organized by the National Industry Confederation (CNI) and it starts at 5:30pm GMT on this link. The event will be conducted in Portuguese, but please feel free to drop in any comments and questions in any language you prefer.

You can find the recorded video below.

Future access to essential services in a growing smart city

Warning of  shameless  self-promotion:

I'm glad to share that some colleagues at UBC (Jerome, Martino and Nuttall) and I have a new paper published. In this paper we analyze how projected population change could affect future accessibility demand to education and healthcare services and transportation equity, looking at the case of Surrey in Canada. One thing in particular I like about this paper is that it looks at how transport accessibility is affected by changes in population growth and spatial distribution while most studies in the literature have traditionally looked at how accessibility levels change due to modifications in the transport network or in the spatial allocation of schools, healthcare facilities etc. The paper will remain open access for the next 50 days. Download it here or send me an email and I'll be glad to share it to you. 

Mayaud, J. R., Tran, M., Pereira, R. H. M., & Nuttall, R. (2018). Future access to essential services in a growing smart city: The case of Surrey, British Columbia. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2018.07.005

Abstract:

The concept of accessibility – the ease with which people can reach places or opportunities –lies at the heart of what makes cities livable, workable and sustainable. As urban populations shift over time, predicting the changes to accessibility demand for certain services becomes crucial for responsible and ‘smart’ urban planning and infrastructure investment. In this study, we investigate how projected population change could affect accessibility to essential services in the City of Surrey, one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. Our objectives are two-fold: first, to quantify the additional pressure that Surrey's growing population will have on existing facilities; second, to investigate how changes in the spatial distribution of different age and income groups will impact accessibility equity across the city. We evaluated accessibility levels to healthcare facilities and schools across Surrey's multimodal transport network using origin-destination matrices, and combined this information with high-resolution longitudinal census data. Paying close attention to two vulnerable population groups – children and youth (0–19 years of age) and seniors (65+ years of age) – we analyzed shifts in accessibility demand from 2016 to 2022. The results show that population growth both within and outside the catchments of existing facilities will have varying implications for future accessibility demand in different areas of the city. By 2022, the city's hospitals and walk-in clinics will be accessible to ~9000 and ~124,000 more people (respectively) within a predefined threshold of 30 min by public transport. Schools will also face increased demand, as ~8000 additional children/youth in 2022 will move to areas with access to at least half of the city's schools. Conversely, over 27,000 more people – almost half of them seniors – will not be able to access a hospital in under 30 min by 2022. Since low-income and senior residents moving into poorly connected areas tend to be more reliant on public transport, accessibility equity may decline in some rural communities. Our study highlights how open-source data and code can be leveraged to conduct in-depth analysis of accessibility demand across a city, which is key for ensuring inclusive and ‘smart’ urban investment strategies.

Making sense of smart cities

Last year (2016), Tim Schwanen, James Palmer and I put together a lecture series around the topic of "Urban Mobilities in the Smart City", hosted at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at Oxford University.

It was a great experience and I learned a lot from the speakers but also from the process of co-organizing the event. I would like to share here four papers that I've read back then and that I would recommend to anyone who wants to start a research on smart cities. These are quite influential papers so some of you might have read them already. Also, feel free to suggest in the comments some other publications you think have strongly contributed to the literature.

• Caragliu, A., Del Bo, C., Nijkamp, P. (2011). Smart cities in Europe. Journal of urban technology, 18(2), 65-82.
  
  
  
  
• Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1-14.
  
  
  
  
• Luque-Ayala, A., Marvin, S. (2015). Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism?. Urban Studies, 52(12), 2105-2116.
  
  
  
  
• Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131-136.

image credit : techcrunch

TSU Seminars: Urban Mobilities in the Smart City

From January to March 2016, the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford will host a lecture series on the theme of ‘Smart Cities’. This series will gather a range of world – leading academics and urban policy practitioners to debate some of the key issues raised by smart cities for urban transport and mobility futures.

The program is available here and we'll have the participation of some great researchers, including Gillian Rose, Michael Batty, Paul Newman, Geoff Vigar and others.

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

Professor Rob Kitchin is one the leading scholars on issues that arise at the intersection between big data, ubiquitous computing and smart cities (how software mediates everyday life in cities, more broadly). He is also one of the main researchers at the Programmable City project.

Rob delivered last year an interesting presentation at OII here at Oxford, where he gave a good summary of the scholar discussion on big data and smart cities, presenting a critical view on the political dimension of smart urbanism. I've embedded the talk in this post, but you can also watch it here. Rob's presentation was based on this paper: 

Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1-14. (ungated version). 

Abstract:

‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.