Play the City Blog
Here you find items on cities, open planning and design.
SitoThe Era of Smart Citizens
"Open up your code and let citizens make their city."
Notes on the Future Everything Summit in Manchester 2013, by Luis Veracruz
Sometimes it is simply better to elaborate a desired future, rather than loosing time to improve failing tools of the imperfect present.
Dan Hill set the tone of the conference in his keynote speech: “18th century institutions are not adapted to the 21st century problems”. “There is an institutional collapse and '5 Star Movement' in Italy is a good example of that.”
After his reflection on institutions Hill showed some good practices that mix analog and digital technology, and the question arrived early: are those examples of smart cities? From Dan's point of view, “Sm...
Lilly“New Towns, New Territories” conference organized by INTI hosted a session on New Songdo, a Korean city created in 1996 and hailed as one of the first truly “smart” cities of the 21st century.
The project began in 1996, initiated jointly by Daewoo and the Korean Government with Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in charge of the Masterplan. After Korea's bailout in 1998 and Daewoo's bankruptcy in 1999, the project re-started without OMA and with a new investor: Gale International, an American real estate and development company led by Stanley Gale. Gale International raised $40 billion for making New Songdo the most expensive private real estate development in the world.
Cisco Systems is the company in charge of providing technologica...
Play the City reports about the conference “New Towns, New Territories”, New players in Urban Development, coordinated by the International New Town Institute (INTI) in collaboration with the Nederlands Architecture Institute (NAI), location of the conference.
New Towns New Territories Conference focuses on the four latest new towns started from scratch as perfect examples of “global urbanization, privatization and new organizational models of urban development”.
The subtitle “New players in Urban Development” refers to how private companies are being responsible for the development in these new cities not only in terms of building but also introducing new governance, trying to create a new community and modifying inevitably the existing environment before their arrival. Consequently such private parties gain more power over communities than actual governments.
The electe...
Future of Design
Kevin C. Desouze writes in 'Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds through Participatory Platforms': The future of design and planning is certain to be around participatory platforms, designers and planners should embrace these platforms.
Kevin C. de Souza gives five guidelines for the use of participatory platforms. Using gaming is one of them!
De Souza is the PhD director of the Metropolitan Institute and an associate professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech.
New technologies are providing participatory platforms that allow individuals to share their ideas, interact with other's ideas, and work towards collaborative solutions to resolve problems or take advantage of opportunities. Kevin C. Desouza, PhD offers five guidelines to ensure that the use of such emerging technologies are maximized by practitioners.
To design and plan for smart cities we must have platforms that support the leveraging of intelligence and wisdom from a diverse set of stakeholders, sometimes referred to as “the crowd.” Towards this end, it is important for designers and planners to understand how to construct...