smart cities – Impact Lab

Automobiles, City Planning, Electric Vehicles, Energy, Science & Technology News

Why wireless vehicle charging makes sense for smart cities

August 20, 2020

Image of proposed wireless charging stations

Investments we make today in urban EV infrastructure must take into account future requirements for ride sharing, transit and utilities

As the world’s population grows increasingly urban — it’s expected that by 2050, 70 per cent of individuals will live in urban areas — it’s critical for these regions to have the infrastructure in place to support quick, convenient and electric mobility. From autonomous vehicles, to electric urban transit, to effective energy management by utilities, successful deployment depends on cities investing in the proper accompanying charging infrastructure. To that end, there’s a good case to be made that investing in wireless charging is critical for the prosperity of urban areas.

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City Planning, Energy, Environment, Science & Technology News

Smart cities: The future of urban infrastructure

July 28, 2020

Songdo in South Korea has been designed with sensors to monitor everything from temperature to energy use to traffic flow. By Timothy Carter

Technology is changing everyday city life, allowing us to instantly adapt to everything from storm threats to traffic jams.

Infrastructure is not exactly the sexiest word in architecture. There are no “starchitects” proudly boasting about their pipe designs or subsurface drainage systems. By its very definition – the underlying structures that support our systems – infrastructure is inherently hidden from us, and therefore often overlooked. But without it our current cities couldn’t possibly exist. Without finding ways to improve it, our future cities will struggle to survive.

Historically, our urban infrastructure has materialised as a response to some emergent or acute problem, like natural disasters. In 2010 it was estimated that over 40% of the global population lives in coastal areas, and much of the large-scale devastation in these areas is due to hurricanes and typhoons. Multi-billion-dollar estimates of infrastructure damage from Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the recent devastation in the Philippines, demonstrate the amount of damage and human cost these disasters create.

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AI, Big Data, City Planning, Science & Technology News

How Stockholm is leading the way for smart cities

July 9, 2019

‘Being smart is about working in a smarter way with different partners and empowering citizens’

Stockholm is one of the world’s most connected cities, and a beacon for innovators and international talent. We are also a forward-looking city, leading the environmental and smart city agendas. By 2040, we have the ambition to be both carbon neutral and the smartest city in the world.

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Analysis, City Planning, Science & Technology News, Transportation

The Next Player in the ‘Smart City’ Game: WeWork – CityLab

April 5, 2019

We believe in data: WeWork’s algorithmically optimized site locations and décor reflect the company’s trust in numbers.

WeWork Wants to Build the ‘Future of Cities.’ What Does That Mean?

The co-working startup is hatching plans to deploy data to reimagine urban problems. In the past, it has profiled neighborhoods based on class indicators.

The We Company, the all-encompassing life-services platform formerly known as WeWork, is entering the booming business commonly known as “smart cities.” Di-Ann Eisnor, the former Google executive who helped grow Waze into a traffic-data juggernaut with 90 million monthly users, will lead the recently rebranded We Company’s efforts to build data-driven products and partnerships with cities and community groups, aimed at tackling barriers to jobs, housing, education, and other problems related to urbanization.

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AI, Analysis, City Planning, Science & Technology News

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050

March 24, 2019

Tomorrow’s cities are reshaping almost every industry imaginable, and birthing those we’ve never heard of.

Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms, sustaining and responding to the livelihood patterns of millions.

Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate.

And countless urban centers, companies, and visionaries are already building out decades-long visions of the future.

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City Planning, Future, Green Friendly, Housing, Science & Technology News

This is what the cities of the future could look like

January 21, 2019

Could hyperloops be the future of inner-city travel?

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City Planning, Culture, Economy, People Making a Difference

From coworking to a smart city.

January 2, 2019

This year is the 10th anniversary of my decision to devote myself to the creation of the models of social changes. After banging my head against the wall, trying to scale the default coworking business model, I realized that only city-wide catalyst models such as smart city can survive and are ones of the pillars of the future of coworking business as well as cities itself.

It took some time when I tried to persuade the atomized community of small coworking owners that our model will not sustain and will probably end up very, very soon, but they didn’t want to listen. Next year, the network of publicly financed spaces turned up into business, disrupting the co-working space in every major city.

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City Planning, Google, Housing, Science & Technology News

Google is building a city of the future in Toronto. Would anyone want to live there?

July 8, 2018

It could be the coolest new neighborhood on the planet—or a peek into the Orwellian metropolis that knows everything you did last night.

TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city’s western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada’s Parliament, “It’s this weird industrial land that’s just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one’s really known what to do with it.”

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