Page 54 - Green Builder May-June 2017 Issue

SMART CITIES

Raising the Urban IQ

There’s a profound shift taking place among cities and it’s not just about technology.

It’s about people and our planet.

CREDIT: ALEXANDR TRUBETSKOY

Common sense. In Arlington, Va., the Crystal City Sensor Network project will implement and share data from rooftop sensor devices
deployed in downtown Washington D.C., to Virginia Tech researchers and Arlington County officials.

BY MARTIN O’MALLEY These are among the innovations being advanced across this
forward-leading network of smart cities and their university partners.
VER THE LAST YEAR, I have been working with But what, you might ask, makes a “smart” city?
a new smart cities initiative called the MetroLab
Network—a collaborative of leading cities and their
university partners. The network came together to WHAT MAKES A CITY SMART?
Ospeed up the research, development and deployment We hear the adjective “smart” used so often these days it’s become
of smart city solutions to big city challenges. cliché. Smart phones, smart cars, smart this, that, and the other
Our network—with the support of funders like the MacArthur thing...
Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation—believes that When effective and collaborative mayoral leadership is in place,
progress can be greatly accelerated through: better, purpose-driven one can identify a smart city by a few key characteristics.
city-university partnerships; better multi-city collaborations across First, a smart city is well governed. The old days of patronage
the country; green infrastructure; sensors that allow us to monitor politics and allocating city services based on how a particular
air, water, traffic; big data for more effective and timely delivery of neighborhood voted in the last election are rapidly fading away.
critical human services; carbon neutrality and renewable energy Smart cities instead make use of geographic information systems
production. to create common platforms for agency collaboration and the delivery

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