Smart About Cities

Current discussions on urban planning regularly invoke the concept of the smart city-a city based on innovative urban planning, which itself is based on "smart" technologies that are supposed to make cities safer, cleaner and more efficient. But is this actually improving cities? "Smart about Cities [...]
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Current discussions on urban planning regularly invoke the concept of the smart city-a city based on innovative urban planning, which itself is based on "smart" technologies that are supposed to make cities safer, cleaner and more efficient. But is this actually improving cities? "Smart about Cities" argues for "smart urban planning" instead of an uncritical embrace of the smart city. Smart urban planning tackles what twentieth-century urban planning forgot-the metabolism of cities, the incoming and outgoing flows that connect urban life with the natural world. Key questions are visualized in 50 infographics: what do cities live on? How much water, food and construction material do they use? What amount of those materials do they dispose of? This book makes an appeal for "global network urban planning" in which technology is not a panacea but is instead anchored in social innovation.