blog de notas de juan freire

… Obviamente, si las empresas están interesadas en el concepto es porque se traduce en negocio. En el sector de las soluciones para smart cities insisten en que es siempre un beneficio en una doble dirección: las compañías venden servicios, pero a los municipios les interesa porque supone mejorar la vida de sus ciudadanos e incluso ahorrar. Hay jugadores de todos los tamaños: desde pymes que han creado aplicaciones para el móvil hasta gigantes como Telefónica, Endesa, Schneider Electric, Agbar, Accenture, Siemens, Cisco, Ferrovial…

How do you take the enormous amount of critical information gathered every day by city agencies and make it actually useful to citizens? On the City of New York’s DataMine web site, just looking through the list of datasets generated by the Department of Transportation alone is enough to give you a headache. Enter the annual NYC Big Apps competition – a call to software developers who can mine this data and find ingenious ways to put it at the fingertips, or keyboard clicks, of the average New Yorker. This April, winners received a total of $20,000 in cash, the wide exposure their work deserves, investment meetings with BMW, and a chance to talk to Mayor Bloomberg about their ideas…

… Not so long ago, airports were built near cities, and roads connected the one to the other. This pattern—the city in the center, the airport on the periphery— shaped life in the twentieth century, from the central city to exurban sprawl. Today, the ubiquity of jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks has turned the pattern inside out. Soon the airport will be at the center and the city will be built around it, the better to keep workers, suppliers, executives, and goods in touch with the global market. 

This is the aerotropolis: a combination of giant airport, planned city, shipping facility, and business hub. The aerotropolis approach to urban living is now reshaping life in Seoul and Amsterdam, in China and India, in Dallas and Washington, D.C. The aerotropolis is the frontier of the next phase of globalization, whether we like it or not …

Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Greg Lindsay

Q: In a few sentences, what’s the central message of your book?

A: Successful cities have always been founded because of trade—from Ur to New York, these are places where people exchange goods, money and ideas. Meanwhile, the shape of cities has always been defined by transportation. Boston was built around its docks;,Chicago around the railroads, and Los Angeles around the car. And the world is poised to build literally hundreds of new cities as 3 billion urbanize over the next forty years. So where would you put a new city today? And how would a city in western China—historically the middle of nowhere—connect to the world? The answer is the airport. In a global economy, where trillions of dollars in goods and billions of people follow digital bits around the world, sooner or later we would end up building cities defined by their airports, because the only geography that matters vis economic geography. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s always been this way.

…

Q: What differentiates the aerotropolis from other commercially-centered visions of urban planning, like the suburban strip mall or Leavittown?

A: Those are examples of what you get when private developers are driving the agenda, which has been the case in American since post-WWII suburbia, at least. The places that are consciously looking to develop (or redevelop) the areas around their airports, like Detroit, or Amsterdam, or Beijing, have done a much better job about thinking regionally, about bringing public and private interests together, and trying to build something that makes sense from both an economic and urban planning standpoint, rather than just make a quick buck. A great example is Amsterdam, which built an entirely new business district called the Zuidas on its southern border with towers expressly designed for the Netherlands’ largest banks and other companies, along with housing, all centered on a train station that is six minutes from the airport. It’s a lot better than the alternative—exurbs lying forty miles from Phoenix, Arizona.

Connected sustainable cities employ ubiquitous, networked intelligence to ensure the efficient and responsible use of the scarce resources – particularly energy and water – that are required for a city’s operation, together with the effective management of waste products that a city produces, such as carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

Read the new Foreword to Connected Sustainable Cities

Download Connected Sustainable Cities

Abstract: The majority of research on the information revolution in Korea focuses exclusively on the 1990s, disregarding previous historical periods, claiming that decade marked the beginning of an “information society.” This article, on the other hand, adopts a wider, sociohistorical perspective on urban mobility and mobile communication technologies in the Korean context. By doing so, it recontextualizes the shifting relationship between mobile communication technologies and urban mobility and provides insights into how the modern social geography of mobility in Seoul is being constantly made and remade. In particular, the article focuses upon the social space ofbang (literally “room” in Korean) as a product of the specific modern spatial rearrangement of the public and the private. It examines how the organizing principles of social spaces are moving from enclosure and containment to connection and distribution.