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Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
W W Norton
October 2013
On Sale: September 30, 2013
400 pages ISBN: 0393082873 EAN: 9780393082876 Kindle: B00CF2M9AA Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our
smart, mobile, connected future. We live in a world defined by urbanization and digital
ubiquity, where mobile broadband connections outnumber fixed
ones, machines dominate a new "internet of things," and more
people live in cities than in the countryside. In Smart Cities, urbanist and technology expert
Anthony Townsend takes a broad historical look at the forces
that have shaped the planning and design of cities and
information technologies from the rise of the great
industrial cities of the nineteenth century to the present.
A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator
were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular
networks and cloud computing tie together the complex
choreography of mega-regions of tens of millions of people. In response, cities worldwide are deploying technology to
address both the timeless challenges of government and the
mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously
unimaginable size and complexity. In Chicago, GPS sensors on
snow plows feed a real-time "plow tracker" map that everyone
can access. In Zaragoza, Spain, a "citizen card" can get you
on the free city-wide Wi-Fi network, unlock a bike share,
check a book out of the library, and pay for your bus ride
home. In New York, a guerrilla group of citizen-scientists
installed sensors in local sewers to alert you when
stormwater runoff overwhelms the system, dumping waste into
local waterways. As technology barons, entrepreneurs, mayors, and an emerging
vanguard of civic hackers are trying to shape this new
frontier, Smart Cities considers the motivations,
aspirations, and shortcomings of them all while offering a
new civics to guide our efforts as we build the future
together, one click at a time.
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