Disruptive Data Strategies for Smart Cities and Places

The smart cities movement has focused on the potential of advances in data and technology to help a city meet its goals. The application areas are broad, providing better services for a variety of stakeholders. These range from better city processes such as the maintenance and management of city assets (e.g. buildings, roads, parks, amenities, recycling), to better customer experiences (mobility/transport, parking, interactions with government).

Traditional smart city ‘best-practice’ adopts a mindset of applying technology incrementally to specific problems of today and attempting to copy others in order to reduce risk. In this model the tools (of data and technology) drive the vision instead of the vision driving the tool selection. The results are missed opportunities for excellence, a plethora of fragmented point solutions to point problems and entrenched future costs and barriers.

By contrast in this course we seek to rethink what is possible based on new paradigms and future-proofing. We will seek to disrupt ourselves first. This is a practical course, based on participant preferences during the day, we’ll apply our methodology to the domains of: personal mobility, logistics and/or city transport management; to dealing with future pandemics; sustainability; or to recycling and circular economy.