Post Updated: After the Smart City, What? -- a talk at Harvard

Looking at downtown Philadelphia from the South Street Bridge. July 2013. For more Philadelphia images from the last few years, see here.

 RESCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY MARCH 14, 2014. 2:00 pm in Knafel Hall Room K262

On Wednesday, February 5 I will give a talk at Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis's geography@harvard monthly colloquia series. In the talk I will use Philadelphia as a case study example of how the 'smart city' as an idea or concept has impacted United States urbanism: what the 'smart city' has actually become, and where the 'smart city' might be found. This is another way of saying: what has become of the city in a 'smart city'?

The talk is open to the public; if you are in the Boston/Cambridge area from 12:30-2:00 pm on February 5 please stop by. 

Below is the abstract to the talk. For more information see the geography@harvard colloquia webpage.

 

After the Smart City, What?: Ubiquitous Computing Technologies and the Networked Urban Condition

 

The ability of data-driven, smart city projects to generate transformative urban change are popular, important topics today, but little attention has been paid to the actual, existing cities that underlie these social and technological developments, to charting how smart city projects have integrated into the urban landscape itself. The smart city is a culmnation of ubiquitous computing and the potential of wireless connectivity to effect change. In a smart city, smartphones, networked sensors, data analytics, and the like are intended to improve the flow of people, goods, and information throughout said city. However, the impacts of these changes often remain unclear and under-examined. It is necessary to not only ask what a smart city is and could become, but also who will benefit and where the impacts of these projects will be located. Beyond the celebratory rhetoric of urban intelligence that cities employ to attract business and improve day-to-day issues for residents, this talk will investigate how cities have actively transformed. Through a place-based case study of Philadelphia’s recent smart city efforts, this talk will begin by considering how the always-on, wireless connectivity of a smart, networked city has enabled new forms of civic exchange, municipal governance, and workforce-inclusion agendas. Next I will examine the spatial consequences of Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial efforts to attract key industries of the global information and innovation economy in ‘smart’ zones of the city. The talk will conclude with a consideration of the emerging geography of smart, digital Philadelphia as emblematic of networked urbanism overlaid with ubiquitous computing: as the near-future promise of the smart city to improve the urban condition has been integrated into often splintered and polarized urban landscapes, the areas of the city that attain a 'smart' status were already well-off. For a variety of reasons I will discuss, the benefits have not dispersed very well into the greater city, signaling that this era of digitally-driven urban improvement has not yet lessened longstanding social inequalities as much as was promised.

 

Location: 

Knafel Hall K262 - on Cambridge Street just behind the Graduate School of Design.