
Smart Cities
Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
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Narrated by:
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Jeremy Arthur
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By:
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Anthony Townsend
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 storm water 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.
©2013 Anthony M. Townsend (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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Very useful
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Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Less man is destroying the world and golly keepers we can all work togetherHow could the performance have been better?
It's basically a documentary. The narrator doesn't need to do anything but talk with one voiceDid Smart Cities inspire you to do anything?
Yes..I will use it for restarting civilization after the zombies have attacked !!!!Any additional comments?
Overall it was a very interesting book. It showed the blue prints that are all around us everyday to make our modern world better. They show how cities have used new wireless tech to create needed subsystems for city services. They comment how one city was planned to be high tech and didn't work,but another that grew more organically and wasn't per planned ,becomes a great tech city. It's a very good book, like all documentary style it does bog down in places.Look around and see the future
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Informative and intriguing
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Commendable work both by the Author and Narrator.
Exhaustuve
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A must read for city enthusiasts
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A must read for anyone who cares about cities
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I Tried Really Hard
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