Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
Today is International Day of People with Disability. I’ve been doing a lot of work in my hometown for the Day these past few days. I was interviewed by The Border Mail – the article is here. It made front page of the paper paper!
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Smart Cities need to be for everyone
Bridging the digital divide was another major theme of the show, and premiere sponsor Microsoft led the conversation.
“This is not about cool technology,” Toni Townes-Whitley, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector and Industry, said. “This is about regulatory work and increasing inclusiveness across the board.”
During her keynote, Townes-Whitley unveiled the company’s Smart Cities for All initiative, which seeks to empower disabled persons by making today’s digital environments more accessible. We’ll be covering this initiative and Microsoft’s other big reveals later this week.
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s cities across the U.S. struggle with falling transit ridership, the National League of Cities is urging them to seize the moment by serving more riders, like the poor and “unbanked.”
Many cities are already thinking about how technology can be used to marry traditional and newer forms of multimodal transit, while at the same time ensuring these solutions are equitable across the entire population.
“The good news is that the majority of large cities are thinking about equity. And cities are uniquely positioned to lead the nation into more equitable outcomes,” said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive and director for city solutions at the National League of Cities (NLC).
Rainwater was responding to a recent report by the NLC titled “The Future of Equity in Cities,” which explored issues like transportation, housing and economic development.
With an eye toward serving more riders with multimodal systems, researchers insist on the need to develop these new ideas for everyone, including the disabled, riders with little access to technology and the unbanked — users who lack bank accounts to link up to mobile-ticketing apps and other popular forms of transit technology.
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Calling on the communities of Saskatchewan to improve the lives of Canadians through innovation, data, and technology
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Friday, December 1, 2017— Making our communities smarter by being innovative and using data and connected technology will strengthen our communities and create opportunities to continue growing Canada’s middle class.
Following last week’s official launch of the Smart Cities Challenge, the Honourable Amarjeet Sohi, Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, kicked off the Smart Cities Challenge in Saskatoon today with a roundtable discussion with municipal, provincial and community leaders.
Minister Sohi encouraged community leaders to work with the private and not-for-profit sectors and the research community to identify their priorities, set their own goals and come up with bold ideas to address them.
With the launch of the Challenge, the Government of Canada has fulfilled a commitment made in Budget 2017 and Saskatchewan’s communities have what they need to begin developing their applications. Detailed application guidelines are now available on the new Impact Canada Challenge Platform.
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Event Listing Header Event Listing Body Listing Hero Details Free Beyond Smart Cities: Driving Citizen Engagement and Smart Communities Listing Card Panel Listing Card Info Event Information Description Can you name a sector that isn’t influenced by technology? Yet, the benefits of technology like connectivity, community engagement, productivity and information sharing are still not readily accessible to all citizens. As…
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The Smart Cities Plan will position our cities to succeed in the 21st Century economy. It is a plan for supporting productive, accessible, liveable cities that attract talent, encourage innovation and create jobs and growth.
It represents a new framework for cities policy at the federal level – and it is a framework that will guide action across various portfolios, to deliver better outcomes for our cities, the people who live in them and all Australians.
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his May, urbanists around the world have been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jane Jacobs. The American-Canadian author and activist’s spirited defence of inner-city neighbourhoods inspired a generation of urban activists and place-makers. So what might Jacobs have to teach a new generation of urbanists and planners?
Much of Jacobs’ legacy stems from the successful “David and Goliath” campaigns she led in the late 1950s and 1960s against the development plans of Manhattan’s “master builder” Robert Moses.
Her first battle, to prevent an extension of Fifth Avenue that would have torn apart her beloved Washington Square Park, was followed by a series of protracted community campaigns. These ultimately saved some of Manhattan’s most iconic neighbourhoods – Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy – from “slum clearance” and demolition….
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Google has built an online empire by measuring everything. Clicks. GPS coordinates. Visits. Traffic. The company’s resource is bits of info on you, which it mines, packages, repackages, repackages again, and then uses to sell you stuff. Now it’s taking that data-driven world-building power to the real world. Google is building a city.
Tuesday afternoon, public officials gathered in Toronto to announce that Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary under the Alphabet umbrella that also houses Google, will pilot the redevelopment of 12 acres of southeastern waterfront. Today the area hosts a few industrial buildings and some parking lots. In just a few years, it will be a techified community going by the name of Quayside. Sidewalk Labs has already devoted $50 million to the project, and Google will move its Toronto headquarters to the neighborhood. Once the company has proven out its concept, it plans to expand its redevelopment to the entire 800-acre waterfront area.
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The partnership between a U.S. urban-innovation lab and a government agency could bring a bold experiment in city-building and high-tech to Toronto, Alex Bozikovic explains More below • An illustrated primer on how Sidewalk Toronto would work An artist’s illustration shows Sidewalk Labs’s Quayside redevelopment of the Toronto waterfront. ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF sidewalk labs Published October 17, 2017Updated November 12, 2017 A unit of…
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In order for businesses and governments to remain relevant and competitive in today’s marketplace, it is necessary to adopt a global mindset. There have been numerous discussions, deliberations and debates that outline the importance of creating a more cross-cultural, inclusive and diverse work force. Most of these discussions have led to the conclusion that diversity and inclusion at workplace reap immense benefits including greater customer satisfaction, better market position, an enhanced ability to reach strategic goals and a stronger bottom line. I couldn’t agree more.
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Past surveys have shown only a minority of people understand the concepts behind the smart cities movement. Nevertheless, given the choice between living in a dumb city and a smart city, who wouldn’t choose the latter? You’d be surprised. Teena Maddox () reports over a third of surveyed people have little desire to live in smart cities. “The lure of living in a technologically advanced community appeals to many Americans,” she writes, “although many don’t quite understand what the term smart city means, according to a new report from CompTIA. The Building Smarter Cities and Communities report, which surveyed both private citizens and US government officials, showed that six out of 10 Americans are interested in living in a smart city.”[1] That means 4 in 19 aren’t interested.
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