The “Global Leadership and Change” course explores the role of leadership in global social, economic, and ecological sustainability. Considers population, consumption, technology, diversity, scale, nonviolent change, and community. Evaluates policies, programs and plans that address these issues with specific attention to international disaster mitigation and recovery planning; urban resiliency; sustainable development and regenerative design. “Global Leadership and Change” is part of the Planning, Public Policy and Management Department program at the University of Oregon.
The “Smart Cities Project” is a collaboration with the following organizations:
- Gdansk University of Technology
- ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability
- International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP)
- Portland State University “Sustainable Cities and Regions”
- Ritsumeikan University
- SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden
A smart city is defined as the ability to integrate multiple technological solutions in a secure fashion to manage the city’s assets—the city’s assets include, but not limited to, local departments information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, law enforcement, and other community services. The goal of building a smart city is to improve the quality of life by using technology to improve the efficiency of services and meet residents’ needs. Business drives technology and large-scale urbanization drives innovation and new technologies. Technology is driving the way city officials interact with the community and the city infrastructure. Through the use of real-time systems and sensors, data are collected from citizens and objects—then processed in real-time. The information and knowledge gathered are keys to tackling inefficiency. Technology can be used as an enabler to tell what is happening in the city, how the city is evolving, and how to enable a better quality of life.
A smart city uses information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance quality, performance and interactivity of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption and to improve contact between citizens and government. Sectors that have been developing smart city technology include government services, transport and traffic management, energy, health care, water, innovative urban agriculture and waste management. Smart city applications are developed with the goal of improving the management of urban flows and allowing for real time responses to challenges. A smart city may therefore be more prepared to respond to challenges than one with a simple ‘transactional’ relationship with its citizens. Other terms that have been used for similar concepts include cyberville, digital city, electronic communities, flexicity, information city, intelligent city, knowledge-based city, MESH [Mobile, Efficient, Subtle, Heuristics] city, [technicity] telecity, teletopia, ubiquitous city, wired city. [Wikipedia]
