ReWORK City Conference December 13th in London, England

RE.WORK Cities Summit taking place on 13 December in London.

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An example of some of the talks that will be presented.

Andrew Hudson-Smith, University College London

Realtime Data, Augmented and Virtual Reality mixed with The Internet of Things: Towards the Smart Citizen and ultimately a Smart City
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few (IBM, 2103). This data can, compared to traditional data sources, be defined as ‘big’. Cities and urban environments are the main sources for big data, every minute 100,000 tweets are sent globally, Google receives 2,000,000 search requests and users share 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook (Mashable, 2012). An increasingly amount of this data stream is geolocated, from Check-ins via Foursquare through to Tweets and searches via Google Now, the data cities and individuals emit can be collected and viewed to make the data city visible, aiding our understanding of now only how urban systems operate but opening up the possibility of a real-time view of the city at large (Hudson-Smith, 2013). The talk explores systems such as The City Dashboard (http://www.citydashboard.org) and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in terms of data collection, visualization and analysis. Joining these up creates a move towards the Smart City and via innovations in IoT a look towards augmented reality pointing towards the the creation of a ‘Smart Citizen’ and ultimately a Smart City.

Manu Fernandez, Human Scale City
Forget the Smart Cities of the Future: It is Happening Now

Certain discourses and visions about smart cities look into the future to show the promises of digital techonologies. In this approach there is a underlying negative attitude about the cities we are already living – the mess and chaotic disorder of cities will be finally resolved thanks to command and control-, also hiding new civic engagement practices and collaborative processes already happening. These practices hardly appear in the most apologetic bird´s eye visions of smart cities but, in the end, they are changing and expanding in a silent way the role of citizens.
Manu Fernandez is an urban strategist, the founder of Human Scale City urban agency and the author of Ciudades a Escala Humana blog. As a researcher and urban policy consultant for the last ten years, he has always been involved in projects relating to local sustainability and urban economies. He is currently focused on three areas: adaptive urbanism strategies to actívate vacant sites, the intersection of digital and social perspectives of bottom-up smart cities and, the link of social creativity and local economic development. Manu holds a master´s degree in sustainability management and is a graduate in Laws and Economics.

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