Video: Smart Cities: Becoming a Gimmick?

By Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos on 14 April 2014. Posted in Videos on Intelligent Cities

This 10 minutes video directed and produced by Gynna Millan, Illiany Hamdan and Roderick Selfridge, from the Media and Arts Technology Ph.D. programme, Queen Mary University of London, provides a quick overview of the ‘Smart Cities’ concept.

In 21st Century urban planning, the term ‘Smart Cities’ is frequently bandied about. It’s the ultimate urban utopia of most urban planners and policy-makers in the UK and elsewhere in the World. Today “[h]ardly a week passes without a mayor somewhere in the world unveiling a “smart-city” project—often at one of the many conferences hailing the concept”. Although, city-scale experiments have already been designed and implemented the smart cities model has been largely criticised, contested and challenged by many because of its techno-centric approach to complex physical, social, environmental and economic urban systems.

Smart Cities: Becoming a Gimmick? from MAT, QMUL on Vimeo.