Building Smart Cities

The term "smart city" defines the new urban environment, one that is designed for performance through information and communication technologies. Given that the majority of people across the world will live in urban environments within the next few decades, it's not surprising that massive effort and investment is being placed into efforts to develop strategies and plans for achieving "smart" urban growth. Building Smart Cities: Analytics, ICT, and Design Thinking explains the technology and a methodology known as design thinking for building smart cities.

Information and communications technologies form the backbone of smart cities. A comprehensive and robust data analytics program enables the right choices to be made in building these cities. Design thinking helps to create smart cities that are both livable and able to evolve. This book examines all of these components in the context of smart city development and shows how to use them in an integrated manner.

Using the principles of design thinking to reframe the problems of the smart city and capture the real needs of people living in a highly efficient urban environment, the book helps city planners and technologists through the following:

• Presentation of the relevant technologies required for coordinated, efficient cities
• Exploration of the latent needs of community stakeholders in a culturally appropriate context
• Discussion of the tested approaches to ideation, design, prototyping, and building or retrofitting smart cities
• Proposal of a model for a viable smart city project

The smart city vision that we can create an optimized society through technology is hypothetical at best and reflects the failed repetition through the ages of equating scientific progress with positive social change. Up until now, despite our best hopes and efforts, technology has yet to bring an end to scarcity or suffering. Technical innovation, instead, can and should be directed in the service of our shared cultural values, especially within the rapidly growing urban milieu.

In Building Smart Cities: Analytics, ICT, and Design Thinking, the author discusses the need to focus on creating human-centered approaches to our cities that integrate our human needs and technology to meet our economic, environmental, and existential needs. The book shows how this approach can lead to innovative, livable urban environments that are realizable, practical, and economically and environmentally sustainable.

Carol L. Stimmel is the founder and CEO of Manifest Mind, a collaborative research and consulting organization, working to ensure that companies and investors have the information they need to make enduring investment decisions in the complex world of sustainability. Stimmel is recognized for her integrity, years of experience, independent spirit, and ability to create expert teams on-demand, which have rapidly made Manifest Mind a trusted source of insight for assessing opportunities in developing human economies, the built environment, and natural ecosystems.

With 25 years of experience in emerging technology markets, including operations, research and analysis, and product design, she is a frequent speaker and co-author of The Manager Pool (2001), author of Big Data Analytics Strategies for the Smart Grid (2014), and Building Smart Cities: Analytics, ICT, and Design Thinking (2015). Currently, she is working on new approaches in the field of sustainable finance and future tech collaboration. Stimmel holds several key technology patents and pending applications with myriad co-inventors, including those related to virtual communication, broadcasting, autonomic computing, and energy benchmarking.