Smart Cities and Planning: New Urban Agenda, New Urban Analytics

Applicable Urban Informatics (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) is a CASA research project exploring the relationships between urban analytics and smart cities technologies and their implementation in practice: planning practice, government, businesses concerned with location, urban policy and urban finance - to name a selection of themes that define this enormous domain. On 29 and 30 November 2017, the project held a major conference at Senate House, University of London. The meeting was addressed by six keynote speakers.

In the first keynote session of Day 1, Cliff Hague spoke on ‘Urbanisation and Disruptive Technologies in a Shrinking World: What Future for Urban Planning?’ emphasising the sustainable development goals and the new urban agenda with respect to how new technologies are affected this, and then Alaina Harkness from the Brookings Institution talked about ‘Stronger Governance for Smarter Cities’.

Day 2 opened with Mark Kleinman from the Greater London Authority (GLA) who talked about ‘Digital Innovation and Economic Strategy: A City Perspective’ followed by Jos Creese from The Society for IT Practitioners in the Public Sector (SOCITM) who spoke on ‘From Planning to Personalisation – Developments in Smart Places and the Role of Local Government’

Rob Kitchin recounted his experiences with developments in Dublin and Boston on the theme of ‘Adoption Gap Issues for Smart Cities: Governance, Citizenship, Ethics, Vision’ and the conference was concluded with Adam Greenfield who talked on the subject of ‘Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life’

Throughout the conference the keynotes were followed by panel discussions organised by Janice Morphet and Andrew Collinge and by two sets of short sharp six minute ‘pecha kucha’ presentations by researchers within CASA organised by Robin Morphet.

PDF downloads of the various contributions will be available on this page in due course.