#smart-cities

#smart-cities

Cities worldwide are adopting new technologies to improve quality of life and safety. By integrating data from connected systems, sensors and devices, 'smart cities' better understand how municipal resources are used and where problems arise. An example of this is the changing role of video management systems. Over the years, law enforcement agencies have pushed to install more cameras in high-traffic areas and develop real time crime centers to support more proactive interventions. Now cities are beginning to recognize the value of these cameras and analytics to solve municipal problems as well.

Current developments show that smartness cannot only be a technology-driven urban development. This may answer technical questions of a smart future, but the social and societal aspects of living together are generally not addressed. The social compatibility of technological development, which also includes housing that meets the needs and financial possibilities of users, falls by the wayside, although this claim is repeatedly formulated.

A popular ski resort town in Colorado is adopting a new AI Smart City Solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it better detect wildfires, as well as update a range of other city services. Vail is expanding its firefighting toolbox as hotter, more arid weather with climate change raises wildfire risk in the western US. Colorado has suffered 11 of the 20 largest fires in state history just within the last five years.

AMONG A GROWING ARRAY of government-sanctioned informational systems, motion sensors, acoustic monitors, biometric scanners, and thermal cameras work in tandem with sprawling private networks of data brokers to track social and environmental flows with forensic precision. They measure footfalls, scan license plates, log financial transactions, and inspect the movement of people alongside particulate matter. As sensing technologies increasingly oversee and overwrite the spatial production of contemporary life, proposals for "smart cities" and other data-dependent composites-proliferating since the early 2010s-obfuscate regimented environments of surveillance and control through rosy prospects of connectivity, security, and risk management, all sustained by the tenacious dystopian dream we call information.