Curating knowledge of, and policies for, smart cities and climate change

Richard Tomlinson, a Visiting Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits will present this seminar.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the persistence of a now frayed, but still pervasive, neoliberal urban policy environment, and the evolution of ICT and big data have made possible the multi-institutional curation of knowledge for cities; with the notion of “best practice” still evident.  The contribution of this paper lies more in understanding the creation and role of institutions and the evolution of ICT and big data in knowledge curation than actual policy outcomes.  Knowledge of, and policies for, climate change and smart cities are traced, decade by decade, from the 1980s to the 2010s. Illustrative of many influences, the paper combines the World Bank revisioning itself as a knowledge bank, the creation of C40 with a view to setting the global climate change agenda for large cities, Saskia Sassen’s writing on global cities going global, with this similarly being the case for Michael Hood’s writing on New Public Management, Bloomberg Philanthropies launching the ‘Harvard + Bloomberg + 240 Cities’ initiative, the launch of the iPhone, with the use of smart phones both generating unstructured big data and apps based on that data, Amazon’s launching the EC2 cloud computing platform launch, and Barcelona positioning itself as the centre for global smart city research and practice. 

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