The next big thing: Stay tuned to your screens @ RE-WORK Cities 2013
I was invited to talk at the RE-WORK Cities in London the 13th of December of 2013. The panel session were I was invited to talk was The Internet of Things and the Socially Driven Smart City with the mediatic Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab and Mischa Dohler of Worldsensing and the King's College London.
I wanted to give my point of view for the bottom-up solutions over the top-down approaches that big companies are building in most of the "smart cities". And I also showed that the future makers will improve our future.
The slides:
During the first part of the presentation I showcased two outstanding smart city (and smart country) projects that are a clear example of top-down smart city projects. The first one, the CYBERSYN project designed and built in Chile between 1971 and 1973 with people involved such as Stafford Beer, Fernando Flores and the Chilean president Salvador Allende. The second the Smart City project built by IBM and a big consortium of companies at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, collecting data from 30 different agencies at Rio de Janeiro.
The second part of the presentation, I compared these two projects and the top-down smart cities approaches with the Allegory of the Cave written by Plato. At this allegory Plato described a cave with prisoners chained all of their life facing a blank wall. The only reality that the prisoners knew were the shadows of objects reflected at the wall made by people passing behind the wall were the prisoners were chained. Imagine that one prisoner is freed and discover that the reality is not the shadows in the cave
The final part of the presentation I presented the makers community as the future revolution that can help our societies with their bottom-up projects. With the example of the Pachube use case with the nuclear radiation at Japan after the Fukushima crisis. Afterthat, I showcased some more projects made by citizens for citizens such as the Smart Citizen Kit, GUIFI.net and the Oktoberfest of Things. Makers and education can allow our society to escape from the cave.
Afterthat there was an interesting panel discussion leaded by Jemima Kiss. Here is the video of the panel session.
Feel free to send any comments or feedback related with the presentation.
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