inclusive citizenship

Tomo Kihara graduated on the use of 'smart' security cameras in the city. He developed a game that makes us aware of all that supervision.

 

The idea was: a meeting between city makers and the minister. But it proved to be the mayor and the king.

 

On Thursday the 21st of June, the exciting conference Next Generation Cities took place. During the conference the positive and negative effects of technology were debated.

 

An active group of citizens makes great progress with sustainable mobility and connectedness in the area. Intern Hub Coumans about the pilot of the EU project MUV.

 

According to popular media we are living in a post-fact society. As we moved beyond a society in which facts and truth are used to prove a point, we arrived in a society which doesn't even care about what is truth or not.

 

Through platforms such as vTaiwan and Pol.is, the democracy of Taiwan is starting to make moves towards becoming one of the first liquid democracies in the world. This development did not happen out of nowhere.

 

The government is rapidly developing a large number of digital services. This has been ongoing for a number of years, but there is growing awareness that the digital infrastructure of the future is now being shaped. This has a major impact on our daily lives and how the government evolves. We do not want to leave the development of this digital infrastructure to corporate giants like Google and Microsoft.

 

It is hard to participate in classical EC Research programs for civil organisations, social enterprises, co-operations, communities and creative SME’s.

 

More and more opinion leaders are mistaking a few big corporate platforms for the collaborative economy. We need a pro-active policy framework that bends the collaborative economy towards the public good.

 

On 13 May 2015, the first Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab was held. More than 50 citizens, scientists and technicians gathered to gain more insight in their city. By measuring the city themselves in the next months, to investigate and get into action based on the results.

 

By taking away initiative, enforcing top-down control, and focusing on maximizing efficiency instead of possibility, the smart city is a disaster waiting to happen. Our hope lies in its constituents: the citizens. Citizens can become smart, engaged, and illuminated through mastering the technologies that help them express themselves, connect to others, share their resources and thoughts, and that helps them to reflect so they can decide the best course of action. In short, the technologies that help them to solve their own problems in a better and more thorough way.

 

Cities are the dominant and most successful organisations of human endeavour. This intense form of cohabitation has developed over thousands of years, attracting an increasingly larger part of the human population. While they have vibrantly developed in terms of size, density and quality of life, technology has sped up, leading to problems and possibilities that we still have to fully apprehend.

 

FutureEverything Publications has published a new booklet titled 'Smart Citizens'. This publication aims to shift the debate on the future of cities towards the central place of citizens, and of decentralised, open urban infrastructures. It provides a global perspective on how cities can create the policies, structures and tools to engender a more innovative and participatory society.

 

We, citizens of all cities, take the fate of the places we live in into our own hands. We care about the buildings and the parks, the shops, the schools, the roads and the trees. But above all, we care about the quality of the life we live in our cities.