“The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people,” suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. “It never answered the question: ‘How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work, and play?’” Hill refers to the shiny new technology that has come to embody the smart city concept, and while the smart city can bring many real improvements the corporations running it may have skewed the concept. This “smart stuff”, Hill told The Guardian, “is no longer just IT – or rather IT is too important to be called IT any more. It’s so important you can’t really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city might be a low-carbon city, or a city that’s easy to move around, or a city with jobs and housing.” In order to bring about these ‘real’ improvements technology can play a pivotal role, […]