Tag: Digital cities
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Surfing the Data Tsunami
by James A. Bacon Data Crush is coming, and it gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform aging and decrepit institutions, designed for the mid-20th century. As futurist Chris Surdak argues in the previous post, the “digital trinity” — mobile computing, social media and advanced analytics — is sweeping all before it. Digital-driven innovation is outpacing the…
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The Democratization of Data
Andrew Mondschein, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, is studying how the redevelopment of Tysons affects the pedestrian experience. The first step is collecting data. Accordingly, he is dispatching students equipped with sensors, wearable cameras and smartphone apps to monitor temperature, light levels, green cover, noise pollution and carbon monoxide…
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The Next Wave of Energy Conservation: Collaborative Business Districts
by James A. Bacon As the Obama administration presses forward with its campaign to restructure the U.S. electric industry to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its friends in the environmental movement have touted the potential for energy conservation to ease the transition to a clean energy economy. One key premise of…
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“Hacking for Good” Comes to Virginia
by James A. Bacon Michael Kolbe experienced first-hand the power of data-driven election campaigning while working on the 2012 Obama re-election team. He went on to take a job as a strategy analyst for Health Diagnostic Laboratory in Richmond but didn’t discard his idealism. Hoping to harness the power of data to solve social problems, he joined…
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Anticipating the Demise of the Parking Meter
As the City of Charlottesville ponders an upgrade to its downtown parking technology (see “Paying for Onstreet Parking in Cville“), parking guru Bern Grush is looking two steps ahead and thinking about how municipalities should handle the inevitable demise of the parking meter. At some point in the foreseeable future, parking will be managed in…
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A Radical Notion: Paying for Onstreet Parking in Cville
Irony time: Virginia soon may get a test in market-based parking in… the People’s Republic of Charlottesville. The city would start charging for 800 on-street parking spaces downtown, now free, and install a system of smart traffic meters under a proposal advanced by Mark Brown, new owner of the Charlottesville Parking Center (CPC). The city reverted to a…
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Easy Savings: LED Street Lights
by James A. Bacon Installing LEDs in street lights may be no panacea for municipal budget woes, but the payback is so high that one can’t help but wonder why every local government in Virginia isn’t doing it. It’s heartening to heart that Virginia Beach, Virginia’s most populous city, is taking the plunge. Well, dipping its…
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Chopra Pushes “Open Innovation” in Hampton Roads
Aneesh Chopra took his message of “open innovation” on the road to Hampton Roads yesterday, pushing the case for making government data more readily available to the public for transformation into commercial products and services. Perhaps the single best example of wealth creation that can flow from government data, the Weather Channel, came from Hampton Roads,…
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Bringing Big Data to the Poverty Debate
Here is a positive development in state government that will never get the attention it deserves: The Virginia Department of Social Services is joining four other state agencies in contributing data to the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS). VLDS is a system for accessing data maintained by the Virginia Department of Education, the State Council for Higher Education…
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Smart Cities Tech Meets Sea Level Rise
In the most imaginative and useful application of crowd-sourcing technology I’ve seen in Virginia, Hampton Roads Cares has helped fund creation of the Wetlands Watch Sea-Level Rise app. Right now, you don’t know where it’s going to flood until you’re in the middle of it, says Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, in this video.…
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Sharing Information to Gain Competitive Regional Advantage
by James A. Bacon Very different models of regional competitiveness are emerging as people think seriously how to harness the power of smart cities. In metropolitan regions like Charlotte, Seattle and San Diego, for example, major property owners are collaborating with municipalities and power companies on communal energy-efficiency initiatives. Tapping the potential of “smart grids” is a great…
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Innovative Virginia
In his new book, “Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government,” Aneesh Chopra makes the case for using technology to transform government in the United States. Weary of the old liberal-conservative debate of more government/less government, Chopra espouses effective government. In this book, he comes across as conservative in his frank acknowledgment that government often falls…
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How Planners Can Rescue Virginia from the Fiscal Abyss
This is a copy of a speech that I presented to the Virginia Chapter of the American Planners Association Monday, with extemporaneous amendments and digressions deleted. — JAB Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here. Urban planning is a fascinating discipline. As my old friend Ed Risse likes to say, urban planning isn’t…
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Does Virginia Want to Be a Wireless Friendly State?
States and regions that want to stay in the vanguard of economic growth need to expand their broadband infrastructure. Mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 by some estimates. To accommodate that growth, the wireless industry will have to build new cell towers, distributed antenna systems (DAS) and other infrastructure. However, permitting and regulation…
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Will Virginia Cities Be among the 600?
Madrid-based GOWEX, which specializes in creating wireless smart cities, aims to bring free Wi-Fi connections to 600 cities around the world by 2018 in partnership with Cisco, the American networking giant. (Read details in the “Datamorphosis” blog.) The Spanish company has an interesting business model. Everyone with a smart phone can get on the Wi-Fi…