For many, the term "Smart City" denotes eco-friendly urban spaces with streets of driverless electric cars and houses powered by used drink cans. But as the recent Beijing Design Week demonstrated it's much more than that. Smart City is about completely open innovation.
While the week brought a vast array of ideas from designers around the world, Geo-
City Smart City, curated by the China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts, was the focus feature, displaying 82 projects from 14 countries.
GeoPulse Beijing, the Beijing-focused pilot demo by ARS Electronica of Austria, was one of the Chinese applications of this model on display, and its overall message was clear: Smart cities are the way of the future, and now is Beijing's time to embrace it.
Some predict that by 2050, between 70 and 85 percent of the global population will live in cities, but the problems of over-urbanization — pollution, traffic, overcrowding — are already starting to show. The idea of GeoCity is to put government and citizens' fingers on the urban pulse, and show how they can solve these problems.
The solution? Big Data. In the modern world, the magnitude of open data from social networks, smartphones and other means is phenomenal, yet barely any is being harnessed. According to the GeoCity initiative, if this data is collected, processed and understood, the possibilities for helping urbanization are huge.
"The first time we had it developed for the city of Linz (in Austria) in its first phase, it was a tool for the citizens," said Michael Badics, director of AE Solutions at ARS Electronica."From kids to the elderly, everyone could access this data. But we saw there was so much more potential in it."
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