Sentimental Urban Planning
I watched “Interstellar” a while back, a movie in which the human race escapes from climate disaster using an artefact of theoretical physics known as a “Wormhole”. I once wrote that que the most sensible way of avoiding an environmental “Armageddon” would be to put intelligent urban planning into practice as soon as...
Smart Cities and Universities -or “Univercities”-, by Jon Glasco
Collaboration between smart cities and universities can have very positive impacts. There is a growing interest in urban matters for research and academia.
Zaha Hadid’s Pavilion Bridge: Linking Architecture and Smart City
Mobility is an essential side of any smart city strategy, as it is a smart citizenship. But, traditionally, the motor industry around Zaragoza has stood with his back turned to the city. The situation will likely change when the Pavilion Bridge opens its doors and the citizens will be able to interact with the latest developments when they walk through its exhibition rooms.
Innovation Districts: From Barcelona to Dublin, This Is What I Know
Elections for Mayor are a-coming. With the aim of shaping my contribution to the approaching campaign, I have been reflecting lately on innovation districts. Ours, the Digital Mile (Milla Digital) is unfinished. One tends to think that all innovation districts are, by definition, unfinished. But, seriously, the Digital Mile must be one...
“Zaragoza’s Open Urban Lab”. The city as a platform for innovation
From the beginning of urbanization to the end of the 20th century, the historical ability of cities to adapt its form and function to the changing needs of people have been founded on a close relationship between urban planning and infrastructures. Traditionally servicing the purposes of urban planners, the role of infrastructures in...
The Digital Mile: Past, Present and Future of Zaragoza’s Innovation District
I have been recently invited to speak at “Digital Media City (DMC) International Conference” (to be held in the capital city of South Korea on Sep, 27th-28th) about Zaragoza’s Digital Mile innovation district. Digital Media City is, doubtless, a major achievement in South Korea’s strategic move towards an...
Zaragoza Smart City: Sourcing the Code to Citizen Co-Creation
Zaragoza is a city with a long tradition of citizen activism, governed by the left over 29 of the 37 years of Spanish democracy. This has left a deep footprint in the form of an intricate network of civic associations and community centers and has sculpted a “let’s just do it” culture when, mixed with a university population of 35,000 students, many of them pursuing technical degrees, forms a perfect broth for an open source model of a smart city.
Agile urbanism, slow technology and participation
Uncertainty, globalization, technification, liquidity, acceleration…, opportunities, goods, information and capital moving at the speed of light worldwide and around the clock. And a degree of urbanization as never known before, as if the answers to the remarkable challenges posed by all those elements together were circled around a single word: cities.
Jane Jacobs’ predictions about Detroit
Jane Jacobs thought intensely about Detroit. Almost a decade after her death, the shadow of Jane Jacobs keeps growing as architects, urban planners and city makers discover (and worship) her acute understanding of how cities work. We owe Jane Jacobs the exploit of placing humans at the center of urbanism, in a time where cities were...
Cities in globalization. Resilient and open source cities
Western societies, especially in southern Europe, are facing a double crisis: on the one hand, an abrupt economic downturn that, as a consequence of the austerity agenda adopted by the European Union to fight it, has not only been technically aggravated, but has produced the collateral effect of undermining the confidence of the people in their institutions. And cities are prepared and, in some extent they are already performing as such, to be a key actor in this double process of reconstructing our democracies and revitalizing our economies.
