Podcast transcript: Smart Cities

This podcast is part of the UCIL Digital Society course from the University of Manchester running in 2019/20 semester 2. The story it relates to is hosted on Medium and can be found here.

In this podcast Dave Hirst introduces the topic — Smart Cities.

AS: Welcome to the Digital Society podcast. This week’s topic is Smart Cities.

AS: Hello, I’m Amanda from the Library Student Team, and today on the Digital Society podcast, we are joined by Dave to talk about Smart cities.

DH: Hello, my name is Dave Hirst, I am a Teaching & Learning Librarian at the University of Manchester Library. I am one of the course leaders on the Digital Society course and one of the areas that I am interested in is the relationship that we have with technology, its impact on our daily lives, how sustainable our technology is and how this relationship will develop and evolve in the future.

In this topic session we are looking at the development of the world’s Smart Cities. Digital technologies have an increasing essential role in supporting our interactions with our environment and the places where we live, work and play.

There are roughly 7.7 billion people on planet Earth and by 2030, 60% of the global population will be living in cities and as such we need to use technology to move towards the creation of sustainable spaces so that we don’t have such a negative impact on our environment.

There have been different stages of the Smart Cities development and we will look at those and what made them or didn’t make them a success.

We will look critically at the relationship between the users (all of us) and the Smart City that surround us; how do you as an individual, as part of a group and as part of the city interact with the city both in terms of the technology you use and the data you share?

The main themes that we will cover are:

• What is a Smart City? What separates it from an un-smart city?
• Different applications of Smart City tech.
• Smart City 1.0 — the first type of Smart City, Smart City 2.0 where we currently are and the newly emerging 3.0.
• We will also look at “What is the future of the Smart City?”

At different development stages, Smart Cities have been “technology driven”, “technology enabled”, and also a product of “citizen co-creation” — they have also involved “big data”, “instrumenting a city” and “ubiquitous computing” — all different themes that we will explore in this session.

As part of this session you will be looking at how smart city tech can be used in a location that is personal to you e.g. it could be where you grew up, where you went on holiday or where you are now -Manchester — how could Smart city tech be used to enhance the environment and the life of its citizens. Thank you.

AS: Now that you’ve heard a little bit about this topic, you’re ready to work through the Topic post which includes activities to help you join in the discussion. Engaging with all this content will help you prepare for the assessments. We look forward to hearing what you’ve got to say.