The Edmonton International Airport (EIA) is building its business in a way that positions it at the heart of supporting and developing innovation in the region, says the woman in charge of making those big ideas happen.
“We’re really a small city. We have real estate, commercial developments, waterways, (and) we create our own energy. We also have our big aviation and cargo sectors, the core purpose of our airport,” Tara Mulrooney, vice-president of technology and innovation, told Taproot Edmonton’s innovation podcast, Bloom.
Weiterlesen: CA: Alberta: ‘A small city’: Building a hub for innovation at the Edmonton airport
According to the International Energy Agency's latest report on smart cities, new technologies and increased connectivity are opening massive opportunities for city-level authorities to develop efficient, sustainable energy solutions that enable municipalities to accelerate their transition towards a clean, low-carbon future. Although cities generate more than 80% of the global GDP, they consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions, which will require leveraging digital solutions to drive a sustainable energy transition and reach net zero by 2050.
However, as a recent article from the Harvard Business School illustrates, advancing the concept of smart cities can be challenging and expensive. But, through well-designed public-private partnerships (PPPs), a Deloitte report highlighted that private-sector incentives could be aligned with economic growth and net-zero goals set by local municipalities to unlock the value of technology and bring a critical mass of players together to spur sustainable economic development.
Weiterlesen: Canada’s Area X.O Initiative Looks To Empower Cities’ Transition To A Net-Zero Future
New research shows that police forces across Canada are building extensive digital surveillance hubs without any public engagement. Smart city projects use very similar technologies with the same dangers, yet here residents and municipalities are increasingly implementing Open Smart City principles to avoid potential harms and strengthen public oversight. The police should not be exempt from democratic accountability and the same principles can be applied to them to rebuild it.
People around the world are recognizing the potential of emerging “smart” technologies—those technologies that use machine learning, artificial intelligence and large-scale data analysis—to provide more efficient and effective services. However, there is also significant potential for them to cause harm around privacy, discrimination, transparency, and the corporate capture of what are publicly and democratically controlled tools of government.
Weiterlesen: Canada’s smart tech future: Open cities or opaque surveillance?
The increased pace of digital transformation during the pandemic will help cities recover and thrive in the future, said two mayors from the Toronto area speaking at ITWC’s Technicity GTA conference.
“The technical innovation that’s happened is a tool to help us move forward,” said Allan Thompson, mayor of Caledon. “It’s basically just like what the automobile has done, what the aircraft has done in the last century. I think this innovation is the new wave of the industrial revolution.”
Weiterlesen: CA: Digital acceleration will boost local economic recovery, say GTA mayors
When Sidewalk Lab's shared their vision of a smart city that would be a vital societal endeavour and "meaningful contribution towards tackling affordability and sustainability problems in urban areas" (Cecco, 2020), Torontonians may have listened in awe and anticipation. However, as the project fleshed out, many began to see that there was a thin line between Sidewalk's proposed smart city and a city of surveillance, and that the Quayside Project was leaning concerningly close to the later.
As the Privacy consultant of Sidewalk Labs prior to her departure in October of 2018, Dr Ann Cavoukian made it very clear that there was no wiggle room around enforcing the de-identification of personal data in the Quayside Project from the get-go, to ensure the creation of a smart city of privacy. Dr Cavoukian’s insistence steamed from her expert opinion that data would need to be stripped of personal data (de-identified) at its source to ensure that the personally identifiable data collected was not exploited and that Toronto’s Waterfront did not become another model of the surveillance cities of Dubai and China. (Bloomberg News, 2018)