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Economy

Smart Cities International: Digital Buenos Aires, Smart Small Town, More

Here is a preview of our exclusive newsletter to keep up-to-date and stay inspired by Smart City innovations from around the world.

Santiago by night
Santiago by night
Emily Liedel

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When city planners talk about the future, the increasing influx to urban centers is a source of both fear and excitement. Urban centers are, on a global scale, undoubtedly growing — some at a breakneck pace. It’s easy, however, to get caught in the illusion that cities will always grow, something that has been proven wrong by both recent and ancient history. Many cities, in fact, are designed for continual growth, depending on industries like construction that don’t fare well when the population holds steady. Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with a city with a stable population, although most agree that a declining population is usually a bad sign. The challenges facing cities with steady demographics are different, and they are often overlooked in discussions about how cities of the future will develop.

This week, in addition to other smart city news, we’ll see evidence that Chinese cities might not be destined for infinite growth, and we will also check in on a Turkish proposal to build a megacity out of nowhere.

— Emily Liedel

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THE MEANING OF SMART CITY

The term “smart city” is used to describe a wide variety of projects and goals, muses Tages Spiegel (German), and seems to mean something different to everyone who uses the phrase. Some think a smart city is a green city, some think it is a hyper-connected high-tech city and others think it is about optimization of systems. The truth about cities, the newspaper concludes, is that they are too diverse for a one-size-fits-all approach to their future. Indeed, many Central European cities have stagnant population levels and completely different challenges from a fast-growing city like Lagos, Nigeria.

VERBATIM

“For me, smartness means thinking about how we can function more autonomously. That means without gas from Russia, without nuclear power from France, without water from the Alps and without food from Spain and South America,” Tia Kansara, a British researcher and sustainability specialist, said in an interview with Austrian newspaper Der Standard(German).

BRIDGING THE DIGITAL GAP

In a connected society, people without Internet access often have a difficult time taking advantage of many of the opportunities that others take for granted. That makes providing some kind of free access to the disadvantaged important for social equity. Buenos Aires is well aware of this dynamic, and is expanding a network of digital access points throughout the city that will offer free navigation for those who can't afford their own network, La Nacion reports (Spanish).

CAN A SMALL TOWN BECOME A SMART CITY HUB?

The town of Magog, Canada, located near Montreal, is home to only 27,000 people — hardly a major metropolis. But in an effort to revitalize its once industry-dependent economy, the town is working to become a hub for technology companies working on software and hardware for smart cities, Les Affaires reports (French). And it’s already seeing success, with 25 new companies relocating to the small town over the past 18 months.


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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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