Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

The first Smart Cities Week conference was held in Washington DC in September 2016. This gathering promoted the idea that tech’s newest startups should be concerned with the design and plan of smart (connected) cities. The Chairman of the SC Council, Jesse Berst, summed up the movement as something “… far more than a trend. It’s a race. A race to attract jobs and talent by providing a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure…. A race to reduce income disparity by providing “ladders of opportunity” to those less fortunate.” While the movement has succeeded in building state of the art infrastructures and attracting high-paying jobs and talent, it has done quite poorly in providing “ladders of opportunity” for existing residents of these cities. A leader in the smart city revolution, San Francisco, is a case in point: “…for all the optimism, innovation and wealth that are produced here, the Bay Area can also feel like a place that doesn’t work quite right.” Tech is an essential component of any urban policy and plan moving forward, but we cannot ignore a city’s greatest natural resource: its people. By shifting focus from pure technology to the people already living in underserved communities, cities can be reimagined and thus reinvented. When we connect designers to our cities’ people, we can recreate our landscapes into sustainable centers that support housing, food, education and economic support for all our people - including and especially underserved and at-risk communities.