India is proceeding with its famous Smart Cities Mission, the $7.5 billion initiative to create 100 citizen-friendly and sustainable smart cities across the country by 2020. This ambitious initiative is encountering several difficulties, however, and one case, Lavasa, hailed as India’s first Smart City, offers a cautionary tale.
“Opportunity 2030: More Jobs, Better Health, Liveable Cities – Quantifying the benefits of climate change mitigation measures in buildings transport and energy supply” is a new report that analyses how the impacts of climate action through climate policies can not only lead to the reduction of emissions but also can affect health and prosperity in selected global regions.
This report “Reclaiming the Smart City: Personal Data, Trust and the New Commons” was recently published by Nesta, as part of DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen Owned Data Ecosystems), a major EU Horizon 2020 project. Addressing some of the major flaws in how traditional smart city projects have approached data collection and use, it focuses on how and why city governments are taking a more responsible approach to the use of personal data.
The historic city of Trikala, set among the green fields of Greece’s agricultural heartland, with a population of 82,000 people, does not look like a prime candidate for a smart city but it has managed to become the country’s first, piloting many successful smart city projects and providing optimism for the potential of other Greek cities.
The white paper on “Intelligence and Co-creation in Smart Specialisation Strategies” outlines some key conclusions from the Online S3 project, funded under the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission. The Online S3 project has produced an online platform composed of software applications and roadmaps that facilitate the design and implementation of Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3).
Smart cities, which have been exhibiting some impressive technological breakthroughs in the last few years, are a very appealing target for investors, but, despite this, there seems to be a lack of funds focusing on smart cities, even though there a plenty of funds for investing in technology.
The University of Sheffield and its research center SEERC is offering one scholarship position for a PhD on “Hybrid Life Cycle Assessment of Functional Materials and Devices”. The scholarship includes: (1) A fee waiver offered by the University of Sheffield