Building Connections for the Future City | Colin Birchenhall | TEDxGlasgow

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. When the great cities of the world were built people lived in just one world; we live in two: the physical world and the digital world. The future city will take the digital world out of our pocket and put into the street. Technologies such as the "Internet of Things", cloud computing, big data, and open data provide cities with new opportunities to improve the integration and efficiency of services on the one hand, but on the other, enable communities to better interact directly with their cities, providing us all with new insight into our city. From policy and planning decisions to the day-to-day decisions we all make in our daily lives, we (the city's most important network, it's people) all make decisions that impact key outcomes such as economic resiliency and growth, quality of life, wellbeing and environmental sustainability. If the future city opens up its data to provide you with new insight, what will you do with the empowerment? What will you do to create a common wealth?

Dr Colin Birchenall is the technology architect of the Future Cities Demonstrator in Glasgow, a £24M smart cities programme funded by the UK's innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). Colin's role on the programme (which is led by Glasgow City Council) makes use of his experience in enterprise architecture for a multinational telecommunications company (including technologies used within Network Operations Centres), data architecture and (more recently), ICT strategy for local government.

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