Dublin. My Odyssey is in its beginning. Last week, “Data and the City” workshop in Maynooth. Tomorrow, Newton Fund activity in UK. It’s the “Augmented urbanity and smart technologies: how “smart” are our cities becoming?” RCUK-CONFAP International Network next step with my colleagues from Durham University, Facom – UFBA and PUC-PR. The previous meetings were in Durham/Glasgow and Curitiba. After Plymouth, it’s Salvador-Bahia turn, on December!
The program proposed by our colleagues from Plymouth University (Alex and Katherine) is very exciting, trying to move toward a better understanding of smart cities, Internet of things and big data issues. We’ll see the projects and talk with people from Bristol Open (“city operating system”, “city experimentation as a service”), Bristol Playable City (a counterpoint to “Smart City”) and Citizen Canvas (or “how to humanise smart cities?”). This is our first day.
The next two days will be in Plymouth in a very intense workshop. All the research team will present a paper to discuss. I’ll present “Smart Cities in Brazil. Experiences under way in Búzios, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro” (Lemos, Mont’Alverne) (unpublished). Abstract: “In contrast to the more aggressive BRICS countries, like China or India, the smart city phenomenon is still in its infancy in Brazil. In this article we present the experiences of three urban areas: Búzios, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. As well as describing and analysing these three Brazilian experiences, the article proposes a global model for smart city projects, based on “Conception,” “Organisation” and “Action,” and advocates the use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (LATOUR, 2005) as a useful theoretical framework for analysing this phenomenon.”