Connected Urban Development

This second snapshot on the Partnership for Urban Innovation: Global Conference themes is on The Social Life of Cities.

The economic and, more recently, the environmental dimension of cities invariably rise to the top of the agenda when it comes to the discussion about urban sustainability. What often gets forgotten, or at least displaced on the agenda of investors, policy makers and city designers and builders is the social life of cities, the way cities work (or fail to work) for the lives that people live in common.  How do we avoid the pattern that’s becoming too common in the US and Europe, and is now happening in China, where some of the most modern parts of cities, and some of the most modern cities themselves, end up with diminished communities, disconnected people and dispiriting surroundings?
In this session, a distinguished group of leading thinkers and practitioners will engage participants in a lively conversation about just three distinct, but related dimensions of the social life of cities:

• The first will examine the social life of work and look at emerging patterns of working fuelled by new social networking tools and platforms, that link work, home and community in new ways
• The second will take some examples of social innovation in the city and learn from a new breed of social entrepreneurs who are finding new ways to combine technology, culture and people to solve difficult problems of isolation, intolerance and inequity.
• And the third dimension will look at the creative life of cities including examples of approaches to creating cultural experiences that engage as well as entertain.

Our conversation will have two objectives. The first is to demonstrate that not only is it important to understand the social life of cities as a key issue in its own right. It is also increasingly important to understand the interrelationship between the social dimension and the other dimensions of urban and community sustainability. 
The second objective is to use the conversation to draw up a short “manifesto” for the social life of cities, a powerful collection of principles and propositions that can influence the way people think about how cities work for people and communities. 
So our aim in this session is engage and to explore but also to create together something practical and timely that reminds us that people and communities are at the heart of the challenge to change the way cities are designed, managed, governed and renewed.
Please join us on the conference page of the website for updates to the discussions and content, following the conference.

Today Connected Urban Development (CUD) lived to see another fine day: the launch of the ‘Double U’ network in the Netherlands. Double U is a platform for smart work centers and other high end open public work environments. Double U is a network, an organization, an ‘organizer’ in a fragile and fragmented market, and a portfolio of smart work solutions & tools, among them, the Double U reservation tool which has gone life & public today: www.w-smartwork.nl.

Some facts:

• Double U has been initiated by the City of Amsterdam and Cisco under CUD, founded by Cisco, ABN AMRO, Rabobank and several SWC providers. Double U is a foundation under Dutch law.
• Public Launch of Double U tool on March 23, 2010: www.w-smartwork.nl. The tool itself is easily replicable for other communities around the world at low costs; Double U got launched today, March 23, at a large Dutch event bringing together 300 employers convening on new urban mobility solutions;
• Double U commences with 21 SWCs, with 30 more ready to become part of the Double U network throughout spring 2010, totaling over 50 SWCs throughout the Netherlands;
• Double U is to facilitate and embed a public Telepresence network. The first SWC to feature Telepresence is Amsterdam Bright City in Amsterdam’s prestigious ‘Zuid-As’ financial district. More locations are planned. The local public TP network will be hooked up to the global TATA TP network. The Double U reservation tool, www.w-smartwork.nl, offers a choice of three ‘work resources’: work place, conference / function rooms, and Telepresence;
• The City of Amsterdam is a launching customer to Double U: it is allowing its employees to book work space through Double U and it will be a launching customer to the public TP network once it goes live;
• Double U features ‘Worksnug’ as part of its portfolio. Worksnug is an augmented reality smart phone application mapping public work locations. Worksnug will go live as a Double U application soon, with reviews of public and co-working locations across the Netherlands. See http://www.worksnug.com/. The Double U reservation tool will be enhanced through this innovative Augmented Reality application, and user participation through user reviews – a nice example of ‘mobile’ collective IQ.

Double U is the next phase in the materialization of an urban connected and sustainable work environment envisioned and forged by the City of Amsterdam and Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group under the Connected Urban Development program. Starting out with a vision and a proof of concept in 2008, the ‘smart work initiative’ proceeded to result in a pilot, a program, business model, Value Case, White Papers, user survey and, finally, a scaled network of SWCs, helping forge a distributed work environment, nicely designed, low threshold, well facilitated, embedding Telepresence and other collaboration technologies.

On a personal note: to have commenced with an idea on the future of work, starting out with our famous diagram on distributed networks from Paul Baran, and to help this develop all the way into a national, distributed grid of public work places has been simply fantastic. CUD: Great program, great team, and some real results.

Bas Boorsma

Advancing the Connected Urban Development program’s progress in Connected and Sustainable Living through buildings and energy efficiency applications, the city of Madrid, in partnership with Cisco and technology partner Telvent, has announced the launch of the UrbanEnergy Management pilot project in the city.

Promoted by the Municipal Company for Housing and Lands of Madrid; Cisco, and technology partner Telvent, has deployed network infrastructure, connectivity and control systems in a pilot, apartment building in the city: Calle de Las Margaritas, 52. The development is intended as temporary housing on a rental basis to young people in Madrid.

The “Energy Efficiency Manager” installed in homes, can, at any time and in real time, manage energy consumption, controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and make decisions about the way in which residents make use of energy both at the individual apartment level and throughout the building. In the future this is intended to extend across the urban community.

The solution, which allows consumer to set limits and comparisons of consumer weekly, monthly or yearly, provides to citizens and municipal managers, daily tips to improve efficiency and be more environmentally responsible.

Further details can be found on the projects section of the CUD website, where a fact sheet and presentation sets out further details of the pilot solution and roadmap.