Smart cities are not a panacea, and the New York Times is on it.
Dr. Shoshana Saxe is known to TreeHugger readers for her work on the carbon footprint of big transit projects. Now she is known to riders of the New York Times for writing about another subject dear to this TreeHugger’s heart, titled in the print edition What We Really Need Are Good ‘Dumb’ Cities.
Dr. Saxe is responding to the Sidewalk Labs proposal for Toronto, and wondering if the dumb old solutions aren’t better. She notes that no matter how smart the city is, there will still have to be good management. “If smart data identifies a road that needs paving, it still needs people to show up with asphalt and a steamroller.”
But my favorite paragraph says what we have been saying all along in our talk of dumb houses, dumb boxes and dumb cities:
For an engineering professor, she comes to a surprising conclusion:
Amanda O’Rourke of 8 80 cities has made a similar point in her article, Smart Cities are making us dumber.
Or as I have written,
And as always, the last 140 characters go to Taras Grescoe:
Taras Grescoe/Screen capture
