Smart Cities: Requirements, Ambitions, and Limitations

3.0 credits · Graduate

The smart cities movement was born during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8. When multinationals slashed spending on IT, governments ramped up stimulus spending. Big vendors like IBM, Cisco, and Siemens seized the opportunity to port enterprise tech to the municipal sector. This project didn't get far. While there have been successes, city governments were slow to define and procure smart cities solutions. And the context changed. Consumer tech innovation raced ahead, drawing a new group of giant firms into the fray. They brought new technologies, but also more money, new business models, and more aggressive approaches to government affairs and deregulation. This shift from smart cities to urban tech is ongoing and defines the landscape for engineering cyberphysical urban systems today. This course is a survey of smart cities and urban tech for engineers, organized around 12-15 broad technical capabilities that reflect widely-shared views of what this movement seeks to achieve.