Smart Cities — A Book Review

Bryan Ling
1 min readNov 25, 2020
By: Germaine Halegoua

There are some key takeaways in this book which state that smart cities have good intentions. However, the public-private partnerships tend to overvalue private entities’ assumption of what customers want/are without real citizen input. As a result, what is rolled out is underused, its not applicable to citizens there, and all it tends to do is make profits or scrape data from citizens for private entity. Efforts to rename the term do not work.

In order for Smart Cities to truly take off, one must rethink how to get citizen input, how to not discriminate against the lower income and how to break racial barriers and provide cities for everyone, and ultimately think about what citizens want and not just make profits for the private investors.

It’s quite valid and relevant and explains why smart cities still have not taken off.

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