Though it is unnecessary to frequently update terms to highlight a potential area of interest, it is still highly useful to explore different perspectives. In this short article, the authors consider that the “Smart City” should rather be termed a “Deep Learning City”.

One “boring” aspect of how we built cities going forward is also a very old one, concrete. A material that’s been around since the Romans, humanity has produced an astonishing volume of it and is still doing so at a no less astonishing rate.

We’re usually focused on positive solutions in this space but this really excellent (if somewhat bleak) article by Lev Kushner and Greg Lindsay at Bloomberg’s CityLab is very much worth a read, as it exposes a glaring need for more pro-active and forward looking governance in cities.

Provenance is quite an interesting organization, they want to help companies to track the provenance of their products and their impact. They recently released an excellent initiative, the open-source Provenance Framework, which is “is made up of 50+ shopper-facing claims spanning 5 focus areas: climate, communities, nature, waste and workers”.

Replacing fossil fuel cars with electric cars is not the solution to our climate woes, we need way way fewer cars. However, those that do get replaced could have benefits beyond emission reductions, like plugging back into the power grid and acting like mini power plants.