On organisations stunning ability to absorb nonsensical claims about technology

| cities, urbanism, smart cities, technology

So i have finally managed to finish Adam Greenfield’s Against the smart city (i had lapsed soon after this picture was taken). The book is well worth reading and contains a number valuable insights but there is one passage that stands out for me. Towards the end of the book (or pamphlet as Adam refers to it) he explains why his method of examining the language of marketing and promotional copy of IT vendors is important even though the same vendors, when challenged on the claims contained in it…

Rio de Janeiro as a smart city

| brazil, rio, smart cities, streetart, urbanism, technology

The New York Times has a longish article portraying the Operations Center of the City of Rio that has been build by IBM’s smarter cities unit. In the article both the city of Rio de Janeiro and IBM portray the operations center as some kind of magic wand that enables the benevolent city government to steer the daily life of the city’s population using video feeds and text messages: City employees in white jumpsuits work quietly in front of a giant wall of screens — a sort of virtual Rio, rendere…