The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future (Strong Ideas)

pros:1. This book isn't just a technology book...but rather this book covers politics, infrastructure etc. and how technology should be used as but one of the many tools to resolve issues in those areas.2. The author does a brilliant job of showcasing how to resolve issues with technology isn't a neutral solution that is free of biases and free of errors. As the author showcases in the chapter about algorithms utilized to promote predictive policing...people design algorithm....people design technology....thus it's not neutral but it's geared towards whatever the designer designs it for.Cons:1. The author is very repetitive at times. In fact I find myself struggling to focus during the last 6 or so pages of each chapter because those last pages aren't that different from the 6 pages before it.Conclusion: I recommend this book because it will change the way you look at technology and it provides a proper and democratic lens for evaluating the technology. There are better books out there...but this book is still a really good book and worth the read.

Extremely thoughtful take on the role of technology in cities, with an excellent balance of technical and political perspective. Easy to read and remarkably well written.As someone with no experience working with cities to implement tech-driven solutions, I appreciated that the book provides concrete examples and explanations, while maintaining the rigor and depth needed to spark fascinating conversations.The book has key lessons to be carried over into other fields where technology’s role is rapidly changing.Highly recommend.

a very welcome, super clearly written antidote to the shallow thinking out there about how technology will fix cities. not only a good critique but also a constructive vision of what we should do instead!

At this juncture in human history, few issues should concern us more than our relationship to digital technologies. They are shaping our brains, influencing our values, and changing the nature of human discourse—not always in good ways. When we determine our relationship to any new technology, there is a middle ground between the doe-eyed technophile and the intransigent Luddite. Only fools dwell on the extremes of this continuum; wisdom lies somewhere in between. When developing and managing cities, wisdom definitely demands something less technophilic and more human than the self-serving visions of the “Smart City” that technology vendors are promoting today. Ben Green makes this case compellingly in this thoughtful new book.The term “Smart City” has emerged as shorthand for cities that focus on the latest technologies as the solution to human problems. If you buy into this term, you believe that failing to implement the latest technologies is dumb, and who wants to live in a dumb city? It isn’t that simple, however. Technologies indeed offer benefits, but only good technologies, and only when they’re designed well and applied wisely. Framing all of a city’s problems as solvable through technologies ignores the complexities that successful urban development and governance must understand and address.Green calls this problematic perspective “technology goggles,” or simply “tech goggles,” which is based on the beliefs that “technology provides neutral and optimal solutions to social problems, and…that technology is the primary mechanism to social change.” Tech goggles “cause whoever wears them to perceive every ailment of urban life as a technology problem and to selectively diagnose only issues that technology can solve…The fundamental problem with tech goggles is that neat solutions to complex social issues are rarely, if ever, possible.”Green proposes the alternative to the dream of the Smart City as the Smart Enough City: “a city free from the influence of tech goggles, a city where technology is embraced as a powerful tool to address the needs of urban residents, in conjunction with other forms of innovation and social change, but is not valued for its own sake or viewed as a panacea.” Those who embrace the Smart Enough City “place their policy goals at the forefront and, recognizing the complexity of people and institutions, think holistically about how to better meet their needs.”Throughout this book, Green examines the many ways in which technologies can impact and either assist or harm urban life. He dives deeply into specific issues regarding transportation, police work, civic engagement, and the provision of human services. He examines specific technologies, including autonomous vehicles, sensors, and machine-learning algorithms. He makes his case with example after example, both of smart city failures and smart enough city successes. This story features some bad actors, but quite a few heroes as well. I never imagined that I would find a book about cities so engaging. Even though the book focuses on the ways that technologies are shaping cities—a topic that I haven’t given much thought in the past—the concerns and potential responses that it considers apply much more broadly to technologies and their use. This book is an extraordinarily well-researched and well-written treatise on an important topic. The choices that we make about technologies today will fundamentally shape our future.

Arrived next day .not sure what book is about bought for present