Smart cities: How Barcelona learned to listen
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Smart sensors can improve citizens' lives, especially when residents are put in charge of gathering the data.
Jane Wakefield reports from the Placa del Sol in Barcelona, where Guillem Camprodon of the city's Fab Lab explains how his initiative of placing noise detectors around the square helped residents finally get the city council to take the problem of night-time disturbances seriously.
Michael Donaldson, the city's commissioner for digital innovation argues that public authorities ought to be able to collect more user data, in the same way that online businesses do, in order to improve public services. But tech consultant Charles Reed Anderson warns that the hype around the potential for smart cities far exceeds what is currently achievable, while Sandra Baer of Personal Cities argues that humans need to remain at the centre of such efforts.
(Picture: Noise level sensor in Barcelona; Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Jane Wakefield. |
| 0:02.0 | And I'm producer Sarah Trino. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to a week of very special technology programs. |
| 0:07.9 | We'll be looking into the future to ask what our cities will look like, |
| 0:12.2 | whether we'll get our brains hacked, |
| 0:14.3 | whether flying taxis will be a realistic alternative to the commute, |
| 0:18.0 | and how AI will look in future. |
| 0:22.9 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me, Jane Wakefield, from a very busy Barcelona. |
| 0:36.4 | Smart cities, sensors and technology to improve our urban lives. |
| 0:41.7 | Today, on Business Daily, I'm in a city which claims to be one of Europe's smartest, Barcelona. |
| 0:48.0 | I'll be hearing about the tech solutions many claim will help the globe's increasingly urbanized population and sorting through the hype. |
| 0:55.8 | In my opinion, I don't think there's a smart city yet. This is a long process before we're going to get there. |
| 1:00.7 | We're just at the beginning of it. We don't even have strategies yet. So how come we have smart cities? |
| 1:05.1 | So it's a long process. Don't get caught up in all the hype. |
| 1:07.7 | Basically, I wanted to show what happens when you empower a community suffering |
| 1:11.3 | a specific issue, in this case, noise issues, with technology, in this case, local sensors. |
| 1:18.2 | Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:22.7 | You might not see them, but these days, if you are in a city, you are likely to be surrounded |
| 1:27.7 | by sensors, monitoring air quality, noise levels and pollution. |
| 1:33.2 | Citizens have little say about where these sensors are placed or what happens to the data |
| 1:37.3 | they collect. |
| 1:38.9 | But in Barcelona, there is a lab which makes affordable sensors that are not just easy |
... |
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