Top Highlights

• The experience highlighted a common gap in the world of the smart city. Companies see possibilities (and dollar signs), while municipal employees see hard financial trade-offs and a complicated path to translate technology into real public value. Moreover, it illustrates a fundamental difference in how people see the challenges facing cities. To te...
• that attempts to deploy technology in pursuit of a smart city often distort and exacerbate the problems that are supposedly being solved.
• “The way in which [a] problem is conceived decides what specific suggestions are entertained and which are dismissed.”
• I call this perspective “technology goggles” (or simply “tech goggles”). At their core, tech goggles are grounded in two beliefs: first, that technology provides neutral and optimal solutions to social problems, and second, that technology is the primary mechanism of social change.