About the Atlas

The Atlas of Urban Tech collects case studies created by Cornell Tech students analyzing how city governments and city makers are using digital technology to make cities stronger, fairer, and more resilient.

You'll find two types of case studies here:

Digital masterplans are comprehensive, long-range plans adopted by municipalities to guide policy, planning, and investment in smart city and urban tech solutions. These cases help us understand the technology priorities, strategies, and interventions of city governments.
Tech-enabled districts are neighborhood-scale real estate development projects that combine buildings, utilities, and digital services to create value for tenants, residents, and visitors. These cases help us understand the opportunities, risks, and rewards facing private sector investors.

Key Takeaways

Collectively, these case studies of digital masterplans and tech-enabled districts highlight some underlying truths about the smart cities movement—a broad web of change that includes all of the technology advances, policy innovations, and new social movements unleased by urban tech.

Here are a few of our key takeaways:

Moonshots matter less than practical urban innovations. None of the plans or districs put big bets on a single technology, or do technology for technology's sake. Instead, they strive to define and deliver diverse portfolios of practical innovations that address today's problems now.
City stakeholders choose which technologies succeed. The stories we tell about new technologies are full of inevitabilities (e.g. "self-driving cars will cause urban sprawl"). These plans and districts highlight the power that diverse groups of stakeholders have in deciding which urban technologies succeed—by setting priorities, creating incentives and regulating uses.
Cyber-physical integration is hard, but pays off. Urban tech combines digital, built, and human components. Building occupancy sensors are useless if they aren't connected to the HVAC system. And a smart building's predictive cooling algorithms must account for how people actually move around throughout the day. This integration is hard, and requires collaboration across disciplines and organizations. But it is where the real opportunity for value creation is found.

About the Class

These case studies were created by Cornell Tech students enrolled in a Spring 2023 course, "Smart Cities: Requirements, Ambitions, and Limitations", taught by Dr. Anthony Townsend. The course syllabus can be found here.

This course examined the concept of “smart cities” as a sociotechnical movement that seeks to expand the use of digital technologies in urban development, service delivery, and governance. This movement began in the 1990s, and coalesced during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 when global tech vendors like IBM, Cisco, and Siemens exploited an opportunity to port digitalization solutions from the private sector to municipal governments. Now, consumer-facing companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber are part of a shift to “urban tech”, bringing new technologies, more money, new business models, and more aggressive approaches to government affairs and deregulation.

This course explored the concept of smart cities by examining three broad categories of capabilities that this movement seeks to achieve:

requirements (capabilities that smart cities solutions must have in order to reach commissioning stage);
aspirations (capabilities that many smart city solutions seek to achieve, or values and characteristics stakeholders would like to impose on them); and
limitations (desirable capabilities where smart cities are seen as deeply wanting to date, and will likely struggle to achieve). These capabilities are illustrated and examined through a series of critical place-based case studies of large, ambitious and technology-driven urban development projects in cities around the world.

Through these investigations and case studies, students gained a thorough understanding of the engineering considerations involved in the technology design, as well as social, economic, and political factors influencing how technologies are assessed ahead of time and how system performance is evaluated following deployment.

Upon completion of the course, students are able to:

Understand smart city capabilities, their costs and benefits, and their overall state of development;
Understand key stakeholders in smart city innovation and diffusion, including their goals and motivations, and resources and constraints—including city governments, corporations, entrepreneurs, and NGOs;
Understand how to unpack and critique claims of government officials, entrepreneurs and business leaders, and citizens regarding specific smart city projects and technology solutions;
Understand how foresight and strategic planning is used in the smart cities movement to assess, anticipate, and adapt to technological, economic, and social change.

Want to contribute to the Atlas? Take a look at our list of prospects and then read the docs on Github.

Additional explorations, undertaken by Cornell Tech students enrolled in Prof. Michael Samuelian's "Urban Systems" course, build on these case studies. During this course, first-semester urban tech students explore two types of urban systems—"hard" and "soft"—and emergent urban dynamics arising at the intersection of these systems.

Credits

Instructor

Anthony Townsend

Editor

Rowan Wu (2023)
Leihao Fang (2024)

Grader

Marie Demple (2023)

Design and Coding

Ben Oldenburg

Data Migration

Sriya Challa
Tsung-Yin Hsieh
Vikranth Kanumuru
Sourabh Singh