This project has received significant global media attention, especially as it grew to a full-blown 21st-century central operations center connected to streaming video for crime detection and prevention and integrated emergency services administration among many other integrated smart services. Perhaps one of the best examples of Smart Cities 2.0 is what Rio’s mayor did when he went to IBM to seek their expertise in creating a sensor network to mitigate the role of landslides in the hillside favelas. In this phase, city administrators increasingly focus on technology solutions as enablers to improve quality of life. In this generation, the municipality–led by forward-thinking mayors and city administrators–takes the lead in helping determine what the future of their city is and what the role is for the deployment of smart technologies and other innovations. This phase has been led by cities, as opposed to technology providers. Smart Cities 2.0: Technology Enabled, City-Led In his book Smart Cities, Anthony Townsend presents a thoughtful critique of Smart Cities 1.0, arguing that tech-driven futuristic urban vision were missing out on the key dynamic of how cities interact with their citizens. These future city visions have been driven by private sector technology companies such as Living PlanIT and Cisco. Smart Cities 1.0 is also the underlying philosophy behind most of the bespoke smart cities projects proposed around the globe from PlanIT in Portugal to Songdo in South Korea. It’s like someone who may wait in line for the latest Apple gadget without even knowing what they might use it for. Smart Cities 1.0 is characterized by technology providers encouraging the adoption of their solutions to cities that were really not equipped to properly understand the implications of the technology solutions or how they may impact citizen quality of life.
![summarize the steps of the cetr plan. summarize the steps of the cetr plan.](https://calvarychurch.com/images/full/Next-Steps-YouApp_MAIN.jpg)
So of course some cities jumped in early. It is no secret that global cities are in an intense competition to attract Richard Florida’s “creative class.” This technology-centric vision of smart cities certainly creates an environment that is appealing to urban technology innovators, who in turn have the potential to grow jobs and the economy. And some early adopter cities were definitely buying what they were selling too. When I first began studying smart cities, IBM and several other multinational technology companies were praising the potential for technology to transform cities into highly efficient, highly technologically driven havens for innovators.