Can one person really change a city? Meet our hero, Jane Jacobs, a passionate writer and resident of Greenwich Village during the vibrant 1950s and 60s in New York City. A champion of place, she stood tall against the formidable Robert Moses, known as the master builder of New York. Moses reshaped the city to fit his vision, carving expressways through neighbourhoods, displacing families, and creating a city designed for cars rather than the people who lived there. Their publ
We’ve spent the last two decades building “smart” cities under the pretence that if we could just measure everything, we could fix everything. And so we’ve gone about installing sensors, data dashboards, and digitising our public services. It’s a seductive idea, because who doesn’t want a more efficient city? And yet therein lies the problem – efficiency isn’t the same as health. In city after city, the reality of a smart city has fallen short of its promises, testing the
