Beyond Smart Cities: How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate

by Tim E.J. Campbell

This book draws on quantitative and qualitative data with concrete case studies to show how networks already operating in cities are used to foster and strengthen connections in order to achieve breakthroughs in learning and innovation.

257 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Tim Campbell worked for more than 40 years in urban development with experience in scores of countries and hundreds of cities in Latin America, South and East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He retired from the World Bank in 2005 after 17 years in the urban sector. He is currently a Woodrow Wilson Global Fellow.

His areas of expertise include city learning, innovation, smart cities, strategic urban planning, city development strategies, decentralization, urban policy, and social and poverty impact of urban development.

He holds a B.A. in Political Science from U. C. Berkeley (1966), a Masters in City and Regional Planning from U.C. Berkeley (1970), and a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning from M.I.T. (1980).

Campbell is currently Chairman of the Urban Age Institute.

Reviews

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

I do not have background in urban development and I was initially hoping the book would discuss more the role of information and communication technologies in networking and learning for cities.
Then it became clear that the entire discussion revolves around the people making use of technology and their interactions rather than the technology itself.
What I got from this book is, cities learn through (in)formal networks of individuals (formed as a results of e.g. un(official) visits of staff between the cities) and organizations/think tanks dedicated to specific purposes (e.g. Curritiba). Sometimes the learning process is forced by outside circumstances. Examples include the organization of international events (such as the Olympics were for Barcelona and Turin), or the city being re-shaped to host a different kind of focus industry (e.g. Tampere) or an additional culture (e.g. the bike culture in Portland).
These networks of individuals are renamed in the book ‘clouds of trust’, which I find is yet another name for the old-as-time notion of ‘I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody…’. This is how individuals operate in most aspects of life, nothing new here. The idea of having these relationships illustrated as graphs would be valuable (and I think deserves further exploring) if a discussion were provided as to what to do with these graphs once constructed (e.g. what conclusions we can draw from comparing one graph to another).