Making Smart Cities Equitable

1.5 CM / LU Pending

As Smart City technologies are deployed, an opportunity exists to make cities more equitable for and accessible to lower income citizens, overcoming many barriers that have evolved both intentionally and unintentionally. But without a vision and prioritization, autonomous vehicles and similar Smart City technologies will not organically increase access to affordable housing, jobs, and other opportunity resources and could potentially widen the existing disparity gap in many places. This session presents an overarching vision of how a city could achieve far greater equity and inclusion by focusing on five priorities for its Smart City strategy. This vision and prioritization is paired with a powerful tool suite called the Opportunity 360 framework that can be used to benchmark, plan, and adapt how a city is deploying its Smart City resources and policy framework. We will also explore the criticality of public transit to low-income people and the need for low-cost, wide- coverage transportation.