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En 2015, toutes les grandes capitales de la planète auront voulu être des smart cities. Si la notion renvoie à un objectif de ville « connectée » ou « verte », à Paris, elle incarne plus fortement une culture de la citoyenneté retrouvée à travers une utilisation  collective, créative et réfléchie du numérique.

Développement numérique

Smart City : ce mot-valise qui fut ultra-tendance en 2015, évoque une cité futuriste de l'ère du numérique, tirant partie des nouvelles technologies de l'information et de la communication. Une ville hyperconnectée est équipée de capteurs, de puces, de GPS, d'antennes, de caméras, de cellules, de domestique dans le mobilier urbain, les bâtiments, la chaussée, les moyens de transport, les arbres. Chaque objet, dès lors"intelligent", peut communiquer, produire et échanger des données, renseigner le big data de la ville. Stockées, croisées et valorisées, ces informations entraîneraient uneamélioration de la vie quotidienne des citadins, qui y accèdent via mobile, tout en rationalisant les coups en terme de consommation d'énergie, en accompagnant latransition écologique et en développant la démocratie participative.

L’échelle de la municipalité est la plus pertinente en terme de démocratie locale participative. « Plus près des problèmes qui affectent la planète et sa population, les villes sont tenues d'y répondre plus vite que les États. Elles ont ainsi l'occasion d'apporter des remèdes immédiatement opérationnels et efficaces. », notait un observateur lors du forum Smart City du Grand Paris organisé par le quotidien La Tribune fin novembre à Paris.

Selon un sondage de l'Observatoire des politiques publiques, réalisé par l'Ifop pour EY et Acteurs publics en septembre 2015, le développement numérique constitue « un enjeu central pour la ville de demain ». Près de huit Français sur dix jugent important ou prioritaire le développement numérique des villes. La réduction de la dépense publique et l'amélioration de la sécurité arrivent en tête des priorités assignées aux "villes intelligentes". Autrement dit, l’idée de ville intelligente redynamise l’espoir d’une citoyenneté de proximité qui rime avec efficacité et participativité.

A look inside the hard work at Nextdoor, a social networking site for people in your neighborhood.

The German city is planning a green network that will cover 40% of the city area, contributing to resilience and allowing biking, swimming and nature watching in the city

The European commercial hub promotes bicycling as the main mode of transportation, and plans to build a network around bikes and pedestrians, linking car-free roads to parks and playgrounds, from the city centre to the suburbs.

Welcome to Hamburg, an environmental pioneer whose planned green network will cover 40% of the city's area. "It will connect parks, recreational areas, playgrounds, gardens and cemeteries through green paths", says Angelika Fritsch, a spokeswoman for the city's department of urban planning and the environment. "Other cities, including London, have green rings, but the green network will be unique in covering an area from the outskirts to the city centre. In 15 to 20 years you'll be able to explore the city exclusively on bike and foot."

"Completely awesome magazine on biomimetics by Melissa Sterry" Mike McCue, Founder, Flipboard

The Town Square Initiative is a yearlong volunteer effort in which Gensler designers set out to unearth and re-imagine unexpected open space in cities around the globe. All 43 Gensler offices were invited to participate in the conceptual project, in which we challenged our designers to identify open space in the city and reimagine it as a town square.

Visit the link for more images, diagrams and information on Gensler New York’s design of their future city.

Resilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire a new goal. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with footprints we can globally and locally afford, even though our focus has rightly been on resilience.

It speaks to the question: what is the city we want to create in the future? What is the city in which we want to live? Certainly that city is sustainable and resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now apparently due every few years...

And yet: as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as the third indispensible—and arguably most important—leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.

In honor of the opening of a new garden in Paris, Reuters has pulled together a list of some of their favorite green spaces.

Here are a couple favorites...

China's next new city will be designed by US firm KPF, next to Hunan's regional capital, around a 40-hectare lake.

Adjacent to Changsha, the ancient capital city of Hunan, the design implements the sort of urban innovation that creates a sustainable and truly habitable environment.

"We can introduce integrated urban innovation," von Klemperer says, "we can combine water transport with localised energy production, cluster neighbourhood centres, advanced flood prevention and water management, and urban agriculture. Meixi is an experiment in future city planning and building. It will serve Changsha as a new CBD, but it will also serve as a paradigm for other Chinese city planners. It's a kind of live test case."

The firm seeks to achieve these goals through its dense, mixed-use urban, plan, with integration with surrounding mountains, lakes, parks and canals. Meixi Lake will eventually be home to 180,000 inhabitants, living in "villages" of 10,000 people, clustered around the canals...

Dundee, Bilbao, Curitiba, Helsinki and Turin have been awarded UNESCO City of Design status for their input to the international design industry.

When you’re in a big city humming with activity, it’s not unusual to feel like the world revolves around you. On each trip to a new place, artist Isidro Blasco climbs up to the tallest buildings and documents what exactly “the world” looks like through the city’s eyes.

The result: the “Planet” series, which takes us to the bubbles of places like New York, São Paulo, Sydney, and Madrid.

The artist assembles photographs into meticulously circular panoramas. Reminding us that Photoshop techniques have origins in the physical world, each series is painstakingly incised and trimmed by hand. The three-dimensional works challenge perceptions of our everyday "orbits" through their creative use of representation.

More at the link.

Silent parks. Designing for disabilities. Human-powered data. Garbage anthropology. World-class sidewalks. Floating favelas. Paint as infrastructure.

These are the keys to the cities of the future, according to the most recent TED conference, City 2.0. Last year, for the first time, the TED Prize went to an idea—the future of the city—and a million dollars was divvied up among ten grantees all over the world.

Last week was the first-ever TED City 2.0 conference, featuring several of those grantees plus many other urban leaders discussing their ideas for the future of the city.

Experts predict that by 2050, three-quarters of the world's population will live in cities.

For part of its Tomorrow's Cities season the BBC takes a look through the crystal ball to imagine what city life might be like in 40 years' time.

Find more details at the interactive graphic at the link.

Sustainability values are not just something reserved for the CSR business mandates of corporations. Cities and countries also promote its sustainability and, by doing so, appeal to citizens and attract tourism and business. I’ve delved into how Canada and it’s cities and businesses fair on the sustainability stage in posts like the 50 Best Corporate Citizens in Canada 2012, the 30 Top Green Organizations in Canada According to Employee Engagement, the 55 Greenest Canadian Employers, the 50 Top Diversity Employers in Canada, the Top 50 Canadian CSR Business List, Canada’s Top Employers for 2013,  the top 10 Canadian boards according to gender representation, the Top Canadian Boards According to Visible Minority and Aboriginal Representation, the 12 top countries represented in the Global 100: World Leaders in Clean Capitalism, the 10 Green Business Leaders the 10 best corporate citizens in Canada and the 10 top foreign corporate citizens in Canada. Today, I’ll be adding to this list with the 10 most sustainable North American cities from Corporate Knights (CK) 2013 North American Sustainable Cities Scorecard....

 Based on the CK methodology used, the 10 most sustainable North American cities:

For over a century, writers and architects have imagined the cities of the future.

 In the late 1960s, architect Paolo Soleri envisioned “arcology” - a word that combines “architecture” and “ecology," with a goal of building structures to house large populations in self-contained environments with a self-sustaining economy and agriculture. “In the three-dimensional city, man defines a human ecology. In it he is a country dweller and metropolitan man in one. By it the inner and the outer are at ‘skin’ distance. He has made the city in his own image. Arcology: the city in the image of man.” (Paolo Soleri)

Lighting designers are applying the skills of their profession to further the goals of urban design, creating safer, more stimulating, and better functioning cities.

Cities rarely stand still. It is in their nature to evolve, expand, and, in some cases, contract. Whichever way they go, cities are always reinventing themselves, often one neighborhood at a time. Outdoor lighting can be a crucial part of this metamorphosis. Across the U.S., urban regeneration projects are stimulating activity in derelict infrastructure, defunct waterfronts, neglected plots of land, and dilapidated buildings. Though not completely erased, the use of fluorescent tubes and glaring security lights has been scaled back and in their place is a growing appreciation for sensitive, appropriate, and considered lighting.

The arbiters of this decades-long shift are lighting designers. Their role in improving conditions to make safer, more accessible cities is increasingly key to urban design...

It is no great revelation that architects tend to look up when exploring a city. It’s the best way to guage size, scale, placement, composition and detail – all the information required to process the qualities of a space or place.

Having spent the last few days looking up and considering the architectural impact of the New York City grid-plan layout, this article takes a particular interest in the domestic scale elements that help to service the city and punctuate the rigidity.

At first the brain identifies the rhythm of the brick formation and the window layouts, it is this assumption of regularity that leaves many with this very valid conclusion based on the verticality of the grid. But in identifying this pattern – the eye becomes more accustomed, searching for further geometries or perhaps more importantly, exceptions to the rule.

Welcome to the first annual Urbanist Toolkit Bracket Challenge, where the hottest trends in urbanism go head-to-head in a conceptual game that challenges the instincts, tastes, and urban design wisdom of readers.

Here's how it works:

Thirty-two in-form tools of urbanism have been seeded, according to their popularity and utility, into four regional groups: the Ed Koch, the Sidewalk Ballet, the Le Corbusier, and the Dandyhorse. The four #1 seeds -- car share, bike lanes, farmers' markets, and the waterfront promenade -- are paired off against decidedly more obscure options.

It's the nature of an elimination tournament: two urban design features enter, one urban design feature emerges victorious. At the moment we have a choice between Bike Lanes and Pedestrian Street.

The Pedestrian Street easily trumped the Waterfront Promenade, 69-31, to advance to the finals. On the left side of the bracket, Bike Lanes sent congestion pricing back to the theoretical realm, 60-40, in a match-up that many people found particularly aggravating, for reasons that commenter Quinn Raymond elucidated at the very start of the bracket challenge: "The final question is basically, 'Would you rather stab yourself in the face or the chest?'"

(Confused? Check out the Final Four, the Elite Eight, the Sweet Sixteen, or the initial post for more info on the entries.)