URBANmedias

Smart Cities and the Smart Grid: There are natural parallels between the Smart Grid and smart cities in terms of concepts and deployments, though cities have much more experience at evolution than the traditional electrical grid. After all, they have been adopting new technologies that disrupt the status quo for centuries. The Romans created aqueducts and fundamentally changed how water could be controlled and distributed in cities. Discoveries in hygiene and disease transmission and control allowed people to healthily live in population densities with minimized odds of large scale epidemics. And then automobiles exerted their influences on cities. In each case, city systems, policies, and people changed to accommodate new technologies, new knowledge and new practices.

Now, ambitious goals such as zero net energy buildings will change the relationships that physical structures have within cities, and in turn change the relationships that occupants (full or part-time) have within buildings and within cities.

Read the complete article for more on the latest advances in the building industry, infrastructure and transportation, and how smart cities will interact with the Smart Grid...

In 2010, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design published Ecological Urbanism, a book of interdisciplinary essays on sustainable city-building. But the project had one inescapable shortcoming: When you’re dealing with a field that’s evolving so rapidly, a finite, physical book is liable to be outdated by the time it leaves the printer.

So upon completing the collection, the school commissioned Portland-based interactive studio Second Story to transform the book into an iPad app, a resource that would draw from the original text but could also be updated with new projects and papers as needed. Now available for free, the app shows how dynamic areas of study can benefit greatly from equally dynamic texts.

Features like interactive graphs are innovative ways to access data, as well as useful tools for understanding it. "While working on the app, we found that the data visualizations revealed patterns that told another meta-story that already existed in the book," he says. "Essentially, the patterns illustrated trends in sustainable design, which is attractive for both scholars and the general reader to see."

Visit the link to learn more about how this new format has given research and urban issues a stronger, more engaging and current platform with which users to engage...