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EDITORIAL newDATA
MAGAZINE
"Truly Intelligent" Cities
There is no consensus on when the and climate change that democratically
Anthropocene began - the era when human affects developed and developing countries.
activities started to have a significant global In these scenarios, smart cities are
impact on the Earth's ecosystems to the needed, solving structural and organizational
point of compromising them. Still, the fact issues that allow people to live a higher
that, for the first time in history, by 2020, the quality of life.
mass of objects built by humanity will have The 30 most populated cities in the world
surpassed in weight the mass of living beings
(Nature Magazine ) is a clear sign that we are have more inhabitants than the whole of
in the middle of the Anthropocene era and Portugal. Imagine putting into one city all the
that we are not going back. problems of traffic, housing, infrastructure,
security, and so on that exist in our country.
In this context, talking about smart cities
makes perfect sense. As much as we would It's chaos, right?
like to, humans currently alive are seeing their Today we are already designing (almost)
average life expectancy increase, and there self-sufficient cities. These small
are no signs that the world's population will communities offer their inhabitants
decrease. Therefore, it is necessary to plan everything they need for their daily lives
cities. within very short distances. Car traffic is
There is a lot of talk about intelligent cities reduced, and public transportation is made
as if they could live on their own, without the possible, just like in small villages. And this
constant presence and action of people, would probably have been the best option for
removing the onus of planning and growing cities in the past: efficiently and
maintaining their functioning from those in sustainably connecting many small villages
charge, as if endowing the city with a specific instead of "growing" megacities that turn out
"intelligence" would solve all problems. to be unsustainable, environmentally
Take, for example, the problem of flooding . unfriendly, and uncharacterized.
Although the World Bank, in its publication Maybe it's not too late to turn back... who
Cities and Flooding, states that "Urban knows. The advantages seem obvious to me,
flooding poses a serious challenge to from which I highlight cultural identity and
development and people's lives, particularly quality of life!
for residents of rapidly expanding cities in
developing countries," the fact is that looking
at the list of the 20 most vulnerable cities to Horácio Lopes
flooding, we can quickly notice the problem is Gestor de projetos . Consultor de
not related to development nor technology. Gestão . Editor newDATAmagazine ®
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Formador . BCP . BCI VP
Instead, it is related to land characteristics Perfil | Profile
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