The corporate smart-city rhetoric is about efficiency, predictability, and security. "You'll get to work on time, no queue when you go shopping, and you are safe because of CCTV cameras around you". All these things make a city acceptable, but they don't make a city great.
Goodcitylife.org is a global group of like-minded people who are passionate about building technologies whose focus is to give a good life to city dwellers; because the future of the city is, first and foremost, about people.
We go beyond the creation of a smart city by using digital data to measure intangible aspects of the urban space: the spirit of the city. We will show how this acquired knowledge can be leveraged to build new tools for both citizens and municipalities. Can we rethink existing mapping tools? Is it possible to capture smellscapes of entire cities and celebrate good odors? Can you measure a city's cultural capital?
We will see how a creative use of network-generated data can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions.