#smart-cities

#smart-cities

A popular ski resort town in Colorado is adopting a new AI Smart City Solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it better detect wildfires, as well as update a range of other city services. Vail is expanding its firefighting toolbox as hotter, more arid weather with climate change raises wildfire risk in the western US. Colorado has suffered 11 of the 20 largest fires in state history just within the last five years.

AMONG A GROWING ARRAY of government-sanctioned informational systems, motion sensors, acoustic monitors, biometric scanners, and thermal cameras work in tandem with sprawling private networks of data brokers to track social and environmental flows with forensic precision. They measure footfalls, scan license plates, log financial transactions, and inspect the movement of people alongside particulate matter. As sensing technologies increasingly oversee and overwrite the spatial production of contemporary life, proposals for "smart cities" and other data-dependent composites-proliferating since the early 2010s-obfuscate regimented environments of surveillance and control through rosy prospects of connectivity, security, and risk management, all sustained by the tenacious dystopian dream we call information.