Smart Cities: Social Change Through Technology (FutureLearn)

Learn from New Zealand’s inspirational smart city projects, and see how you can apply these principles to your own context. Gain insights into smart cities from the experts at the University of Canterbury. Smart cities harness the power of digital technology. Through innovative data collection, cities can use these insights to manage resources and operations more efficiently, and promote sustainable development.

Enroll in course

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New Zealand is one of the world’s leading nations when it comes to implementing smart city design principles. This six-week course, presented by the University of Canterbury, gives you a detailed look at how this has been achieved, and how your city can do the same.

Explore the infrastructure of New Zealand’s smart cities

The course will take you on a journey across New Zealand, exploring smart city development in Christchurch in the south, the capital city of Wellington, and all the way up to Hamilton in the north.

You’ll also see how smart life has the ability to drive social change as you explore real-life smart city projects such as solar-powered waste management and LED lighting.

Understand how smart cities can address challenges

You’ll examine how smart city infrastructure can be used to overcome wicked problems

With this understanding, and as you learn about the role of stakeholders and government in smart urban development, you’ll learn how you can apply smart life principles to your own city context.

Explore the importance of citizens and communities to successful smart life

You’ll go beyond smart city principles to understand the value of the citizen in this infrastructure. This knowledge will help you explore how smart cities can tackle community challenges and improve the quality of life in these cities.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the knowledge of smart city practices in New Zealand to understand how you can apply them closer to home.

Learning on this course

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.
What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Identify how local City Councils in New Zealand are organising around the concept of ‘smart’ cities.

- Assess the role of stakeholders in the development of smart cities.

- Evaluate governance challenges in smart cities.

- Critique the evolution of smart societies.

- Compare how Cities are tackling community challenges in smart cities.

- Assess the relevance of global smart city practices to the local contexts.
Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about smart cities, how they harness technology for social change, and the responsibility of citizens and governments in creating and maintaining them.