New Thinking and Increasing Maturity in the Smart Cities Space, with Dan Barr

Hi #SmartCommunity Friends and welcome to the first new episode of 2023! We hope you enjoyed our summer series sharing some of our favourite episodes over the preview 12-18 months. In today’s episode I have a fantastic conversation with old friend of the show, Dan Barr! Now Dan has been on the show before but it was way back in the early days, in episode 44 in 2018. Dan leads the multi-disciplinary consultancy, Better Cities Group and is a co-founder of the major event planning technology collaboration, Better Events VR. The Better Cities Group specialises in design, economics and engagement and proudly supports clients in the private, public and start-up sectors throughout the APAC region.

In this episode, Dan and I discuss how our thinking has changed on a number of topics since 2018, and how the Smart space in general has matured. We talk about the problem of unintended consequences of technology, and the tension between political ambition and commercial reality in Smart projects. Dan tells us a bit about some projects he’s working on, and he tells us what he thinks will be the big story of the next 10 years in city and urban development. We discuss why we need to get the hierarchy right between people and cars when designing our cities, and the importance of both qualitative and quantitative data, what I like to call the numbers and the stories. We finish our chat talking about the emerging trend of geopolitical factors in the Smart space. As always we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Connect with Dan on LinkedIn, via the Better Cities Group website or email danbarr@bettercitiesgroup.com

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

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Podcast Production by Perk Digital