City Tech
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China Smart City Tech in Line with that of the U.S.

Jaime E. Love


On the last day of May, I boarded a 13-hour flight to Beijing, not completely certain about what to expect over the next month. This was the beginning of my Zhi-Xing Eisenhower Fellowship. Over the next 28 days, I would travel to seven cities, meet with more than 100 people, and become fully immersed in a different culture.

Eisenhower Fellowships is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that brings together leaders through an international fellowship experience, creating a global network of people committed to working toward a peaceful world that is also prosperous and just. Each selected fellow has a primary focus area while abroad, and mine was to explore the ecosystem around smart cities and gov tech in China.

The Zhi-Xing Fellowship was a collaboration between Eisenhower Fellowships and the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE), an organization that was pivotal to my on-the-ground support while in China. To get

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City Tech
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Rotterdam is using smart city tech to solve pressing urban problems. Here’s what Canadian cities can learn from the Dutch model

Jaime E. Love

During the past decade, thousands of Rotterdam building owners installed green roofs on their dwellings — about 330,000 square metres in total, almost two per cent of the city’s 18.5 square kilometres of flat roof space. But where some cities have promoted such projects to improve energy efficiency and absorb carbon dioxide, Rotterdam’s green roof infrastructure is all about water, and keeping as much rainwater run-off as possible out of aging, overtaxed sewers in order to prevent flooding.

About four-fifths of the Dutch port is below sea level. As Paul van Roosmalen, the city official overseeing sustainable public real estate, puts it: “The water comes from all sides” — the sea, the sky, the river and ground water. “It’s always been a threat.” But he also sees an opportunity to use a marriage of technology and green design to elevate the role of rooftops in managing Rotterdam’s water pressures.

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City Tech
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How can we be assured smart city tech will do more good than harm? It all comes down to governance

Jaime E. Love

After a Green/Social Democrat coalition won control of the Hamburg state parliament in a February 2020 election, the new government, under Mayor Peter Tschentscher, moved quickly to launch an ambitious transportation strategy for a fast-growing urban region of five million people. “We need to change the way mobility is organized in our city,” says Dennis Heinert, a government spokesperson. (The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has long enjoyed state status in Germany.)

The coalition’s goal is striking: 80 per cent of trips within the city will be via transit, walking, cycling or other shared modes by 2030 in order to cut private vehicle use and carbon emissions. The plan calls for better transit service without fare hikes, a major expansion of the cycling network, and a strategy to load up transit hubs (known as “switch points”) with a range of mobility options, such as e-bike rentals, that cover the

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Tech Deck
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Virginia Tech Hires Hokie Star D-lineman JC Price to coach the DL: More Hokies Come Home

Jaime E. Love

News Highlights: Virginia Tech Hires Hokie Star D-lineman JC Price to coach the DL: More Hokies Come Home

Marshall goes shopping in the Coaching “Portal”

Do you remember the 2018 disaster and the makeup game with Marshall that got the team back on their feet and ended up being a fun day in a relatively empty Lane Stadium? We were talking about their Assistant Defensive Coordinator being a Hokie Defensive line star from the mid to late 90s (especially the great ’95 defense)?

It looks like JC Price is coming home to Blacksburg. He and his family will take the long journey down 77 and up 81 – no speed in the overlap, JC. They get you.

Normally you’d have to say Price had to fill big shoes, but he has a decade of solid coaching experience, mentored Darryl Tapp and learned from the best – like his fellow defensive

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