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This project documents the adoption of “smart city” technologies by service providers in California. These technologies potentially allow cities, counties, infrastructure agencies, and private service providers to manage their assets more effectively or sustainably, and make services more accessible. They can also raise concerns about privacy and surveillance. Our ongoing data compilation effort tracks the acquisition of such technologies in the transportation and security sectors using a variety of techniques, including interviews, web-scraping, surveys, and automated text analysis. We are also analyzing the extent to which each of these data sources can contribute to our understanding of how local public agencies make decisions regarding whether or not to adopt new technologies.

New Developments

Read about how voter pressure and internal capacity shapes early tech adoption in local governments in Urban Affairs Review.
Explore risk hotspots across smart city technologies through a 76-expert survey in the Journal of Urban Technology.
The cover of the 52nd Volume of the Urban Analytics and City Science journal.
Learn how ‘text-as-data’ uncovers patterns in transportation technology adoption in Urban Analytics and City Science.

Institutional Affiliations

Affiliated with the UC Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure.
Affiliated with the UC Berkeley Global Metropolitan Studies Department.
Affiliated with the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies.
Affiliated with Joint Venture Silicon Valley.