A panel lecture on smart city initiatives taken in Austin, by Catherine Crago Blanton (head of strategic initiatives and resource development at housing authority city of Austin), Craig Watkins (Professor at university of Texas) and Sherri Greenberg (Professor at LBJ school of public affairs). The panel discussed initiatives taken in the public housing sector and education sector in Austin.
Public housing - two efforts directly around public housing: first, applications that help connect people who need public housing with landlords renting out properties. Also, digitizing the bureaucracy involved in applying and using vouchers for public housing to help people with the process. The second is a project to provide every public housing resident with internet access, computer literacy and some computer system, usually inexpensive or donated low power linux boxes with preloaded educational content.
Energy efficiency - provided smart thermostats in public housing to save energy. An unexpected added benefit of these is that since they can be controlled by a smart phone, bed-ridden residents could control the temperature right from their bed without having to call in their caretakers just to adjust the thermostat.
Mobility and Transportation - many of the advances in touted in the area of transportation, such as ride hailing applications, do not help poor people who do not have credit cards; so a lot of focus was spent around studying public transportation, mapping routs and understanding transportation costs for activities. How much are the transportation costs of people who live in public housing for various activities such as buying milk, getting to work, paying bills? Using data collected from these research the city could optimize its public transportation routs to make it more accessible and less expensive, and to open up new opportunities for people in public housing.
Education - one if the issues identified is that an infusion of technology into classrooms had not translated into proper curriculum that enables students to learn how to use it properly, and there was a lack of training of teachers as well, so available technology was not really used as much as it could. Various programs were set up to improve this, including summer training for teachers and innovation labs in schools.
To my question of whether they have quantifiable results showing benefits of all these measures, I was answered with anecdotal evidence of improvement (stories of individuals who had better lives); so I'm guessing they don't have data on overall and systemic improvements.
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