Boston wants to be smarter. The city has taken advantage of tiny sensors, big data and other technologies to become more responsive to its residents’ needs. But technology alone is not sufficient to make today’s cities liveable. Boston has discovered that it also needs to reach the old-fashioned low-tech community and integrate that technology with city life.
Kris Carter, co-chair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, rolled out Boston’s smart city program in 2014. It started with an app that residents could download to report locations where sidewalks needed repair. The city collected those reports and decided which place should be repaired.
The system worked beautifully, except for one problem: most of the alerts came from wealthier neighborhoods, where the concentration of smartphone-equipped residents was highest.
Boston’s push to become a leading smart city now contains a core tenet: high-tech initiatives(方案) shouldn’t only benefit the already well-resourced. Under Carter, technology is seeping into the city’s functioning and daily life, but with a special eye to serving those populations and neighborhoods that need the most support.
Instead of letting tech-savvy(懂技术的) residents and high-tech companies drive the process. Carter’s group run meetings in local libraries and other public spaces to find out what problems people in different neighborhoods care about solving. “Some cities take the point of view that if you put out the right technology devices, people will figure out how to take advantage of them,” he explains. “We wanted to start with a grass-roots view of what challenges needed to be addressed.” Only in that context, he adds, does technology enter the picture.
When it comes to sidewalks, Boston has introduced a second method of collecting repair tips. In addition to its smartphone app, it has hired people to get out and walk the city’s 1,700 miles of sidewalks to take notes on their condition. “Combined with our other sidewalk information, that gave us an even better way to predict where faster repairs would do the most good,” says Carter. “We’re really always looking for whatever mix of approaches best solves the problem.”
【小题1】What does the underlined phrase “rolled out”in Paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Printed. | B．Canceled. |
| C．Started. | D．Doubted. |
| A．It works well for poor neighborhoods. |
| B．It helps the blind to walk safely in the city. |
| C．It solves the problem from low-tech community. |
| D．It works on smart phones to report repair information. |
| A．Technology is used properly in different neighborhoods. |
| B．The use of technology is still a dream of the residents in Boston. |
| C．Carter wishes high-tech companies to use the technology first. |
| D．Boston wants to be different from other cities towards using technology. |
| A．Boston is becoming a crowded city. |
| B．Boston focuses too much on repair tips. |
| C．Boston is taking practical ways to get repair information. |
| D．Boston is spending too much on checking the sidewalks. |
