Center for Urban Innovation Director Clark Gives Invited Talk at Seoul National University

Posted October 24, 2018

Center for Urban Innovation Director Jennifer Clark, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy, gave speeches about her smart cities research at Seoul National University on October 16 and Sangsan High School on October 19. She was invited by Sam Ock Park, professor at Seoul National University. 

Clark's remarks were entitled “Uneven Innovation: The Economic Geography of Smart Cities.” 

“I was honored to talk about the development of smart cities projects with the faculty and students at Seoul National University's Department of Geography and with the students at the Sangsan High School in Jeonju,” Clark said. “In a country with the fastest average internet connection speeds in the world, young people have a particularly keen understanding of the potential of smart cities technologies to promote more equitable, sustainable, and efficient cities.”  

Within the past academic year, Clark gave the first plenary talk at Regional Studies Association’s 2017 Central & Eastern Europe Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

In “Smart Cities: Remaking Markets and Manufacturing Open Innovation Spaces,” Clark highlighted the myriad products, actors, processes, and geographies of smart city implementation, emphasizing that being “smart” also necessitates being complex. She also outlined some regional policy implications of the move towards ‘smartening' cities, including smart cities’ potential to exacerbate existing intercity inequality, and finished by emphasizing that the smart cities problem was one of policy, not merely technology.

To learn more about this plenary talk and its conference, follow the conference’s Twitter hashtag #RSACluj or check out CUI's own Twitter account for highlights.

Clark's influential research on smart cities was featured in Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine in the story, “Smart Cities: Innovative Approaches Combining Engineering, Technology, and the Social Sciences Are Boosting the Urban IQ.” 

Visit https://urbaninnovation.gatech.edu to read more about Dr. Clark’s current research projects.