The corporate smart-city rhetoric is about efficiency, predictability, and security. "You’ll get to work on time; no queue when you go shopping, and you are safe because of CCTV cameras around you". Well, all these things make a city acceptable, but they don’t make a city great. We have the technological solutions, but what’s the problem?

Goodcitylife.org is the research answer to that! It’s a global group of researchers and practitioners who think about fundamental urban problems that have received little attention and put forward ideas not to make cities smarter, but dwellers happier. Recently, for example, we have used social media data to map the sensorial and emotional layers of cities. Those layers will make a variety of applications possible - from urban planning to health informatics.