Tom van Arman

Tom van Arman

• Smart city strategist and future city maker
• Creating inclusive and responsible future cities
• Founder of Tapp, an award-winning smart design agency
• A speaker who reaches a wide range of audiences

Tom van Arman left the USA in pursuit of his dreams. He wanted to design the cities of the future. After becoming an architect and urban planner in London, UK, he moved to Amsterdam, a city regarded by many as the smart city capital of the world.

The last twenty years have seen Tom van Arman use IoT, AI, APIs, and open source data as design tools to create more livable, inclusive cities.

Tom van Arman founded Tapp in 2010. The award-winning smart city design agency enables local governments and industries to bridge the gap between the built environment and the new digital landscape. He regularly works with local governments, energy companies, and mobility partners to provide prototype solutions to 21^st century problems.

In 2020, Tom van Arman developed the world’s first privacy-by-design crowd insights monitor for policymakers and authorities. It helped manage public spaces during the COVID pandemic and UEFA Cup 2020 Playoffs.

Tom van Arman has more recently consulted on responsible urban technologies for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions Institute, a former navy seal base Marineterrain Amsterdam Living Lab, the Amsterdam Chief Technology Office, Amsterdam Smart City, and Amsterdam Economic Board.

Tom van Arman – Speaker

A passionate speaker, Tom van Arman counts amongst his numerous and wide-ranging audiences international conferences, colleges and universities, research organisations, and governmental authorities, to name but a few.

He talks about all aspects relating to smart cities. These include urban planning, innovation, open data, and more. An American by birth, he currently resides in the Netherlands and presents in English.

Speaker Topics

• Responsible Sensing: Cities are becoming saturated with smart city solutions like object detection systems, facial recognition software, Wi-Fi trackers, and crowd monitoring systems that collect vast amounts of private data from citizens. In this talk, Tom showcases the many ways cities can collect valuable insights while protecting the digital rights of their citizens.
• Futureproof Cities: Uber and Airbnb radically changed cities faster than the city official and planning could have imagined. During the pandemic, citizens had to work from home, and learn remotely. Tom talks about the major changes to employment, housing, transport, and energy that will occur until 2030 that will affect the daily lives of residents.
• Smart Citizens? “I’ve got nothing to hide” – 85% of the public does not care about the proliferation of urban technologies which means we are leaving the big decisions up to the government and big tech. In this debate, Tom asks: who do you trust with our urban technologies – the politician or the billionaire? What kind of future city do we want (or deserve?)
• Citizen-Centric Design: People are familiar with Cookies and other trackers online, but where is the “I Accept” buttons for public squares or sidewalks? Our collective spaces are becoming more monitored by smart cameras and sensors. In this talk, Tom demonstrates simple smart city approaches that are participatory and citizen-centric by design.
• Data as the new design tool: Our desire to design and build more energy-independent, zero waste, socioeconomic sustainable, food & water secure cities will new data-driven new microgrids and smart contract infrastructures. Tom shows you how tomorrow’s architecture will not be based so much on style but revolutionary new SYSTEMS.