Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

More than anything else, they need to be inclusive. In her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the acclaimed urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”39 Yet over fifty years later, as we set out to create the smart cities of the twenty-first century, we seem to have again forgotten this hard-learned truth.

e spectacular array of local innovations being cooked up in the world’s civic laboratories will challenge our assumptions about both technology and cities, and how they should shape each other. Technologists often want to cut to the chase, find the killer app, and corner the market—this dynamic is already at work in corporate plans for cookie-cutter smart cities. But if we want to get the design of smart cities right, we need to take into account local quirks and involve citizens in their creation. Over time, we’ll surely extract the essence of what’s reusable and share it widely.

Today, India needs to build the equivalent of a new Chicago every year to keep up with demand for urban housing

“The world population will reach a landmark in 2008,” they declared; “for the first time in history the urban population will equal the rural population of the world.”

But you don’t have to take it sitting down. Because this isn’t the industrial revolution, it’s the information revolution. You are no longer just a cog in a vast machine. You are part of the mind of the smart city itself. And that gives you power to shape the future.

This digital upgrade to our built legacy is giving rise to a new kind of city—a “smart” city. Smart cities are places where information technology is wielded to address problems old and new.