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Civic technology and the cities of our future: Part I

Submitted by editor on Fri, 2016/04/22 - 4:25pm

We're beginning to realize the future of smarter cities, but what concrete steps are governments, companies, and citizens taking to get there?

As Moore’s Law continues apace, cities will continue to blanket themselves in all sorts of cheap, reliable, and (we hope) meaningful sensors. Sensors generate data, and data will serve as the first of many building blocks to realize the pie-in-the-sky notion of a “smart city.”

People have grasped at what a “smart city” might mean for quite some time. The 1939 New York World’s Fair is a good start. Much of the best science fiction from the 20th century spends a considerable amount of time detailing how the cities of the future will look, alternating between various forms of u- and dystopia. Aldous Huxley, Isaac Asimov, and Robert L. Heinlein all realized that cities reflect their society’s dreams and technological capabilities—and built visions of what those cities might be like.

Until now, those dreams remained just that, but today we're witnessing the first steps in turning fiction to reality. It turns out that those steps are a fry cry from sci-fi glitz—they involve a lot of data and a lot of thinking about process. What we're witnessing now are three different groups coming together to come to bear on those basic building blocks for the cities of our future: citizen activists, enterprising governments, and private companies.

Read Complete Article Friday, April 22, 2016