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The Tech Building Blocks of City 2.0
CWmike writes "Sci-Fi writers call it Utopia, the glorious City of the Future. But short of downtown atriums being guarded by invisible walls and flying cars, City 2.0 is not as far off as you may think, writes John Brandon. Ubiquitous wireless networks are already available in Baltimore and Minneapolis, Thomson Reuters has sustainable data centers that sell power back to the local utility, the smart energy grid is well on its way, and city-provided social networks are common. While the concept of City 2.0 is monumental, these key technology advancements are already helping pave the road to the next-generation city. The next steps toward the city of tomorrow are all about integrating these services cohesively, making them widely available across the entire metropolis and managing the services more efficiently. 'The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem,' says analyst Rob Enderle."
Imagine it. a quarter million devices connecting to your wireless "cloud".
None of which were spec'ed or validated by you or your group.
Tech support nightmare. Not to mention maintaining all the access points.
This is not "Utopia". This is WiFi. A means of connecting wireless devices (most of them) to services (most of the time).
Could we please have mandatory flogging for anyone who uses the term "2.0" with anything other than numbered software or documentation revisions? It has got to be more annoying by now than "paradigm".
End anonymous moderation and posting on
The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem
is just retarded, as anyone who has ever been anywhere near a city realizes that none of them are remotely resemble contained ecosystems, no matter how much solar power and internet you add.
Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface.
Retail did that 15 years ago with the Unified POS device standards. Every barcode scanner out there has a different interface: different commands to turn it on and off, different electrical requirements, etc., but every scanner ultimately does the same task - it reads a barcode. So 15 years ago the retail industry said "we're sick of this" and developed a de facto standard that became UPOS. All a vendor has to do is wrap their device driver in a little proxy layer so it meets the common UPOS interface standard, and any cash register can use it (yes, UPOS today is limited to Windows and Java implementations.)
It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller. As long as the cities arrive at a common interface spec for what a core electric controller does, this can work.
John
Unless its a city without traffic, pollution, gangs, poverty and the homeless its going to look pretty much the same to me. Getting rid of cars, trucks, and sirens would be the biggest step to a Utopian city I can think of assuming you replace it with effective transit, kinder gentler taxis, an effective logistics mechanism to replace trucks and effective emergency services without sirens.
I recall reading recently there is a 2 mile square suburb in Germany which was designed to ban cars. They have communal garages on the edge for your cars. Rail service to commute to jobs in the city. Stores are designed to be walked to. Its bikes and pedestrians only in the interior. That is pretty close to Utopia for me.
If people in businesses like IT, finance, etc and can telecommute effectively that would also be a huge step. Commuting alone make urban/suburban design an unavoidable living hell.
Solving the homeless problem a lot harder. You can't just cage them, can't just ship them somewhere else, and you can't just wave a wand and solve the drug abuse, mental illness, criminal records, hatred for the man and hatred for 40 hour work weeks in factories and offices that made them the way they are.
Here is an interesting article on CounterPunch with Alex Rivera, an indie sci fi film producer from Peru about his dystopian film, Sleep Dealer. It raises some interesting issues. One of the premises is based on a future sealing of the border to illegal immigrants who will instead continue to work in the U.S. through virtual links, like driving Taxi's, assembly line work in factories through robots, mowing lawns, etc. Its the ultimate continuation to outsourcing and globalization.
@de_machina
Cities need to grow and evolve "organically". All of this new technology is wonderful and awesome, but if imposed from above by planners, will only result in distortions and unintended consequences. City planning beyond a local neighborhood level just doesn't work well. We don't like to admit it, because we've been taught since childhood that central planners are quasi-omniscient, but it's true. Cities are just too complex.
That doesn't mean that cities don't get planned, they do. Cities are an emergent order. No one person (or committee) can possibly plan an efficient healthy city, but the voluntary interactions of a hundred thousand inhabitants can give rise to one. The information needed to run a city is extremely dispersed and constantly changing, so that it cannot be codified into a static plan. This is about Hayekian information coordination. It's something every city manager needs to understand. Only then will City 2.0 be open to us.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!