We have been sold a tech-utopia called a Smart City. An urban infrastructure full of sensors, creating masses of data, or “big data”, sent to sophisticated systems, which crunch numbers and control all sorts of applications and information provisions. Hired by national and municipal governments, tech giants such as IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, have developed infrastructure now being applied in cities around the world, shaping the urban society of the future. However, several leading experts are now suggesting we turn this top-down system on its head. Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future and author of “Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest of a New Utopia”, talks about how smart cities will develop using the analogy of a mainframe vs. the web. He writes: “These model smart cities are like mainframes where everything’s going to a central place. There’s one suite of software that dictates how […]