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

by Anthony M. Townsend

Overview

An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future.

From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology—sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces—to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. In Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend documents this emerging futuristic landscape while considering the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of the key actors—entrepreneurs, mayors, philanthropists, and software developers—at work in shaping the new urban frontier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393349788
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/06/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anthony M. Townsend is the author of Ghost Road and Smart Cities, and the president and founder of Star City Group, a strategic foresight and urban planning studio. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: Urbanization and Ubiquity 1

1 The $100 Billion Jackpot 19

2 Cybernetics Redux 57

3 Cities of Tomorrow 93

4 The Open-Source Metropolis 115

5 Tinkering Toward Utopia 142

6 Have Nots 168

7 Reinventing City Hall 194

8 A Planet of Civic Laboratories 226

9 Buggy, Brittle, and Bugged 252

10 A New Civics for a Smart Century 282

Epilogue 321

Acknowledgments 325

Notes 329

Index 371

Editorial Reviews

"An entertaining history of urban planning’s visionaries and villains, the technological breakthroughs and the spectacular failures that brought us to this crossroads."

New Scientist - Tim Smedley

"Townsend has collected fascinating stories of urban renewal and innovation from around the globe and packaged them into lessons that are neat and digestible"

Slate - Sarah Rothbard

"Anthony Townsend’s terrific book looks at the historic relationship of urban and industrial development to new technologies."

Architecture Today

"[Smart Cities] will engage both advanced geeks and cyber-dolts."

Nation - Catherine Tumber

"An ambitiously wide-ranging, admirably clear-eyed, and ultimately humanistic guidebook to the connected city."

Tom Vanderbilt

"[A] timely and necessary guide to this age of the Franken-city."

New York Times Book Review - Daniel Brook

"Compelling…Townsend begins a conversation."

Nature - Melanie Moses

"Our cities are in the first act of an unprecedented technodrama. At stake is nothing less than the survival of our urban species. Combining technological sophistication, deep humanity, and an urban planner's sensitivity to the nuances of places, Smart Cities is an essential guide to understanding the technologies changing urban life."

Andrew Blum

"Today, it's not the height of the skyscrapers, but the depth of the code that drives the modern city. Anthony Townsend brilliantly frames the new forces shaping tomorrow's metropolises. Read Smart Cities and you’ll never look at a skyline or walk down a city block the same way again."

Andrew Zolli

"[Townsend] has written a generous book in clean prose, one that will engage both advanced geeks and cyber-dolts."

The Nation - Catherine Tumber

"Powerful, readable prose."

NPR - Franklyn Carter