City as Platform
Discussion
Paul Davies:
"Bearing the weight of booming populations and a precarious economy, cities can no longer conduct business as usual. Despite the countless technological and cultural shifts of the past century, many cities still resemble lumbering relics of the Industrial Era, belching forth smog produced not by factories, but instead motorized boxes stalled in traffic.
In response, cities are embracing the concept of the “city as a platform,” a hyper-connected urban environment that harnesses the network effects, openness, and agility of the real-time web. It’s a model most recently adopted by the City of Palo Alto, which announced an ambitious open data initiative on August 2nd.
Grand declarations make for great press conferences, but little else. As Palo Alto’s roadmap demonstrates, the devil is in the implementation. It’s an incremental process that requires an engaged citizenry that sees tangible benefit from such initiatives, changes in municipal procedures and IT infrastructure, and buy-in from business leaders, developers, and entrepreneurs.
An enormous and ambitious undertaking, no doubt, meaning many things to different constituents. Such disruptions are not without peril. As noted by critics such as Evgeny Morozov and Sarah Leonard, civic tech movements are not free of ideology, and transparency policies are often more opaque than promised.
While technologists boast of the potential for smartphone apps to connect citizens to city services and institutions, those smartphones double as data exhaust-emitting GPS devices, prompting significant civil liberties concerns. As Alex Howard succinctly puts it, “While the apps used to find city services are generally not the ones used to surveil citizens, in practice the mobile device itself may be an agent of both actions.”
The policies enacted and implemented in the name of innovation require ongoing debate and scrutiny; open data initiatives and civic apps are not ends in themselves. Despite this, the civic tech movement must play a fundamental role in addressing the challenges besetting cities and their denizens in the early 21st century: exploding populations, crumbling infrastructure, unemployment, even municipal bankruptcy." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/rebuilding-cities-as-platforms)