From the course: Smarter Cities: Using Data to Drive Urban Innovation

The amazing opportunity to reinvent our cities

From the course: Smarter Cities: Using Data to Drive Urban Innovation

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The amazing opportunity to reinvent our cities

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- We now live in an age when cars can drive themselves. Where chatbots can mimic humans. Where homes can disconnect from the electrical grid and generate their own energy from the sun. We live in an age where the world's knowledge is available on demand on a wireless device that we can fit in our pocket. We're quickly digitizing the analog world. We are rapidly connecting everyone together. Facebook alone provides a platform that connects over a billion people every single day. Gradually we are beginning to connect billions of devices in something we're now referring to as the internet of things. Soon your refrigerator will order food that might be delivered within a few minutes by a drone. All done between devices without human intervention. We live in a truly spectacular time. There are many reasons for this acceleration in technological innovation. It ranges from the increased availability of internet connectivity to more global freedom, and the easier flow of capital to rising living standards around the world to more access to education. Just the overall exponential effect of knowledge and capability that builds on itself and is so now available to so many. It appears that every sector of the global economy is being impacted by these technological shifts from retail to entertainment, from finance to automobiles and from manufacturing to energy production. No doubt our optimism must be cautioned by the disorienting disruption that all this change brings, but it's in this context that we must now also think about the future of our cities. In cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Melbourne and Palo Alto new technology is being used to deliver city services in new ways, in fact, in smarter ways. Cities now have an opportunity to reinvent how they are delivered done in the hope of better and faster and cheaper. This will require investment, risk taking, open minds, new skills and a generation of leaders ready to embrace the future.

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