Our Networked World - - The City

Cities around the globe will face a future of scarcity and excess - - were "smartness" in the context of water, transportation, green buildings, clean energy, and city management will become increasingly important. Balancing the scarcity and excess equation to produce sustainable outcomes will be one of the critical function of smart networks embedded in smart cities.

Both hardware and software have a critical role in making cities smarter. Hardware, the digital plumbing of a city, will need creative software to find and develop system purpose. Which software platform dominates the city environment - - from traffic maps, to energy demand, to weather updates, to pictures, to security cameras - - will be interesting to watch and follow.

Call it the 'Urban Operating System" - - a platform that integrates all parts and combines them into all kinds of services, such as traffic management and better use of energy. The "Urban Operating System" will have the responsibility of helping to manage the urban environment, the "system zoo" so to speak. In some respects, the basic urban infrastructure and how it is managed has changed little in hundreds of years. The networked and smarter city represents the interconnectedness of "Something Old with Something New" - - where the operating urban platform of the new needs to connect all that is represented by the old.

An important consideration in the ideas behind the 'Urban Operating System" is the dashboard. Smart systems, especially those in complex urban environments monitoring hundreds of systems and sub-systems, will become more and more complex, making it hard to grasp what exactly happens to the data engineers and managineers will be looking at and be responsible for. The dashboard will have several key considerations - - what, when, why, where of the basic data and information; the transparency and inner workings of the operating system; and public versus private access to system inputs and outputs. With a smart urban system, engineers must recognize that in order to be successful on a global stage, the world of prediction, control, and siloed analysis must be transformed into a framework in which complexities are embraced, silos broken, and partnerships welcomed.

Hopefully, new system tools allow for new system thinking where, in the context of the urban environment, we get better at the following:

• Hone our abilities to understand parts and systems (both the trees and the forest).
• See interconnections.
• Ask "What If" questions about possible future behaviors.
• Be creative and courageous about system redesign.