Our technology-first approach has failed the city of the future. So-called “smart cities,” powered by technology, carry the promise of responding to the great pressures of our time, such as urban population growth, climate instability, and fiscal uncertainty. But by focusing on the cutting-edge technologies themselves and relying on private companies to move forward, we have lost sight of what we even want our cities to achieve with all that tech.

To date, smart city conversations mostly trade in optimism, focusing on images of cities without congestion and smart energy meters on every building. Global publications like this one devote space to specific solutions, while television commercials offer a visual taste of how our cities could look in the years ahead. Marketers fuel the fire by estimating a multi-trillion dollar market within a decade.

At what point do we prioritize the municipality–the actual governance of the city–to make great plans?

To help push the industry forward and achieve those trillion dollar market projections, we need to spend as much time and energy creating policy blueprints as we’ve spent researching and marketing new technologies. Smart policies must match smart technologies.

But where do you even begin that kind of process? Each city is fundamentally a different place with unique collections of industries, rules and regulations and culture. That means there won’t be silver bullet solutions to crafting smart city policies. Instead, policy innovators will need to start by sifting through common diagnoses and prescriptions, determining which apply to their specific market. After talking to municipal leaders from around the world, we recommend taking these five steps first:

1. Smart Cities Must Craft an Economic Vision That Includes a Specific Role for Technology

It all starts with cities making a concerted effort to understand who they are and where they want to go. In this respect it makes sense to think of cities like a business. No business can expect to succeed without a business plan, and no city can expect to maximize growth without an economic vision. That means the first step is a bit of self-reflection: smart cities conduct thorough assessments of their strengths and weaknesses, and plan future growth around their key assets and areas for improvement. Edmonton, Canada is a great example of this, where its City Vision 2040 program is a guide for all major decisions....Continue Reading

> via Wired