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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

City futures « Previous | |Next »
May 11, 2009

John Geraci in his The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory at O'Reilly Radar says that cities everywhere find themselves faced with the challenge of gigantic budget shortfalls brought on by the recession. We begin to realize that our cities today are outdated models of inefficiency, consisting of centralized, top-down and non-participatory services and infrastructures. The results are spiraling city deficits, ballooning bureaucracy, and an inability to pay for basic services, paired with problems of wasted resources, scarcity and redundancies. The way to solve these problems is for cities to become more like the web, relying on decentralized, distributed, participatory and geo-aware services built with open source software than anyone can configure, maintain and improve. Geraci says:

The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now. Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

He says imagine what would happen if cities did throw their weight behind this kind of innovation? The landscape of those cities would change virtually overnight, with legions of new applications springing up to provide residents with every sort of information conceivable, making their decisions more informed, making their movements more coordinated, and ultimately making the cities themselves work better.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:06 PM |