Contributor Blog

This morning, Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled New York City's long-awaited Big Apps contest. Big Apps seeks to promote the Internet industry in the Big Apple (it's sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) and make local government more transparent.

I've been following the evolution of open data initiatives at the municipal level for about a year now, and was really hoping that New York was going to set the bar for future efforts across the country. It doesn't. In fact it's hard to understand why some notable local tech superstars like investors Fred Wilson and John Borthwick would sign on to such a lame effort.

Since its founding in the mid 1990s, Alliance for Downtown New York has long been one of the world's leading business improvement districts. This non-profit organization has presided over the reinvention of New York's historic Financial District as a thriving 24-hour live/work district, while retaining a respectable share of the city's financial services sector. The Alliance built a network of Wi-Fi hotspots that lit up nearly every major public space in the district - not just outdoor locations like Bowling Green and City Hall Park, but also indoor atria like the Winter Garden and 60 Wall Street.

The American economy has long relied upon technological innovation to drive its economy. Today,basic investment in science and technology is once again taking center stage,as a cure for both our economic and environmental ills.

Here in New York City, there is an incredibly popular burger stand in Madison Square Park called The Shake Shack. It's one of the touchpoints for Silicon Alley, and a great meet-up spot. The problem is that its usually insanely crowded, with an hour-long line stretching well across the park.

Not to be defeated, Silicon Alley geeks created the Shake Shack Twitter Bot, which serves as a sort of chat room for people to report wait times at the Shake Shack. It's a few dozen lines of code that leverages Web 2.0 technology to make the city smarter, more efficient, and more fun.

The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.

The main thrust of the report is that China needs to focus less on growing its cities and more on making them efficient and productive. Given the massive levels of capital investment Chinese cities have seen over the last 20 years, it makes sense that the country's urban planners need to find ways to squeeze more capacity out of these systems. After all, as McKinsey projects, another 350 million people will need to be accommodated, some 250 million of them as rootless rural migrants.

Maybe it's the rain in New York today, but I'm gloomy. So while China collapses, it looks like the mobility-land use solution embodied in many of America's newer suburbs seems to be unravelling due to high oil prices.

The IHT reports:

One of the most influential pieces of contemporary urban theory I've ever read was a short monograph by Richard Norton entitled "Feral Cities", which appeared in the Naval War College Review in 2003. Norton described feral cities thusly:

"Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power."

China's economic boom has often been compared to the West's industrialization, only running in fast-foward. IT looks as if the decline of Western industrial regions may be playing out in the China on the same accelerated time frame. BusinessWeek Asia is reporting on "China's Factory Blues" this week on how a perfect storm of recent developments - from the decline in the US housing market to soaring commodity prices and new labor regulations - is shuttering factories in the Peal River Delta at an alarming rate.

It's tough to say what the impact of a decision like this is for the US market, where there are already so many obstacles to making money on the last mile.

I'm reposting this from my Future of Cities blog. You're all invited to join our conversation over there: it's sort of for urban studies what Planetizen is for urban planning and design.

Some of you may know that my wife and I welcomed a little girl to the world last month (Stella!). Despite the fact that my mother was a nurse for 40 years - or perhaps because of it - I've never spent a lot of time around hospitals. In fact, like many of you I share an aversion to the centralization of sick people.

It seems that global cities across the world are running up against an unforeseen brake on their future growth - airport and airspace congestion.

I spent a few days last week in Newcastle, England - a real gem of a town for tech history enthusiasts and urbanists. Newcastle is where the first steam trains and railways were built at the dawn of the industrial revolution. It was the demonstration of Robert Stephenson's Rocket in 1829 in Newcastle that you might mark as the beginning of mass mechanical mobility.

There are lots of Wi-Fi buses popping up in Northern California. The Google shuttle from San Francisco to the Valley has been running for a while and I think Yahoo! has a similar service, but I saw this Wi-Fi enabled AC Transit bus (that's Alameda County folks) crossing the Dumbarton Bridge last week. Apparently, the service is being subsidized by a grant from the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency.

It's the talk of the town today. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, after years of dithering has finally signed a contract to build out a shared cell phone infrastructure inside the underground portions of the subway system. Sort of.

According to the New York Times, "[t]he cellphone network will start in six downtown Manhattan stations in two years. Once it is shown to be working properly, Transit Wireless will have four more years to outfit the rest of the underground stations."

Thats six years to completion, folks. Awesome.

The Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre, a think tank close to Hong Kong governor Donald Tsang, has just released a report arguing that it might make sense for Hong Kong and Shenzhen to merge into a single metropolitan entity. According to The Economist Cities Guide email update (one of the magazine's best services for subscribers and a most for global urban trendwatches):

Valleywag, the uber-obnoxious Bay Area gossip blog has a great piece on the impact a rapidly-expanding Facebook.com has on downtown Palo Alto (The Institute is right across the street!)

The gang at Appleseed, one of New York City's most interesting boutique economic development consultancies, has just launched a new blog. This is looking to be a must-read, as founder Hugh O'Neill has been one of the most accurate analysts and forecasters of economic trends in the New York region for many years now, and a strategist bar none. If his first post, a take on New York City's current commercial real estate market is a harbinger of things to come, I suspect we'll be back for more.

Some readers may be familiar with the TELECOM-CITIES listserv that I've run for the last ten years, sharing discussions about how information and communications technology is transforming cities and the process of urbanization. Once upon a time back in 1998, 1999, TELECOM-CITIES was an active community of researchers trying to figure out what fiber optics and cell phones and dot-com startups meant for the future of cities. Over the years, the list has maintained that focus, but growth of readership has been stagnant for years.

It's increasingly clear that the future of the car in Asia, and possibly Africa and the Middle East as well, is going to be shaped as much by what happens in the Shanghai region as Western cities were by Detroit in the 20th century.

Last week General Motors (GM) unveiled a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered version of its Chevrolet Volt concept, a family of electric cars that get a portion of their energy from being plugged into the electrical grid. The first version, announced in January, married plug-in electric drive to a gasoline or ethanol generator that can recharge the battery.