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Turning Cities into Software

Posted by: Nate Berg

24 August 2010 - 6:00am

Many have called for "urban operating systems" to streamline how cities work, but few ideas have really taken hold. One small start-up, however, is making strides in developing that concept.

Fast Company's Greg Lindsay takes a look at the urban OS, and explores how a city's infrastructure and built environment could someday be interconnected in the cloud.

"Living PlanIT (pronounced “planet”) is the brainchild of Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, a pair of IT veterans who met when Lewis was still a top executive on the .NET team at Microsoft. Their ambition is twofold: to build a prototype smart, green city in Portugal that can be rolled out worldwide, and to drag the construction industry into the 21st century.

The latter may be the more audacious of the two. While plenty of companies have jumped on the smarter city bandwagon (as I’ve written about ad nauseum), no one has sought to make the construction business look more like the technology one."

Full Story: A City in the Cloud: Living PlanIT Redefines Cities as Software
Source: Fast Company, August 20, 2010
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If hundreds of people in your community raised reasonable concerns about a planning program you developed, how would you respond? Perhaps you might call a community meeting, or ask community elected officials to reach out to community leaders.
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