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
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Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
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