Anthony Townsend

Anthony Townsend is a research director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California.

Member for
19 years 7 months

Contributed 26 posts

Full Bio

Anthony has been researching the implications of new technology on cities and public institutions for over a decade. As Research Director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California, Anthony's work focuses on several inter-related topics: pervasive computing, the urban environment, economics and demographics, public and nonprofit organizations, and the media industry.

Prior to joining IFTF, Anthony enjoyed a brief but productive academic career at New York University, where he directed research sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.

Anthony is active in international futures research networks, and received a Fulbright scholarship in 2004 to study the social impacts of broadband in South Korea. He was one of the original founders of NYCwireless, a pioneer in the municipal wireless movement.

Anthony received his Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.

Therapeutic Cities

I'm reposting this from my <a href="http://cities.iftf.net">Future of Cities</a> 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.

Airports as a Brake on Global City Growth

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

Blended Urban Reality: What Would Jane Jacobs Think of Facebook?

The Future of Presence

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 <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/launch_ani_rocket.shtml">demonstration</a> of Robert <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephenson's_Rocket">Stephenson's </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephenson's_Rocket">Rocket</a> in 1829 in Newcastle that you might mark as the beginning of mass mechanical mobility.

Wireless, Connected, Productive Transit - Formula for Hyper-Sprawl?

There are lots of Wi-Fi buses popping up in Northern California. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html">Google shuttle</a> from San Francisco to the Valley has been running for a while and I think Yahoo! has a similar service, but I saw this <a href="http://www.actransit.org/news/articledetail.wu?articleid=ae8a49cd">Wi-Fi enabled AC Transit bus</a> (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.

Anthony Townsend