There’s a big shift coming in the Smart City movement that will reshape our cities and create economic opportunities for decades to come. The pervasiveness of technology and the expansion of open data policies is about to unleash an economic growth engine for urban innovation that we have never seen. For the first time in history, we are creating digital cities.
The idea of leveraging technology to help cities run better is far from a new concept. Many innovative city leaders have taken steps to use technology within City Hall to help their departments work better or collaborate more effectively. Cities may have worked on data projects that would, for example, help firefighters access building plans electronically when they arrived at the scene of a fire. Other cities tracked asset information on roads or water systems to predict areas in need of repair. Some cities even went as far as using analytic models to predict crime incidents to redeploy their police force.
All of these solutions helped unlock data that was trapped within a single department of City Hall and put it to more effective use. I am proud to have had the opportunity to work with many of these teams, delivering better city coordination in Rio de Janeiro, better transportation in Singapore and better public safety in Memphis and Chicago.
View the story https://www.ge.com/digital/blog/unleashing-urban-innovation-smart-city