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The Master Plan

IBM Partners With Portland To Play SimCity For Real

The Oregon city is the first to use IBM's app to help cities figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. But can any algorithm quantify the whole experience of city living? READ»

IBM Offers Cash-Strapped Mayors A Smarter City-In-A-Box

A plug-and-play system for cities that want the benefits of real-time data crunching, without the big bills required to become a true city of the future.READ»

IBM Smarter City Classes Seek Solutions For Emergency Rooms, Public Transit, And "The Crotch"

IBM has announced the 50 recipients of its “Smarter Planet Faculty Innovation Awards” and $10,000 grants for designing classes geared toward the technologies, markets, and applications in which IBM has a vested interest. Including one particularly gnarly Chicago transit hub.READ»

Smart Cities: Getting Greener, and Making Money Doing It

Another week, another smarter city conference. "It's the creation of a new industry!" Cisco's chief globalization officer, Wim Elfrink, exclaimed on stage last night at the opening of Global Green Cities of the 21st Century, this ...READ»

Port-au-Prince 2.0: A City of Urban Villages?

Reclaiming the core of the old city could require block-by-block redevelopment, at least according to the plans presented last night in Haiti by the architect Andrés Duany and his firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.READ»

Building a Smarter Favela: IBM Signs Up Rio

A new operations center features an impressive high-tech centerpiece--a weather forecasting system built atop IBM Research’s “Deep Thunder” software and tailored to Rio’s climate and topography. READ»

The Battle for Control of Smart Cities

Will tech-powered cities revolutionize the way we live or hand corporations the keys to our privacy? A new study by the Rockefeller Foundation offers conclusions.READ»

After the Expo: Urban Renewal With Chinese Characteristics

The future belongs to crowds. That’s the lesson in a sentence from Expo 2010, which concluded in Shanghai on Sunday after six months, a record-breaking 73 million visitors, and 30,000 newborns saddled with the unfortunate name of ...READ»

Cities for People: A Q&A With Architect Jan Gehl

While visiting New York this week for the American publication of his latest book "Cities for People"--a kind of manual for making walkable cities--Jan Gehl invited me to sit with him in Bryant Park to observe the sidewalk ballet and discuss what he calls “the needs of the urban habitat of homo sapiens.”READ»

A City in the Cloud: Living PlanIT Redefines Cities as Software

When did Silicon Valley become so obsessed with building cities? Last month it was Cisco’s SVP of strategy Inder Sidhu describing the company’s smart city play as the $36 billion company’s “biggest opportunity.” Then, at the ...READ»

The Government's Landlord Smartens Up and Goes Green

By now you’ve heard plenty about smarter cities and even a “decade of smart,” but what about a smarter courthouse? Or a smarter federal building? Despite the flurry of deals signed by cities and even non-profits with the ...READ»

David Harvey's Urban Manifesto: Down With Suburbia; Down With Bloomberg's New York

"New York? The whole damn place has been turned into a suburb," sneered David Harvey, startling a roomful of New Yorkers who prided themselves on the same things he derided: the makeover of the city's parks; the new network of bike ...READ»

America in 2050: Urban, Suburban, or Both?

Last Wednesday night, Joel Kotkin--a futurist and (sub)urban historian--squared off in a debate against Christopher Leinberger, a developer, consultant and proponent of "walkable urbanism." The topic: "America 2050: What Will We ...READ»

Russia Hires Cisco to Build a Silicon Forest, Easier Said Than Done

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrapped up his whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley yesterday, and while it’s fun to imagine Steve Jobs giving him the five-cent tour of One Infinite Loop or Ev Williams and Biz Stone teaching him how ...READ»

Wiring a Smart City in the Desert

Is Dubai the world’s smartest city? Maybe not in the sense that it mortgaged long-term infrastructure with $100 billion in very short-term debt, but “smart” in a way IBM, Cisco and other tech heavyweights would be envious ...READ»

The Mall Is Undead, but Maybe Not for Long

Is the mall dead? And if so, is it permanently dead? That question hung in the air on the last day of the annual Congress for the New Urbanism. "We have too much retail," said Francis Scire, a senior leasing executive at Simon ...READ»

New Urbanism for the Apocalypse

Has the New Urbanism outlived its original purpose? The movement's charismatic founder, Andrés Duany, seems to think so. Last week's 18th annual Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta should have been an unalloyed triumph for Duany ...READ»

Peter Calthorpe's Vision for California: Save the Cities, Save the World

New Urbanism has traditionally positioned itself as an antidote to the soullessness of urban sprawl, with an emphasis on "soul" -- the ineffable benefits in living in places built to human scale rather than breaking out hard metrics ...READ»

HUD Announces the End of Urban Sprawl as We Know It, New Urbanists Feel Fine

It could turn out to be the first step in a sea change about how the federal government approaches urbanism, which in turn could lead to the end of sprawl. Or, to paraphrase Nixon, we are all New Urbanists now.READ»

Driving Makes You Fat, Urban Sprawl Bankrupts You, Other Life-Saving New Urbanist Epiphanies

On the afternoon of July 6, 1999, Dr. Richard Jackson was summoned to the office of his boss, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Jackson was then the head of the CDC's National Center for Environmental ...READ»