How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs.
Around the world such cities are already being built, from Masdar in Abu Dhabi to Songdo in South Korea. Now the chaotic city near you may be in line for a makeover.
In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space, even the rubbish bins will be smart.
But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?
And is it a future we even want?
Technology firms such as IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco are busy selling their software to solve a range of city problems, from water leaks to air pollution to traffic congestion.
In Singapore, Stockholm and California, IBM is gathering traffic data and running it via algorithms to predict where a traffic jam will occur an hour before it has happened.
Meanwhile in Rio, it has built a Nasa-style control room where banks of screens suck up data from sensors and cameras located around the city.
In total IBM has some 2,500 smarter cities projects around the world and has even trademarked the term "smarter cities".
But when, at a recent smart cities event that IBM hosted, one of its engineers joked that the company "tends to look at the pipes and then people come along and destroy all our nice optimised systems", it summed up the issue that some have with the corporate-led approach to city management.
"Some people want to fine tune a city like you do a race car but they are leaving citizens out of the process," said Anthony Townsend, director of the Institute of the Future and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.
bbc
