Cities as Technologies: Using Data and Analytics to Grow From Smart to Brilliant

“Smart”cities seek environmental sustainability, economic prosperity, and convenient, livable spaces – and Big Data and analytics vendors like IBM, SAP, and Oracle promise to help with sensors, dashboards, and other high technology solutions. Civic hackers, open data proponents, and social technologists are developing open data portals and holding hackathons to provide grassroots complements and competitors. Like any complex technology, cities are assembled from component technologies, and they must be architected to learn – by being open and receptive to tomorrow’s disruptive technologies.