In cities across the world, mayors, urban planners, citizens, and, increasingly, tech companies are using powerful new devices and programs to create smart cities, where transportation systems, energy grids, and public services can be monitored and manipulated in real time. We should be careful about how we enable ubiquitous computing to change and control our cities, cautions Anthony Townsend, a senior research scientist at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. As a researcher, Townsend has studied how cities apply technology for the past 20 years. He spoke with journalist Nate Berg for the Business Report.
