ABSTRACT
Our fascination with how technologies can improve cities is timeless. Take the last hundred years: there was the Efficient City movement of the 1930s, the Modernist city of the 1950s and 1960s, and more recently Bill Mitchell’s “City of Bits” (1995) where technology became the thing underneath it all. We are now in an age of mobile technologies where our interaction with the city is in fact “beneath it all” but also literally in our finger tips. In this new era, which I call the Responsive City, local governments and private institutions meet the needs of visitors and inhabitants by providing information almost anywhere. This new Techno-Utopia involves embedded sensors, command centers, mobile and web-based service applications, and analysis of Big Data. With all its possibilities, a city embedded with sensors navigates a thin line between providing citizens with a “public good” and creating a surveillance system that puts its citizens under watch, there is a fine balance between total digital control and open information systems. For good or for bad, in the Responsive City data is king, and the analytics are heralded as transformative for urban policy and strategy. Data analytics can be transformative—it can both obscure the needs of marginalized communities as well as elevate them. Like no other era before it, today’s techno-city can be top-down or bottom-up and the popularization of a “Do it Yourself” (DIY) culture, Civic Hacking and Open Government has created a space for this bottom-up innovation. The ease in which cities and their citizens can make mobile applications has generated partnerships between the city and its civic minded technology community. This collaboration allows governments to be more facile in the way they develop infrastructure to meet the needs of its citizens, by removing barriers to innovation. The Bottom-up Technology City is highly mobile, adaptive, analytical, and reacts to the needs of the citizens by forming alliances that allow for innovation outside formal governmental channels.
