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February 16, 2009, 07:05 AM ET
Lev Gonick: Smart Cities and the University
First the Internet changed everything about our lives. Now it is about to change everything about the cities we live in. I think America’s great universities need to embrace a new research and teaching agenda that focuses on the design, sociology, health, and economy of a new kind of smart city.
The number of people living in urban areas is projected to grow from 3 billion today to 5 billion by 2030. For the first time in our collective experience as humans, more people are living in cities than in rural settings.
At the same time, the Internet is maturing and expanding from a technology based on connecting computers and mobile devices to a technology that connects everything. Buildings will breathe and report their health. Sensors will capture data on the quality of the air we breathe and simultaneously become a lab for school children and post docs alike. Health-care education and much of our health care can become proactive in the smart city as both consumers and providers are able to customize their experience with better intelligence related to the population’s general and specific health needs. The smart city will not only include access to a more transparent government but also enable citizens to participate more actively and directly than ever before.
Smart cities are coming. As the stimulus package coming out of Washington tries to recatalyze economic growth, job creation, and new skills for the nation’s future, universities are the recipients of much scarce public investment and the source of much of our country’s collective hope. So the time is ripe to reimagine, reinvent, and restimulate the urban experience as one based on a smart city created in the image of our universities—as a place that attracts the bright, the curious, those seeking inspiration, and those committed to changing the world. —Lev Gonick
Lev Gonick, this month’s guest blogger, is CIO at Case Western Reserve University.
Categories: Research
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