My INYT Op-ed: A People App for City Crowds

The International Herald Tribune is dead; long live the International New York Times. As part of a special section to commemorate today’s first edition, I was asked to contribute an op-ed on the future of cities. I’ve posted it in its (brief) entirety below:

A People App for City Crowds

By GREG LINDSAY

Co-director of the World Policy Institute’s Emergent Cities Project

I caught a glimpse of the city of the future last fall while crossing the street in San Francisco. I recognized someone I’d never seen striding toward me – because my iPhone warned me he was coming. Paul Davison runs Highlight, an app that maps users’ Facebook profiles to their phones’ GPS, producing a social network tethered to the sidewalks rather than splayed across cyberspace. If this century truly belongs to the city – and by its midpoint, four in five of us will live in one – then how should we best bring another few dozen cycles of Moore’s Law to bear on it? More than highways or skyscrapers, cities are the product of our personal encounters. Rather than wire our cities with sensors and run them from hidden control rooms, give me an app that can pick a new face out of a crowd – call it “serendipity-as-a-service.”