Ericsson Business Review: Just Two Questions

(Originally published at Ericsson Business Review on December 10, 2013.)

Just Two Questions… to Greg Lindsay, Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute, and Director of its Emergent Cities Project

In what ways will developments in ICT, such as intelligent networks and the cloud, most shape life in 21st-century megacities?

Done right, networked cities promise to heighten the density and intensity of urban life by tying previously disconnected people, environments, and activities together. In India, for example, SMS-connected auto-rickshaw networks create mobility on demand for passengers and higher wages for drivers. Here in New York, apps such as Foursquare, LiquidSpace, and Tinder can help me find a coffee shop, an office, and maybe a date around the corner – where I might never have noticed them otherwise. And the entire premise of the “sharing economy” is the increased utilization of assets – like cars, tools, and spare bedrooms – all made possible by the network.

The outcomes will be profound: fewer cars on the street as mobility-on-demand replaces private vehicles; fewer office towers and hotels as the network makes it easier to find and share under-utilized offices or apartments, leading to space-as-a-service rather than 10-year leases; and commerce everywhere, courtesy of devices like Square. The real challenge will be faced by governments, as a hyper-networked city looks an awful lot like the informal settlement of megacities in the Global South – in which everything is an unregulated asset to be negotiated. Securing the safety and rights of citizens in such a world is a daunting task, to say the least. We’re just beginning to grapple with the issues.

With most of humanity living in cities – and so many in megacities – how do you see the evolution of how we interact with each other?

The physicist Luis Bettencourt recently described cities as “social reactors”. They compress dense, overlapping social networks of people in space and time, and the fusion of those networks – much like the sun produces light and heat – forms new ideas, social cohesion, economic growth, and so on. The best cities, in other words, are the ones that are most effective at bringing appropriately diverse groups of people together. They produce the experience of serendipity. This is what makes dense cities and public space so powerful; it’s what makes a city a city.

So how can we accelerate that fusion? ICT definitely has a role to play, especially now that our social networks are increasingly visible thanks to the combination of smartphones and social media. I believe the killer urban app is one that can reveal the strangers around me, connecting me to people whose acquaintance I might never have otherwise met. Call it “serendipity-as-a-service”.