“Not-So-Smart Cities” — My NYT Op-Ed

Sunday’s edition of The New York Times includes my op-ed on increasingly ambitious “smart cities” – which I’ve been covering for Fast Company the last two years. The ultimate aim of these efforts is to build an “urban operating system” capable of playing SimCity for real. The op-ed begins below:

The Southwest is famously fertile territory for ghost towns. They didn’t start out depopulated, of course – which is what makes the latest addition to their rolls so strange. Starting next year, Pegasus Holdings, a Washington-based technology company, will build a medium-size town on 20 square miles of New Mexico desert, populated entirely by robots.

Scheduled to open in 2014, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, as the town is officially known, will come complete with roads, buildings, water lines and power grids, enough to support 35,000 people – even though no one will ever live there. It will be a life-size laboratory for companies, universities and government agencies to test smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems – technologies commonly lumped together under the heading of “smart cities.”

The only humans present will be several hundred engineers and programmers huddled underground in a Disneyland-like warren of control rooms. They’ll be playing SimCity for real.

The rest of the op-ed is available here.