Smart City Dispatch · Editor’s Briefs
Read earlier commentary on the projects, technologies, and choices shaping urban life.
Discover Urban Energy Monitor in Smart City Lab! Explore electricity demand, compare cities and regions, and uncover daily trends. Try it now—and tell us which city to add next! Home --> Smart City Lab --> Urban Energy Monitor
Read brief →“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” — William Gibson, author of *Neuromancer*
Read brief →We’ve launched a new segment under the Smart City Lab: the Visual Atlas. Explore extraordinary architecture, emerging urban districts, and forward-looking infrastructure from cities around the world—the exact systems, structures, and innovations you’d want in your future city.
Read brief →“They are not just cities of technology but cities of love, life, beauty, dignity, freedom and equality.” — Amit Ray, author.
Read brief →“A ‘smart city’ is a city that uses technology in a ‘smart’ way to reinforce the pillars of urbanization.”
Read brief →Most cities we initially selected for the Smart City Map are known for being—or aspiring to become—advanced smart cities.
Read brief →Not just a map, but a living digital model that understands what is happening across the city in real time.
Read brief →Smart City Dispatch has added a new City Digital Twins Database, bringing together real-world digital twin projects from cities around the globe.
Read brief →For a major U.S. city today, you are generally talking about thousands of government-operated cameras, and in the largest highly integrated surveillance systems, tens of thousands of cameras potentially accessible to authorities. And that's before counting ordinary private cameras on shops, office buildings, homes, parking garages, doorbells, etc. For a smart-city/privacy discussion, I think the more interesting metric isn't simply “How many cameras?” It is “How many cameras can the city access, correlate, and analyze?” A city with 2,000 integrated, AI-searchable cameras may have substantially greater surveillance capability than one with 20,000 disconnected cameras.
Read brief →For now, there are 19.
Read brief →1. Transform an existing city gradually—like Barcelona. 2. Build an entirely new smart city from the ground up—like NEOM.
Read brief →The new Ask SCD AI assistant can answer questions across the site, including topics from the Smart City Glossary and a wide range of smart-city technologies. It will keep improving—please send your suggestions using the form on the About page.
Read brief →I’ve just updated the site with several new interesting features, including a searchable world map of smart cities. I’ll continue adding cities—about 20 more are already in the database.
Read brief →Neocloud operators are specialized cloud providers that build and run GPU-heavy infrastructure optimized for AI training and inference—think of them as data centers filled with GPUs and specialized software designed primarily to run AI workloads.
Read brief →I am sure most people never think about the precise definition of a city. We tend to assume we simply know one when we see one. But, for the record, a formal definition does exist.
Read brief →Cities are where dreams are born, where opportunities are created, and where the future is built.
Read brief →I am beginning to think that NEOM will not be completed as originally envisioned. Given the political uncertainty in the region, its effects on business, and the project’s enormous cost—estimated at more than $500 billion—it seems increasingly likely that NEOM will be scaled back dramatically.
Read brief →While most attention is focused on advances in AI and how they may change our lives, far less attention is paid to how quickly our cities are changing around us. In some places, you can already enter a subway by simply looking into a camera, or walk into a store, take what you need, and leave without interacting with any staff.
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