Smarter Cities

Art is a big part of smart. In Barcelona last week, thousands of paper people were strung in the sky for a joyous, multi-generational neighborhood dinner, shown below. All images in this blog post were submitted to IBM's Smarter Cities project.

Jack Mason of IBM sent me an email inviting me to participate in the Smarter Cities Tumblr project, where people can post Smarter City ideas. I could spend the rest of the night posting images, videos, quotes and other mixed-media. What makes a culture culturally and economically smart is one of the central questions at the core of Dancing Ink Productions, which was founded as an extrinsic result of an IBM InnovationJam during which 37,000 employees made suggestions for how the company should invest $100 million.

I believe that IBM's Smarter Planet project, bolstered by human creativity and sophisticated analytics, represents one of the best chances we have in the effort to combat the most serious crisis that faces all humans, climate change, while it serves to improve life in specific locales the world over.

People in smart cities care where their food comes from, how it is produced and how far it travels. The market at La Rambla, Barcelona.

No study of the metaphysical reality of cities is complete without a read of Italo Calvino's brilliant Invisible Cities. I submitted a passage from the book, which is about Marco Polo reporting back on imaginary adventures to the aging emperor Kubla Khan, from a section called "Trading Cities 4:"

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.