Fixing South Africa’s Water System, With Citizen Inspectors | Co.Exist
WaterWatchers is a new tool from IBM that lets mobile users, even ones without smartphones, report issues with the water in their communities. Can it help clean up the country’s dirty water?
SXSW: Don’t Fight City Hall—Hack It | Time
At SXSW: Rachel Hoat, the wunderkind chief digital officer of New York, talked about the way that Gotham has begun to use digital tools to streamline governance and make City Hall quicker and more responsive. Abhi Nemani, the director of strategy at Code for America—a civic-minded startup that lives up to its nickname as the Peace Corps for Geeks—discussed how nimble techies can help even the smallest cities innovate. And Erika Diamond of Recyclebank—a now mature green startup that rewards people for taking green actions, including recycling—addressed the way the private sector can work hand in hand with digitally savvy city governments.
Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/03/12/south-by-southwest-dont-fight-city-hall-hack-it/#ixzz2NP8XWj7v
City of Dubuque: Investing in sustainability for economic development now and in the future.
By monitoring traffic patterns as well as water and power consumption, Dubuque, Iowa is improving sustainability and engaging its citizens.
How will our future cities look? | BBC News
Imagine a city of the future. Do you see clean streets, flying cars and robots doing all the work?
Raising the IQ of School Buildings
Schools across the U.S. are discovering that bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into a building’s operations can go a long way toward creating more efficient, sustainable and profitable campuses.
Honolulu: Citizens Building a Smarter City
People globe-wide are flocking to cities, where, the thinking goes, they’ll be able to live nice, robust lives more efficiently and emit less planet-killing pollution. But city living is only really a solution to woes like climate change and resource overconsumption if 1) a city actually helps its residents use resources more effectively and 2) people decide to keep living in them.
Which is why developing state-of-the-art mass transportation systems is considered such an important part of the equation.
Stand on a busy big-city street corner at lunch time and you will witness a chaotic scene. Thousands of people are walking every which way, getting on and off buses, descending to subways, riding in cars, and walking in and out of buildings. Where did all these people come from? And where are they going? Until now, such questions were unanswerable–mysteries of the city. But no more.
Today, thanks to deep analytics, we can for the first time understand the complexities of cities in motion.

You think cities are crowded now? By 2030, more than 5 billion people will live in urban settings. But before we get to that kind of population density, we have to optimize our cities. We need to make them smarter and better; technology can help.
Cities all around the world work with developers and contractors to make city living better, whether it’s improving the timing of traffic lights or creating a useful app, which becomes more powerful as smartphone penetration continues to increase. Apps and well-implemented technology can help cash-strapped governments save money and, be more efficient. Check out this list of 25 Technologies Every Smart City Should Have.
Crowdsourcing is not like outsourcing. As a community-based initiative, crowdsourcing fosters ideas and strengthens communities by bringing neighbors and strangers together for a shared enterprise. New York City has begun using this model to influence change with its government initiatives and…
