For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
NEW YORK — What are the latest innovations — especially high tech “apps” — to make today’s cities succeed?
A host are being applied or waiting in the wings. They include new forms of electronic measurement to track and channel traffic, monitor potential crime sites, check on water quality, gauge the energy use in “smart grids,” and much more.
Will the new “apps” change the way cities look in a decade or two? Not on the surface, Wired Magazine senior editor Nicholas Thompson suggested at the eminent Regional Plan Association’s yearly assembly here last week, attended by 700 civic and business leaders from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metro area.
But the technologies have the potential, Thompson and others said, to improve dramatically the convenience and safety of cities, plus cutting their costs.
Some already have good track records — for example electronic monitoring for location, time and frequency of criminal incidents. Pioneered in New York City, often combined with community policing, the geographic positioning is already undergirding improved law enforcement in cities nationwide.
