NEW IDEAS
Research & Perspectives
Is the U.S. Falling Short on Infrastructure Innovation?
The Infrastructure, Innovation, and Jobs Act of 2021 authorized more than $550 billion in spending on transportation, broadband, water systems and more. But are cities do enough to leverage technology to future-proof this next generation of investments?
The Uncertain Future of Urban AI
Future historians will look back on 2022 as the year deep learning broke out of the box. But the excitement over large language models, the AI approach behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, glosses over lingering barriers to deep learning’s usefulness in the urban realm
How Cities Can Make Software Together
Open Source Software (OSS) presents a possibility for cities to fulfill fast-growing software needs with greater autonomy and lower cost. However, OSS requires enormous effort to create, and even more to deploy and maintain.
SOUND BITES
In the News
Cities See Many Risks in Emerging Technologies
The Economist‘s “Digital Cities Index 2022” quotes from a lengthy interview with Dr. Townsend on the evolving smart cities movement, and how cities are starting to systematically focus on the risks of emerging technologies like AI.
How Hybrid Work Harms Innovation
When our friends at Arup took one of the first deep dives into forecasting the future of hybrid work in late 2020, it was already clear that the new flexibility would come at a cost—an innovation deficit whose bill is now coming due.
GHOST ROAD Named Best Business Book of 2020
James Suroweicki writes in Strategy + Business, the PwC magazine, “Ghost Road offers up an exhilarating picture of the ways in which autonomous vehicles might transform our lives for the better, saving time and lives, reshaping cities, and helping combat climate change.”
DEEP DIVES
Books
“A timely and necessary guide to this age of the Franken-city.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A relentlessly creative and deeply thought-through analysis of the future of transportation.”
—Inside Higher Ed
