Approximate world population right now:

MESH Cities' mission is to help distribute the methods and technologies that will shape the design of tomorrow's responsive, sustainable cities. Please join us in that goal. MESH is an acronym that stands for: M=Mobile E=Efficient S=Subtle H=Heuristics

Smartphone platform use as of 2011 with "blue ocean" of potential growth.

There are about 350 million cellphones in use across North America. One-third of those are smartphones. The winning smartphone platform has yet to be determined, but as the above chart shows, Android-based phones have edged out RIM and Apple to lead the race.

More importantly for MESH Cities readers, the number of applications associated with those devices is growing exponentially. Why is this a game changer for cities? Outside of public protest movements like Occupy XYZ Street, urban planners are catching on to the idea that mobile-based applications offer a host of new ways to understand the city. Dr. Jennifer Evans-Cowley of Ohio State University observes that traditional methods of understanding cities are being swept aside by the disruptive power mobile Apps offer.

The Atlantic Cities notes some of the city Apps now in play:

• MyColumbus – 3-1-1 service requests.
• You The Man – New York City’s transportation department developed this one to curb drunk driving.
• myDelaware – Send a code violation directly to the city.
• Citizens Connect – Flag potholes, graffiti and other nuisances.  

MESH CIties editor and founder Robert Ouellette is an early advocate and visionary of the way mobile applications can improve the efficiency of cities. His crowd sourced TTC website project kicked off an event Harvard Business Review called one of the great new business ideas of 2008. Toronto made transit data available for developers as a result of that project . The "Rocket Radar" application is an example of a solution based on that data.

In Shenzhen, China, officials are considering a “straddling bus” system designed by Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment, to be built directly on existing roadways. Are massive infrastructure solutions like this the key to smarter, more sustainable cities?

IBM launched the next phase of its world-changing competition for cities last month securing that company's place as the dominant commercial player in the smart city marketplace. October 24th IBM announced another year of its three year, $50 million smarter city competition. Through this competition cities vie to access IBM's expertise across the "finance, sustainability, public safety, and citizen services" sectors. The one-time value of those services for winning cities is $400,000 US. The deadline for 2012 grant applications is 16 December 2011.

What does it take to be a Smarter Cities challenge winner? Here are some criteria:

• Strong leadership;
• Strong stakeholder collaboration;
• Goal to make city more efficient;
• Measurable efforts to improve the lives of their citizens; and
• Involvement of the city's multiple disciplines and departments.
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In an attempt to use crowd sourcing to access bottom-up user information, the company launched a twitter campaign where Stanley S. Litow discussed what it takes to become a smarter city. Participants followed @CitizenIBM, and commented using the hashtag #CityChat. No word yet how successful their initiative was, but a hat tip to the company for trying non-traditional approaches to gain insights into the complex organisms called cities.

The IBM Commuter Pain Index measures and ranks the emotional and economic toll of commuting across 20 international cities.

Spanish MESH CIty upstart Libelium is offering urban designers and traffic engineers new tools that may just change the way we manage the massive conurbations we call 21st Century cities. The company has come up with a technology that can monitor how many people are using a street or sidewalk or bike lane. If you know anything about the way traffic engineers gather data, you probably know that it generally requires expensive pressure or magnetic sensors. Those solutions are car or truck specific. They are difficult if not impossible to use for monitoring other kinds of traffic--like pedestrians and bikes. Until now. Libelium thinks it has an answer. It will track the unique bluetooth signals generated from the cell phones all those walkers or cyclists are now carrying around with them. Here is how they describe the benefits of their system:

Understanding the flow and congestion of vehicular traffic is essential for efficient road systems in cities. Smooth vehicle flows reduce journey times, reduce emissions and save energy. Similarly the efficient flow of pedestrians in an airport, stadium or shopping centre saves time and can make the difference between a good and a bad visit. Monitoring traffic - whether road vehicles or people - is useful for operators of roads, attractions and transport hubs.

At the heart of Libelium's system is a dual radio circuit board mashing-up bluetooth with zigbee. One radio picks up the cell phone-based bluetooth signals while the other moves that data to the Internet via a dedicated I.P. address. This relatively low cost system allows nuanced measurement and analysis of so-called "soft" city usage. That information will improve the way urban designers and traffic planners design intelligent city transit systems.

Last week Richard Branson and Foster+Partners opened the world's first commercial space port in the New Mexico desert. Part of Branson's push to be the first to offer flights into space for consumers, albeit very rich ones, the space port opens a discussion about the benefits advanced technologies like this bring to the future sustainability of our planet, not to mention the role they play in building MESH Cities. Many argue that the commercialization of space is a distraction from the really important issues facing humankind. How does taking people into space for half a million dollars or so benefit anyone here on an increasingly precarious earth? The innovator and techno-environmentalist Buckminster Fuller offered this answer: Getting people into space and sustaining them there demands that we design complex, new technologies that allow us to do more with less. The word he coined to describe that process was "synergetics." Fuller may have maintained that Branson and Galactic designer Burt Rutan are creating new tools that can be adopted to solve real-world, terrestrial challenges. In the sixties and seventies he said that the Apollo program's investment in computer technology would change the world. He was right. Without that investment the Internet and intertwined mobile communications systems as we know them today would not exist. For that matter, the complex green energy production and distribution networks now shouldering an increasing part of the world's energy demands would fail without the research into integrated circuits, communications systems, and advanced composite materials the space program spun off. The space port designed by Foster+Partners is another example of sustainable design driven by advanced technologies. Its LEED Gold systems include solar voltaic and solar panels along with a reverse geothermal system that dissipates ambient desert heat into the ground below the building.

A now famous argument began when Richard Florida released "Who's Your City" and put forth the idea that the world is not flat but spiky. Florida took aim at New York TImes columnist and author Thomas Friedman who had earlier, and somewhat famously proposed that the world is flat (of course metaphorically, but I am sure there are some anti-science people out there who think a round world is just a "theory"). A condensed version of the two perspectives goes something like this: The world is spiky because talent, economic activity, and innovation cluster around the world's most successful cities. The areas in-between those cities tend to be low economic zones. On the other hand, the world is flat today because communications technology, global supply chains, and manufacturing capacity work together to push a middle-class lifestyle out across the globe. Here geographic distance and cultural differences are no longer barriers to economic growth. So who is right? Florida or Friedman? And how do MESH Cities influence the ascendancy of one world view or the other? I ask this question for the sake of a student at the Rotman school of management. Last Friday I gave a talk there with the working title of "How can MESH Cities drive innovation?" The basic premise of the talk was that in complex, rapidly changing markets linear and predictive innovation techniques are unable to drive the kind of responsive change needed to be successful. To be innovative in those markets requires a different innovation model, one that is distributed and/or crowd-sourced. The student asked--in the context of building sustainable cities--if MESH City principles could be applied in, say La Paz as effectively as in Toronto. Good question. This is what got me thinking about the Florida/Friedman dichotomy. MESH Cities, I would contend, do not have to align with spiky cities. In fact, in the technological shift away from copper-based communications systems, not having vast and expensive (continue reading)