Data is the answer, but what was the question?

摘要

The strange thing about the "data-driven city" is that almost everyone agrees we're headed there, but no one seems to agree on what it's actually for. Listen to five different talks on the same topic, and you might as well visit five different planets, each with its own language. In one, we'll have apps which allow citizens to report potholes or crowd fund street improvement, while in another, we'll have grids of sensors connecting everything to everything else. Next will be a socially-networked city, where marketing is omniscient and "serendipity can be engineered" (sic). In another, we're told in optimistic platitudes that peer-to-peer services such as Airbnb, Zipcar and Uber represent a new "sharing" economy. Men in suit jackets explain how government data will drive seamless, "smart" privatized infrastructure in which we all become hyper-efficient, coffee-in-hand consumers, whilst (younger) men in T-shirts project futures of alternative currencies and the Deep Web.