Giving Compass' Take:

• Five years after an initial "smart cities" report, Brookings examines the specific strategies needed for municipalities in the U.S. to bring a digital vision to reality.

• What can the nonprofit sector do to accelerate progress in this realm? How can tech be leveraged to help the most vulnerable populations in our urban areas?

• Here's how startups can help solve city challenges.


How do metro areas continue to bridge the gap between their ambition to leverage technology thoughtfully and the outcomes they hope to achieve? Assuming there is a central strategy and a clear set of desired outcomes to advance the collective future of a metro area, these four steps can benefit just about every place:

Promote deeper engagement with residents and businesses. Building a smarter city requires the trust and support of the people who live there.

Intentionally build strong, formal collaborations between public, private, and civic actors. If metro areas are collections of people, businesses, and institutions, we must recognize municipalities shouldn’t always run point.

Modernize governments’ approach to data collection and use. Recent developments in technology have exponentially increased the private sector’s ability to collect, store, and analyze data, while the government lags further and further behind.

Establish new performance measures and goals based on collective outcomes. It is promising that some smart city actors now lead with long-term planning when designing local programs and investment strategies. But to deliver on what are often complex outcomes — promoting social inclusion, reducing environmental waste, and growing entrepreneurial ecosystems — the public sector and its partners need new sets of performance measures and data to reflect the challenges of today.

Read the full article about smart cities by Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane at Brookings.