Anthony Townsend
Anthony Townsend is a research director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California.
Contributed 26 posts
Anthony has been researching the implications of new technology on cities and public institutions for over a decade. As Research Director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California, Anthony's work focuses on several inter-related topics: pervasive computing, the urban environment, economics and demographics, public and nonprofit organizations, and the media industry.
Prior to joining IFTF, Anthony enjoyed a brief but productive academic career at New York University, where he directed research sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.
Anthony is active in international futures research networks, and received a Fulbright scholarship in 2004 to study the social impacts of broadband in South Korea. He was one of the original founders of NYCwireless, a pioneer in the municipal wireless movement.
Anthony received his Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.
De-Bunking Smart Cities
<p>About two years ago, after teaching a course at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program on "Digitally Mediated Urban Space", I wrote an article for the architectural design journal Praxis that sought to do do two things: 1) make sense of the wide array of digital technologies that are being deployed in urban space, and 2) present a couple of places that I thought exemplified good and bad "design" of digital public spaces. </p><p>Recently, my research on context-aware computing - computing based on sensors and artificial intelligence - has led me to revisit this piece. Around the same time, I got a call from Lucas Graves, a friend who writes for Wired, and was doing a piece on technologies that are "perpetually around the corner". Lucas was mainly interested in things like videophones, but it coincided with a turn in my research to the applications side of context-awareness: smart cities, smart places, smart homes, and smart objects. As an urban planner, I immediately gravitated to thinking about smart cities and smart places, but wondered in the back of my mind - is this something that is really happening, or just another one of those technologies that are perpetually around the corner?<br />