Sidewalk Labs represents a central, “top-down” approach to creating smart cities.
https://medium.com/@danielzahler/why-la-feels-like-living-in-the-future-e937be7ee457
Sidewalk Labs represents a central, “top-down” approach to creating smart cities. It’s an experiment worth watching, but we should also recognize the value of the “bottoms-up” approach, where a city provides fertile ground for entrepreneurs looking to launch new products to city residents. Allowing many players to compete can yield a greater variety of innovative goods and services — e.g. mobility, sustainability, health and wellness — than what’s offered by any single company. An example of a city doing this today is Santa Monica, California, as I explain in my piece below.
https://medium.com/@danielzahler/why-la-feels-like-living-in-the-future-e937be7ee457