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Trends
What can high technology do to help cities confront their thorniest problems — from police strategies to water systems, traffic control to waste disposal?
The world’s cities are impatiently demanding that they be heard earlier, and heeded seriously, in the decisions of nations -- and at the United Nations.
The C40 Cities, led by New York's Michael Bloomberg, merges with the Clinton Climate Initiative, and World Bank President Robert Zoellick announced "one-window" city access to bank lending, rather than having to negotiate through their nation staters.
The cities of the world are on a great growth tear, gobbling up land as a dizzying rate. The expansion has ground to a crawl in recession-impacted America and Europe. But just check what’s happening across the developing world.
Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past — communicating, trading, competing. But there are two differences: Today it’s nation states, not city-states, that occasionally go to war. And unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in Medieval Europe, today there are literally thousands of cities on the rise, and looking outward in search not of silk and spices, but rather sources of finance, global talent, and most of all, good ideas.