Cities Of The Future
John Ink2Quill
www.ink2quill.com

Cities are getting larger and richer through the ages. People are walking around and driving by. Gone are the days of horses and horse drawn carts constituting traffic. The rings in the sidewalk to keep horses and mules tethered are gone too. At least in nearly all cities and most towns. You still have taxies and chauffeurs and of course traffic still exists like in antiquity. But how have cities changed from, say, 100 or 1000 years ago?

The hustling and bustling populations in the streets has remained and they are unchanged in their frantic energies or relaxed strolls. We still have shops of all kinds run and owned by people from all over. You still have different neighborhoods. You still have city planners and powerbrokers moving things around and changing parts of the city. Today some of those people who exert huge influence on a city are called ‘Titans of Industry’ and ‘Powerbrokers’. They have job titles too but no longer have titles that suggest a certain lineage to a king or conqueror. They are ‘head of such and such’ or ‘CEO’ or ‘VP’ etc. That sounds more meritocratic and less a sign of privilege. That makes the cities of today sound better off with better leadership.

I don’t know. Is our better quality of life from that of a hundred or thousand years ago due to better leadership or more advanced technologies. Better medical and pharmaceutical technologies have made us healthier for longer. That is sure. Better transportation technologies have given us the ability to move people faster and farther than ever before at fair costs. Machines can lift and produce many things faster and in greater numbers than ever before. The Sciences ands Research has allowed us better materials and products for constructions than ever before. For example, buildings today are a lot safer from fires than ever before because of the sciences behind their construction. We live in safer cities because of research advancements. And that is good. All of that is good. I’ve heard it said that the average person today lives a better quality of life than a king did 200 years ago and I believe it.

So, what’s the problem? Let’s keep barreling ahead without any thoughts or trepidations. But. Not so fast. Living in the cities of today is not all peaches and cream. It is far from a utopia. The cities of today are increasingly place where you can be charged money, or call it credits, digital money and the like, at every step of the way. That is heavily taxed places. Where you pay at every step of the day throughout the day. That is to say, get charged for entering the subways or on buses and trains, stores, places of entertainment, residences, libraries, museums and the list goes on. You pay with moneys or your information. Yes. In this day and age your information is valuable currency. The times and people’s mentalities have not caught up with this fact but information, on people and their habits, is a very valuable currency. And it is constantly harvested from people throughout the day without their consent or knowledge. It is that fact that makes the modern age we are entering less appealing and even frightening. To some degree we have begun to create the type of cities the Scifi genre warned us against.

How do we change things? The solution sounds so simple because it is. Remember. We are not at a dystopian dead end. There is much to change and many, many options to us. Firstly, start by creating rights of a person over their entire body of information collected from everywhere and anywhere. They decide what happens to their information and who has the right to use it unaltered and unedited. We must treat any violations of a person’s information rights as serious like an physical attack on their person.

That is a good start to building that better future we all deserve. I believe we can do it with the help of some well intentioned leadership and industry.

John Ink2Quill

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