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How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs.
Around the world such cities are already being built, from Masdar in Abu Dhabi to Songdo in South Korea. Now the chaotic city near you may be in line for a makeover.
In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space, even the rubbish bins will be smart.

Solving the traffic crisis
Traffic jam

Traffic congestion is probably one of the biggest issues in today's cities.
While data may be able to predict where traffic jams will happen, it is not able to take cars off the road.
Israeli firm Waze asks citizens to help solve the problem, crowd-sourcing actual journeys to create a real-time map of traffic conditions.
It is estimated that 20% of drivers in its native Israel contribute to and use the app with anecdotal evidence of widespread traffic meltdown when the service goes offline.
The city government of Rio has just announced a partnership with Waze, in an effort to integrate the technology into its operation centre.
Interestingly Waze was recently bought by Google for $1.3bn, possibly paving the way for the search engine to become the next large corporation to enter the smart city marketplace.
But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?
And is it a future we even want?
Technology firms such as IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco are busy selling their software to solve a range of city problems, from water leaks to air pollution to traffic congestion.
In Singapore, Stockholm and California, IBM is gathering traffic data and running it via algorithms to predict where a traffic jam will occur an hour before it has happened.
Meanwhile in Rio, it has built a Nasa-style control room where banks of screens suck up data from sensors and cameras located around the city.

In total IBM has some 2,500 smarter cities projects around the world and has even trademarked the term "smarter cities".
But when, at a recent smart cities event that IBM hosted, one of its engineers joked that the company "tends to look at the pipes and then people come along and destroy all our nice optimised systems", it summed up the issue that some have with the corporate-led approach to city management.
"Some people want to fine tune a city like you do a race car but they are leaving citizens out of the process," said Anthony Townsend, director of the Institute of the Future and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.
City lights Smart cities will need smart networks into which everything is hooked
IBM argues that it does get citizens involved in its smart city projects. In Dublin it has worked with the city council to open up the vast amounts of data it has, which has led to clever little apps such as ParkYa which uses traffic data to find people the best parking space in the city.
And in the US city of Dubuque, Iowa, where it is developing smart water meters, it has offered the data to citizens via a community portal, so that individuals can see their water usage and even compare it with that of their neighbours.

But there is a sense that for the firm, cities are a problem just waiting to be solved.
"We need to build cities that adapt to the needs of [their] citizens but previously it was not possible because there was not enough information," says Dr Lisa Amini, director of IBM Research.
The racing car city
Racing car
Steve Lewis has taken the idea of fine-tuning a city like a racing car quite literally by using technology originally designed by McLaren for Formula 1 cars.
Like the sensors in a racing car that constantly feed information to a central helpdesk, so Mr Lewis envisages an urban operating system that control sensors on a city-wide scale.
His technology is being used in cities in China and Brazil and has also been integrated at London City Airport to create a network of sensors to improve services.
But his personal dream is to build a smart city from scratch - and he has bought land in Portugal to do just that.
The city, called PlanIT Valley, will become the ultimate showcase for the urban operating system.
Everything, including the bricks that will build the homes and offices, will be fitted with sensors to make them smart.
She makes the comparison between the "assets" of cities, such as street lights, traffic, water pipes and those of large corporations, for which IBM's systems were originally designed.
Mr Townsend is not convinced that the technology can so easily be transferred.
"Government doesn't make decisions like businesses do. Citizens are not consumers," he says.
China is busy building dozens of new cities and is starting to adopt huge control rooms like the one IBM has created in Rio.

It worries Mr Townsend.
"The control room in Rio was created by a progressive mayor but what if the bad guys get in? Are we creating capabilities that can be misused?" he asks.
Citizen network There is another chapter in the smart city story - and this one is being written by citizens, who are using apps, DIY sensors, smartphones and the web to solve the city problems that matter to them.
Don't Flush Me is a neat little DIY sensor and app which is single-handedly helping to solve one of New York's biggest water issues.

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