New Orleans: The Next City of the Future?

It's official. Two weeks ago, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced a seventeen-person commission to begin thinking about how to rebuild the city from the bottom up. If all proceeds according to the mayor's announcement, the commission will reach out and involve hundreds of people with a stake in the city's future: experts from every walk of life, state and federal officials, as well as many local community leaders and average citizens. It could be, in short, a heroic effort to galvanize widespread interest in the city and the region, that could serve as a model for the country in the global age of the Internet.

Is this the time to rebuild New Orleans as a "city of the future" replete with broadband information highways, or perhaps a totally wireless, broadband infrastructure with community-wide portals for shopping, travel and tourism, and arts and culture? If so, then let our IT wants, needs, wishes and dreams be expansive and uninhibited.

Becoming a city of the future, however, requires acknowledgement of two critical but often overlooked, principles. First, deployment and use of IT is vital as a tool to transform everything about the way we live and work and play, and thus to ensure our personal and economic success in this new age. Second, and perhaps most importantly, little can or will be accomplished if agreement isn't reached upfront -- widespread citizen involvement and participation is essential.

Achieving broad-based ownership of any new idea is everyone's responsibility and to do so effectively and consistently requires creation of a new decision-making mechanism for the digital age. We simply cannot do the people's business any more by voting every four years or passing some referendum as it is put before us. We need somehow to change the democratic process or that democratic ideal of "the city" -- and the communality it engenders -- will atrophy and die.

Sandy Goodkin -- an old friend who for half a century has advised major developers and governments on how best to create walkable, livable, so-called planned communities that maximize citizen engagement and enjoyment while minimizing all the bad things that development usually entails -- was quite taken by the concept of the "city of the future," a high-tech Mecca first articulated by former San Diego mayor Susan Golding more than a decade ago.

Similar to Mayor Nagin with his call for widespread "collaboration," Golding formed a committee with community-wide representation including business, government and non-profit sectors, as well as average citizens, to help create a new model for our age. As her press release put it, San Diego would be the "first fiber-optic wired city." Not that fiber optics was necessarily the answer. It happened to be the technology du jour.

The committee examined in earnest the role such a wired infrastructure would mean to the city and concluded "that while cities of the past were built along railroads, waterways and interstate highways, cities of the future would definitely be built along broadband wired and wireless infrastructures connecting every home, office and school to every other throughout the region." Importantly, the committee in its own crude way began exploring what life, work and play might look like in a time when networked telecommunications systems -- remember this was before the Internet was commercialized -- would affect every sector of our economy and society.

Goodkin was skeptical however. He had observed and worked in local government for perhaps too long. While intrigued, he was well versed in the politics of city government, and said such a futuristic and laudable concept could only occur if it was "built on the moon," a place where nothing essentially exists and the politics would allow for the kind of change that for most cities -- then and now -- seems insurmountable.