Emerging Smart City Careers: The Jobs of Tomorrow
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere
The idea of a Smart City is a tautology. Cities are already smart, with their own specific memories, habits and quirks. This has not stopped journalists and tech companies from branding “connected cities” as “smart cities”. This simple phrase has come to cover an astonishing number of topics: urban operating systems, centralized control rooms, intelligent transport systems, smart energy grids, smart meters, sensor networks, smartphone apps, sharing economy platforms...
No doubt politicians and billionaires see this as a marvelous improvement from an existing rowdy, multi-organic intelligence that can neither be tracked nor controlled. But that's a conversation for another day.
In 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. We’ll need technology to manage these increasingly complex organisms, lest they collapse under their own weight. And we’ll need people to take the new jobs these technologies create. Below is what the future of work will look like for many of our children.