The misleading simplicity of designing an intelligent city

Today’s designers of intelligent cities have successfully been able to communicate a conceptual model for the technology requirements that fulfil a city’s ambitions. The increasing popularisation of intelligent cities has driven this behaviour and populations are now starting to experience the gap between their expectations and reality. This paper considers the new generalist roles that are necessary to deliver broad and complex intelligent city systems. Furthermore, new inanimate users are discussed as well as the ways that standardisation in nomenclature, processing and management are essentials to reduce initial delivery and operational risk. The paper presents an example intelligent city design whose initial stack diagram unravels to present billions of permutations of system interactions. It is concluded that city Chief Information Officers (CIO) have teams that they need to build in order to manage the coming challenges in their operational purviews.