GIS for intelligent cities of the future
On the way home, you stop at a fast-food restaurant:
The restaurant is at that particular location because GIS helped to define the right store mix for the location's potential customers.
When you return back home, All is Well and things are safe: Communities are showing that GIS is helping to reduce crime, providing an intelligence tool that plots and tracks all crimes. It's been a long day, but you are finally home safe and sound. GIS has been there nearly every step of the way, helping make life more comfortable and safe. All through the power of GIS. The Emergence of Intelligent Cities In the hundred years or so since its introduction, the automobile fundamentally changed the world. Its effects can be seen having shaped both cities and institutions. Similarly, technologies like GIS, which are still in their genesis, will, over time, have impacts of equal or greater magnitude, reshaping our cities. The field of cybernetics holds the key to the Intelligent City. Cybernetics has the ability to synthesize and simulate intelligent systems and can provide the means for improving planning, decision-making and problem-solving processes, in some cases automating them. The total system will be dynamic, where various subsystems can adjust as required to maximize the well being of the whole system. Real-time modeling will occur whereby subsystems can run "what ifs" and then feed the results to a central processor which compares all subsystem results and passes either positive or negative feedback to subsystems. The desired results of one subsystem will thus be in relation to all other subsystems affected. Intelligent city as an organism To better understand the concept of the Intelligent City, it is helpful to draw an analogy with the natural world. With billions of years to equilibrate and optimize, natural systems are a superior model for perfecting manmade systems. The Intelligent City will, in many respects, operate very much like an organism, monitoring its various component systems and responding accordingly to potential or actual changes of state in order to maintain equilibrium. As conditions favouring disaster are detected, the Intelligent City will respond accordingly, heightening readiness as appropriate. The Intelligent City will assimilate knowledge of hazards and implement hazard mitigation as an integral component of its overall functionality. As feedback processes are built into the Intelligent City, the system will learn from its mistakes and improvements will occur. The vulnerability of man's artificial environment exists today because of the absence of an effective communication and control system, creating a permanent condition of asymmetry which leaves society open to disasters. As telecommunication and technologies like GIS are used to interconnect all municipal subsystems, the city's nervous system will be in place and a condition of equilibrium will be defined. If we view the Intelligent City like an organism, experiencing countless actions and reactions, we can see that unless these actions and reactions are intelligently managed and coordinated, then the system experiences chaos and crisis - which every city of the world is facing today in one way or the other. The Intelligent City will incorporate each of the elements of crisis management (Preparedness, Response, Recovery and Mitigation) into its overall planning and operational matrix. 
Intelligent Cities and GIS It is not that efforts have not been made for planning an "Intelligent City: GIS, The City and The Planner" but it is the same old traditional approaches and techniques that have turned out be obsolete, still being used for planning the cities of the 21st century. In the words of Aristotle " A City should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness". True to this, Intelligent Cities are cities that are sustainable to the present and future demands of the city providing its inhabitants security and happiness while adopting planning tools & practices suited to the local requirements. Different cities are faced with different challenges and complexities peculiar to them and their stage of development. Information is the glue binding us together in cities. Monitoring the city for key urban indicators can help an Urban Planner to plan effectively and efficiently. To make a quick decision a planner requires authenticated and accurate data and a proper computer aided tool (GIS), which will incorporate & analyze data with auxiliary information and spatial information faster for the decision making. In brief an Intelligent City would be:
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