Forget Greensboro making Popular Science’s list of Top 50 Green Cities. Winston-Salem made the Community Forum’s list of Top 7 Intelligent Communities. It looks to me like cities pay ICF for the right to be compared to Winston-Salem. Stands to reason that Winston-Salem paid to be the standard of comparison, right?
Fair enough, ICF explains why Winston-Salem makes the list. ICF also explains its bigger mission, which is to convince cities that “Internet bandwidth is the new essential utility.” Fair enough. But they didn’t quit while they were ahead:
Being an Intelligent Community, however, is not a matter of technology — it is a matter of creating a culture of use for that technology. Intelligent Communities work to position their citizens, businesses and public sector to prosper in the Digital Age. Rather than trying to prop up dying industries, they eagerly embrace the growth industries of tomorrow. They train their citizens to take advantage of those jobs, provide means for low-income citizens to benefit from broadband, and work to deliver government services in electronic form more cost-effectively and efficiently than ever before. Without these non-technology efforts, the broadband revolution risks worsening social inequality, reducing economic opportunity and constricting political participation — creating a “gilded age” in which the benefits go to the privileged few, rather than a “golden age” of greater prosperity, knowledge and freedom.
City governments just love that last part.
