Creating a ‘smart city’ from the ground up in India
The city's name is Palava. It's on FB and YouTube and Twitter.
The developer has a goal of making it one of the top 50 most-livable cities in the world in a country where no city is currently in the top 100. He talks about the choice between 'fixing' an existing city or creating a new one. He points out the challenges of both and considers this a compromise: a new city relatively close (25 miles) to a major urban core.
This is not a new idea, of course (*cough* Las Colinas), but these types of projects always make me think of how I might do something similar near Fort Worth if I had access to a ridiculous pile of cash. For my purposes, I'd want to build something that would supplement the existing core - not 25 miles away but perhaps, oh, across a river or highway. I mean, a large project downtown might have limitations based on existing design and infrastructure, but if we were building from scratch in a greenfield or brownfield practically adjacent to downtown we might be significantly less restricted. We could tie it strongly to the existing downtown to ensure that they support and feed off of one another.
Perhaps this is somewhat the goal of that Trinity River thing, but that might have too much governmental involvement for my purposes. And that's their dream, not mine.
So if you were designing a sort of downtown Fort Worth, phase II given the state of current technology (not just IT and communications, but also energy, transportation, etc.), current demographic needs and trends, your own values and dreams, and so on... what would you do? Keep in mind that if I win a lot of money I may steal some of your ideas. But I'll upvote your post here so it's cool.