Connected Urban Development conference

Reporting in from the first global conference for Connected Urban Development (CUD) in San Francisco.  The meeting has got off to a great start - hearing from the 3 CUD cities (Amsterdam, San Francisco and Seoul) and introduced to the 4 next CUD cities (Lisbon, Madrid, Birmingham and Hamburg).  Short note - we need to speed up the spread of CUD and CUD-like initiatives into Asia, which is after all where much of the largest, most urgent and spectacular urban action is going to be in the next 15 years!

Two big messages so far - sustainability is part of, and partly responsible for leading, a genuine market transition that in turn is fueling what we might call a "policy transition".  Embedding a sustainability ethic and mindset into the core policy processes of governments at all levels is what is really at stake.

The second message, hammered by Cisco CEO John Chambers in his impressive opening speech, is the need to move from a transactional to an architectural approach.  By which I take him to mean an approach that is integrated, systematic and designed, thinking about a response that is driven by, and makes sense within, a larger frame of policy outcomes and intended results.

Big shifts of thinking and vision are on the move, grounded in the equally powerful desire to see the grand ideas and urgent call for action grounded in practical projects that start delivering results now.  At the conference, we're going to see the "smart bus" solution to improve the reliability and convenience of public transport and the "personal transport assistant", which brings information about transport options to your mobile or PDA. 

Check out more at www.cisco.com/go/connectedurbandevelopment

Great bunch of people here - Mayors, politicians, senior executives, think tanks, universities...and over 100 people turned away because we couldn't fit anyone else in!