Week 4 Day 4: Finalizing our cities

It's hard to believe that in less than 24 hours, I would've concluded my role as an instructor in the 2012 NYU Poly Science of Smart Cities summer program. It's been an incredible journey and these past four weeks were properly structured to allow our city to grow. After learning about energy in the first week, we came up with a plan to maximize the amount of electricity that can be generated from renewable sources. We decided to place wind turbines, solar panels, reservoirs, canals and a desalination plant in strategic locations throughout our city to make the most use out of our natural resources.

In the second week, the food and sustenance week, after seeing how easy it is to grow local food at the Added Value farm, we decided to place a farm in our city. This farm is at the epicenter of our city and it serves as a source of local food and as a drop off point for our city's compost. Reusing our city's organic wastes in the form of compost can and will prove beneficial to the quality of life of our city's inhabitants and to the general quality of our environment. We told our students, what our professors always tell us, as engineers we are always striving to work with nature not against it. We introduced the concepts of sustainability and waste management, and students understand that earth's resources are renewable as long as they are not consumed faster than they are generated.

Our city's layout became more clear in the third week after we learned about transportation. We designed our city's road network, highways, commuter railroads and the general layout of our city's infrastructures. In the fourth week, the communications week, we learned a lot about wireless communications. After our visit to Northrop Grumman, we saw the importance and benefits of having a advanced metering infrastructure and automatic vehicle locaters in a city. We decided to place a universal automatic metering system in our city's buildings and houses to help citizen's monitor their utility bill. This can help customers become more aware of their usage and even encourage them to use their utilities more efficiently.

Our city is oriented in the east-west direction, the turquoise strips make up our road network and the big green space on top is our farm. 

Today we finalized our cities, and with the productive contribution of everybody in our class, we were able to finish painting our cities, construct the underground subway network for our cities and worked on our presentations for tomorrow. After our last day of class tomorrow, there will be a celebration from 5:00 - 7:00 pm, that will give the student's families and everyone involved with SOSC to see the student's smart cities and to learn why it is smart. I am really excited about tomorrow and I look forward to meeting you and our students' families. We've all worked very hard on our cities and tomorrow is our time to shine, thank you for reading!