Can today’s city govern well if its citizens lack modern technology? How important is access to computers for lowering unemployment? What infrastructure does a city have to build in order to attract new business?

In this new collection, Michael A. Pagano curates engagement with such questions by public intellectuals, stakeholders, academics, policy analysts, and citizens. Each essay explores issues related to the impact and opportunities technology provides in government and citizenship, health care, workforce development, service delivery to citizens, and metropolitan growth. As the authors show, rapidly emerging technologies and access to such technologies shape the ways people and institutions interact in the public sphere and private marketplace. The direction of metropolitan growth and development, in turn, depends on access to appropriate technology scaled and informed by the individual, household, and community needs of the region.

Contributors include Randy Blankenhorn, Benedicte Callan, Jane Fountain, Sandee Kastrul, Karen Mossberger, Dan O'Neil, Michelle Russell, Alfred Tatum, Stephanie Truchan, Darrel West, and Howard Wial.