“Vision – fresh perspectives from Dubai” (www.vision.ae) is is a glossy magazine published quarterly in the English language, and has a print run of 60,000. (An additional 45,000 copies of the magazine are also published in Mandarin).

For the July 2014 issue of the magazine, I wrote an article about how leading global cities use data to improve their citizens’ lives, using as case studies New York, London, Shangai and Dubai.

Here are the first lines:

Cities, especially big ones, are complex organisms. To work efficiently, they have to rely on a web of interactions, and it can be difficult for authorities and institutions to square the circle. Interventions that are made to solve one problem create another – for example, making life easier for cars generates air-quality problems. But in this ongoing fight to balance accounts, today’s megalopolis has a new ally: information.

Read the complete article about smart cities and information exchange on Vision’s website.