Cities were important, he began, as if warming up for a pitch; as if we did not tacitly agree on this, standing in a living room in a famous urban center. “But cities could be smarter,” he said. “They should be smarter. What if we were given a blank slate? What problems could we fix?” Men were always talking about our problems. Who was the we? “We have all these new technologies at our disposal,” he said. “Self-driving cars, predictive analytics, drones. How can we put them together into the perfect combination?” I resisted making a joke about central planning.
