Google has announced that Provo, Utah will become the third city in the U.S. to get Google Fiber, the search company's entry into broadband Internet and TV service. Read More

The idea of public-private partnerships to fund projects like parks or public transit has been on the upswing. In New York City, for example, non-profits work with the city to fund programming in three major parks, and a public-private partnership allowed the city to fund the construction of its now-famous High Line park on an old elevated rail spur. A team hoping to pitch the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority on turning an unused section of its underground subway network into another park raised initial funding on Kickstarter.

That last success, and others like it, have spurred several entrepreneurs to develop Kickstarter-like websites devoted specifically to funding civic projects. They're not the only ones looking online to renegotiate the relationship between cities and citizens — over the past year, a piece of software called ChangeByUs has evolved over time into a platform for cities to help introduce citizens to one another in the hopes that they'll organize around smaller-scale projects — but they're certainly among the most ambitious.

Chicago at night. Photo: Rhys Asplundh / Flickr Mayors across the United States are tasking senior staffers with changing the way their cities work, Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva said during an interview ... Read More

Late last month, some folks in Grand Rapids, Mich. — a city of less than 1 million people — used a well-made viral video to completely change the way the world views their city. Theirs was just one of many ... Read More

Governing Magazine's Heather Kerrigan reports that cities across the U.S. are finding a useful policing edge in overlaying crime data and traffic safety data. (In broad strokes, crime and traffic incidents tend to happen ... Read More

Marcus Westbury, the festival organizer who led an effort to reinvigorate the downtown in his native Newcastle, Australia, by filling it with small businesses, art installations and temporary uses, shares an article he ... Read More

Technically Philly describes a hackathon project to find all properties owned by a given landlord by cross-referencing scraped data and city databases: So, say, a small-time property developer wanted neighborhood ... Read More

"The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion" map from the Institute for the Future. Technology Review's Erica Naone warns that if the future of urban life is data-driven digital one, there's a risk that ... Read More

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