The Kawasaki, Japan “Smart City of the Twenty-First Century” international competition was one of the early pioneers of what became a smart city movement. Zann Gill’s entry was one of seventeen semi-finalists in this competition (the only woman), which received more than two hundred submissions worldwide – a competition that drew entries from major Japanese corporations, including Matsushita, Shimizu, and Taisei (pre-Internet).
Zann Gill (M. Arch. Harvard) won First Prize and the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki in the international urban design competition “Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century,” sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government. Her proposed system of innovation networks to drive “smart city” innovation bottom up provided a framework of diverse interlinked components for urban innovation as a complex adaptive ecosystem manifesting collaborative intelligence. Early work for Buckminster Fuller sparked awareness of the need for a discipline of collaborative intelligence to address decision-making that harnesses diverse inputs from many contributors. Fuller’s concepts of Design Science and World Game preceded the internet, ubiquitous computing and big data analytics.
Illustrations above by Zann Gill show some of the concepts in the diagram: The Children’s Story Exchange, the World Collage Bulletin, and the Festival of Dreams.