Every city it seems, wants to be a "Smart City" by using technology to solve our current problems of water use and supply, energy consumption, transportation efficiency, mobile healthcare, police, fire, and safety; and to lay the foundation -- certainly the bandwidth -- for future savings of the city and increased revenues for businesses and individuals.

While the savings and the increased revenue streams appear attractive, the difficulties appear insurmountable. In part, because the "City of the Future" is not a city at all, but a powerful economic region; and, the "Internet of Everything" (IoT), where everything is connected to everything else and through the Internet cities will be able to offer services unheard of today, is critical to the entire region.

It is these regional -- metropolitan -- economies that foster quality places, vibrant downtowns, attractive town centers and historic, older suburbs that feed the development and acquisition of human capital, financial capital and contribute to efficient, sustainable growth. Regions have replaced nations, and even cities in the usual sense, as the engines of economic growth.

As Bruce Katz, a founding director of the Metropolitan Economy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C, has pointed out:

There is a fundamental disconnect between how we live and work in large portions all over America and how we govern...The mismatch between governments and the economy undermines the competitiveness of places by raising the costs of doing business, exacerbating strong development trends, squandering urban assets and deepening racial and class separation.

Most people already live in one jurisdiction, work in other, and play or dine in a third. They have no idea that the cost to them is enormous because of the duplication and waste. Moreover, they do not realize that the new creative and innovation economy demands greater cooperation and consolidation, if politically possible, to save money, and to reposition itself in the new global economy.

It is cheaper, sure, but the real reasons are to stimulate economic prosperity. As syndicated columnist Neil Peirce has pointed out, these new "city-states" as he calls them, "have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade commerce and communication." And together they can share their ideas for the IoE.

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