I told them.

I told them when I was in Vietnam during my first visit there in December 2016. I told them at a talk I gave to the leadership of its new “rocket to the future,” the smart city of Binh Duong. I told the big shots from its government what they were building.

I told them that in my country (the USA), the hope of the tortured 20th Century was given a boost by the landing on the Moon. It gave people everywhere a new sense of hope, a feeling of possibilities and wonders to come. The technology that flowed from the innovations that had to take place to get men on the Moon, over time, became part of the global economy and embedded in the world we live in today, especially the world of communications. It fed engineering schools new, inspired students who wanted to go to work for NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or General Foods, makers of Tang, the first orange drink mix the astronauts had with them in space! It enabled young, aspiring poets like me to wonder about the workings and nature of the universe, which had opened up like the clouds of a Renaissance painting.

I get territorial when it comes to pride of place. It may be the psychic balm for the chronic case of homesickness I get whenever and wherever I travel.

With the exception of my university years, I have lived an entire life in the state of New York. In three places. I have lived in New York City for 40+ years. I grew up in the Finger Lakes region of the state, and for the past 20 years, spend time at a residence in Long Island in the eastern part of the state.

These places have been – for the most part – wonderful places for someone with my temperament. I have lived the life I dreamed of and wanted. I have built communities and friendships that are solid and long-lasting within the circumference of a few city blocks and internationally!

Whenever I get back from a trip – as happened recently upon my return from the Urban Future Conference #uf23 in Stuttgart – someone invariably says: “Oh, you went there? That’s on my bucket list.”

When I gave a TED Talk in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago, same thing. When I spoke at the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 in Oslo, ditto. “On my bucket list.”

Once in a while, someone will ask me: “What’s left on your bucket list?”

Nothing. I never had one.

On October 27, a delegation from New Taipei City, Taiwan (which for the uninitiated is NOT Taipei) literally and metaphorically crossed the Bridge.

That afternoon, New Taipei City, along with members of the Top7 communities of the Year, walked toward the Scioto River in Central Ohio, through the streets of Dublin. Dublin is a testament to the concept of “New Urbanism” and a case study in political will and vision. We slowly came to the foot of the US$23 million Dublink Bridge, the largest “S” shaped walking bridge in North America. It is breathtakingly beautiful and the only bridge in North America – or the world – named after a fiber optic telecommunications network! A municipally built one at that.

I’m excited and honored to be in Vietnam this week for the Top7 Conference - Post-Pandemic Recovery: How Digital Innovation Drives Growth in Our Community, an event that is helping to create a positive, peaceful future for our cities and our world. I would like to thank Binh Duong and Becamex for inviting us here to Vietnam’s first Intelligent Community for the conference. It has been a pleasure to watch Binh Duong continuously making progress and to be here to congratulate the city on its 25th anniversary. It will be good to see my colleagues from the Netherlands and Eindhoven, too. Eindhoven remains, 11 years after its achievement as Intelligent Community of the Year, one of the best examples of what can be done with innovation, cooperation and the power of the Trip Helix.

Our theme today is “How Digital Innovation Drives Growth.” We will ask our guests: what does that mean? And what kind of growth? Economic, social and cultural, political maturity and excellence? Yes, all of these! We should be proud that in Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities, governments also innovate and learn to provide better, timelier and more reliable services to their eager cities and towns.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” – General Sun Tzu

Good Friday (April 15, 2022) – Sun Tzu is one general that Vladimir Putin evidently didn’t consult.

Luck has hit the Russians like a dry sponge the past six weeks. That is, they have been struck lightly by it and seem oblivious to the nails driven into the hands and feet of their soulmates across the border. But in the wake of this war on cities – this crucifixion of cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv and Volnovakha – those of us who smugly thought we knew anything about the dark side of human nature have also found ourselves on the wrong end of our intelligence. We need to now reconsider much about our own “security” and what it really means. “War will surprise you,” another general, Dwight Eisenhower, said. He was wise to note it with such Zen precision. Because it will try your soul if you even are watching it through social media combat.

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” -Voltaire

The violence you saw on January 6 in the USA was not accidental. The violence was the point! Donald Trump used violence like a mobster to work over the American electorate and to let them know that next time it would be worse if they didn’t play along. Time will tell if the most robust of democratic nations and its oldest living republic will manage through the political plague. So far, the chisel to cut the stone for a new monument to civil unity seems dulled.

Political violence has been a tactic of every disgruntled, bullying ideologue or insurgency for as long as we have organized ourselves into communities. We saw it recently in Afghanistan. Despite the effort of people like ICF Visionary of the Year Amirzai Sangin to bring the nation into a new era through broadband communications, civil progress was thwarted.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If the cliché “Ignorance is Bliss” were true, legal marijuana would go up in smoke. Our ignorance would be sufficient to keep us happily stoned. In our state of Bliss, we would be sublimely governed, assured that our rights were fully secured and knowing that our daily bread would produce loaves plentiful enough for generations. Would World Peace be far behind for dummies and cafones?

But as that bothersomely observant Greek Plato said about ignorance and its consequences, “Those who believe they are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” (Write in your own association to modern times here. _________ I’ll wait.)

One of my heroes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was a sharp observer of the human community. He famously reported on the utter collapse of the family and the coarsening of our social relations. He concluded famously, “We have defined deviancy downward.”

“Our police are more trusted in our republic than our president.”

Here’s a “pop” quiz: name the source of that quote.

Hint: It does not come from an authoritarian leader of a country. Nor does it come from the United States in 2021.

It comes from representatives of the world’s most Intelligent Community: Tallinn, Estonia. It is part of a new podcast series that is my attempt to begin to get to the raw, poignant and seemingly intractable issues our communities continue to grapple with in this Era of COVID.

March 14, 2021 – Today was declared a day of remembrance in New York City. It was on this date one year ago that the first person in the Big Apple died from COVID19.

We posted as best we could the early weeks of this shock – an emotional and civic trauma unlike any other in my lifetime – in our “No Place BUT Home” series.

Words were not of much use as this city was hollowed out and whipsawed in a perfect storm; one where all of its cultural jewels and unique assets – bound together for generations like a Sicilian family – were unraveled so spectacularly that religious people proclaimed this novel corona virus the author of a “biblical epic.” It had its own exodus as 300,000 people fled the terror of ending up in a crowded or non-existent ICU. While some relied on religious analogies, readers of Sartre, author of The Plague (copies of the 1947 novel sold out in weeks), noted that life is tenuous, viruses have unimaginable power and that communities and societies can be overturned, transformed or even eviscerated in the time it takes to cough, lose your breath and die. In a few weeks, it appeared that our public health networks, our technology and our sophisticated rituals could not sustain us.