Dan Doctoroff on the future of cities


What I learned from interviewing Doctoroff–

Doctoroff starting in 1994 or so realized that cities could be transformed by sport. Olympic bid followed.

As deputy mayor I think the key insight was that the city owns 30ish% of all the real estate of the city — the most valuable asset of any institution in the city by a large margin possibly. Using this huge cash-value asset well can transform everything.

Now the huge opportunity is to turn every block of concrete or steel infrastructure into something that gathers data and responds to data — street pavement, street lights, traffic lights, lane markers, subways, buildings, police cars…

And it is an infrastructure project. Not a lame overlay. We will replace and append to all kinds of core old-fashioned systems.