Our Cities Have an API Problem. Startups Can Fix It. | Future

What if we viewed America’s cities as technological systems? Startups need to compete directly with legacy cities to offer better Land Use APIs.

“Cities are technological artifacts,” Kevin Kelly once wrote, “the largest technology we make.” What if we looked at America’s cities not metaphorically as tech, but literally as a technological system? Rather than fighting about politics, we’d ask our cities the mundane questions that engineers and entrepreneurs ask about any other technology: “Is it expensive to run?” “Does it scale? And especially: “How good are its APIs?” Cities’ API challenge: land use policy At its essence, an API (“application programming interface”) describes how users in

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