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And the smartest and most successful cities are those that combine design features that prevailed centuries ago with innovative applications of networked technology.

Bill Mitchell, who is a Professor of Architecture and Media Arts & Sciences at the world-renowned MIT Design Lab, points out that technology does not operate in isolation when it comes to changing cities.

Mitchell says, “Technology creates possibilities, then social forces and economic forces and human desires really drive what then happens to cities.”

While some of the key technologies that are changing the way cities work are fairly obvious, some of the ramifications are not immediately apparent, he says.

With computers becoming cheaper and at the same time more powerful and free software like Open Office rivalling its expensive commercial alternative, Microsoft Office, the economic barrier to the digital revolution is slowly disappearing.

Add cheap mobile phones, widely available wireless internet and inexpensive international call rates through VOIP and the notion of “the world village” creeps closer to realisation.

Low cost digital technology makes large scale global networking accessible to everyone – and has had a sweeping impact, very quickly.

“Networks like the internet have grown in a grass-roots way, without the huge amount of top-down planning needed by other infrastructures,” Mitchell says.

This has been a boon in some developing nations, allowing them to leapfrog the developed world to introduce rapid technological change.

In Bangladesh, a development project that introduced very cheap mobile phone connectivity to people in remote rural villages that have never had access to telephones has made a huge impact on local economies.

About 15 percent of Bangladeshi people now own a mobile phone and wireless internet connectivity is now making significant inroads into rural villages.

And while rural villages in developing nations are flexible enough to fast-track their connectivity and change rapidly, introducing change to the behemoth cities of the developed world is in many ways a bigger challenge.

Mitchell explains that over thousands of years, cities have evolved increasingly more complex and pervasive networks, from transportation networks, to networks delivering water and sewerage, to electrical networks and now, information networks.

In years gone by, the city wall provided a clear boundary between the city and its surroundings – but networks of roads extended into the hinterland and beyond.

“The functionality of any place is jointly constructed by its boundaries and its networks,” Mitchell says, adding that the focus has shifted from the pre-industrial era, where the world was dominated by boundaries, to the present-day, where the networks and connections dominate our use of space.

The most recent development in the evolution of the city is the impact of widely available wireless networks.

With mobile phones and other portable devices – like notebooks – many people are constantly ‘connected’; they can always access information, browse the internet, make a phone call and read and send email.

“Most of us are never disconnected these days - and that’s a fundamentally new thing,” Mitchell says.

The integration of digital networks with every aspect of society is an influential development.

“When the internet first began it was kind of a stand-alone thing but now it’s basically locked into everything that we do,” says Mitchell.

“Retailing is an obvious example of this. You can log into Amazon from anywhere in the world to browse or buy books; but at the same time, there’s a huge logistical system on the ground, of warehouses and transportation and so on – which all now works together as one system.”

He points out that this generates a new building type: the large regional distribution centre. Many warehouses are almost fully automated, Mitchell explains – and these epitomise the integration of the digital and the physical worlds.

“Every time you buy something on Amazon, something physical goes somewhere,” he says. Instead of people going into a mall to buy a book from a carton shipped to a retailer, a forklift in a remote warehouse grabs just one book, which is wrapped and posted.

When there are thousands, perhaps millions of such transactions taking place every day, patterns of transportation and distribution are irrevocably changed – and the structures and functions of cities must also change to meet this new pattern of activity.

Mitchell is speaking from a North American perspective; but in some ways, the fully-wired city is yet to occur in Australian cities, says Professor Tom Kvan, who heads the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

“Australia still is lagging behind on network technology compared to northern Europe and North America,” Kvan says.

Kvan believes that Australian cities have some fundamental differences to their European counterparts that have slowed the adoption of things like universal wi-fi and remote workplaces.

“Businesses here have not set up and distributed work as much as we might have expected. Perhaps because our cities are so spread out, people are still commuting to their work rather than working from home or from a local centre,” he suggests.

Free public wi-fi broadband opens up a lot of flexibility in the way that people use space and time, Mitchell observes.

Until very recently, he says, office workers truly worked in an office. But work has become increasingly less tethered to location. The wireless laptop and mobile phone allows you to move your workplace to any place that has coverage of phone and/or wireless internet.

Many people have structured their worklives so that everything they need to do their work is available and accessible universally – and this flexibility in the use of time and space is already changing the nature of city design.

“Public space begins to operate in a different kind of way. Public space is, not only public physical space but it’s public cyberspace. You get these overlays of functions.”

Mitchell adds that in architecture, there is currently a fundamental shift away from a dominance of private space towards public space.

“There’s a great increase in demand for unassigned informal space that you can just appropriate it as you need it; space for little coffee shops, more usable space set in nooks and crannies and other public space where you can just sit down and do some work.”

Rob Adams is the Director of Design and Urban Environment for the City of Melbourne – and is heavily involved in the future planning for Melbourne.

He says that there are a number of elements that make a smart city – but the most important one is sustainability.

“The smart cities of the future will be cities that not only have technological advances but that work with the environment to create a good living space for the people who use them, one that can be sustained,” he says.

He believes that the strong divisions between work space, public space, recreation space and living space that characterise modern Australian cities like Melbourne must change.

“Nobody goes to the big commercial office blocks for a good night out,” Adams points out, adding that these areas might be deserted outside business hours, but they continue to occupy space and use resources.

The time for the deep division between commercial and residential functions in cities has passed, he says – and many experts agree.

US architect Arrol Gellner argues that modern architecture is responsible for breeding urban isolation, blaming postwar planners who saw mixed-use neighborhoods as old-fashioned and developed sharply-drawn boundaries between residential and commercial zones.

“Under this doctrine, neighbourhoods - once self-contained social units - were quickly replaced by vast, isolated housing tracts bereft of services and accessible only by automobile,” Gellner says.

“The result was sprawling yet lifeless suburbs by day, forlorn downtowns by night, and a previously unknown schism between work and life in general.”

Gellner is scathing about gated communities common in the US where “vast but barely utilized houses stand sequestered among acres of setback land.”

Meanwhile, he says, Americans spend hours trapped on the freeways, where walls on either side shut out any view of the world beyond.

Urban sprawl generates all sorts of logistical issues, not the least of which is sustainable transport.

Tom Kvan says that Australia also lags behind Europe in adopting sustainable transport.

“In Europe, as you look across the urban landscape there are vast numbers of … small cars, but you don’t see that here in Australia. People still are driving large vehicles.”

He says that densely populated European cities offer limited parking facilities and drivers value the ability to wedge into small spaces, whereas small cars are seen as less safe in Australia and parking ratios more generous.

But with a global push towards climate-change triggers, Kvan believes this may soon change. He says that increasing inner-city density will also have an impact.

“Melbourne has over the last 15 years experienced a dramatic growth in inner city population - from 15,000 to about 80,000. [That brings] an increasing acceptance of smaller cars because the commuting distances are much smaller.”

He believes that already vibrant models of car-sharing will also increase in acceptance.

“The technology is not the issue,” he says, adding that cultural change is needed to reduce urban sprawl and identify urban ‘nodes’ within the city.

Rob Adams agrees that urban sprawl is unsustainable – and the solution is to move people closer together, he says.

“To make cities work, you need higher density of population.” And, he says, the technologies exist to make high density living work in a very sustainable way.

Solar collection, water harvesting and reuse and sustainable urban transport systems together with energy-efficient housing are key technologies, he says.

“We have moved from the industrial revolution to the ecological revolution.'

Adams has been heavily involved with the development of Australia’s greenest office building, Council House 2 (CH2), which opened in August 2006 on Little Collins Street in central Melbourne to international acclaim.

The building consumes just 15 percent of the energy and about 30 percent of the water of its non-green peers and is an example of bio-mimicry architecture, where a building uses sustainable technology copied from the natural world.

A façade of solar-powered sun-tracking louvres shades the western side of the ten-storey building and a variety of other technologies combine to control temperature; like thermal mass and vaulted ceilings, windows that open at night to cool the building and wind turbines that draw hot air outside.

In the basement, sewer water is treated and filtered on site to reduce mains water supply and throughout the building, light is filtered through plants.

“Technologies like on-site water purification at the site means that as you increase population density in the city, you don’t have to build new infrastructure,” Adams says.

He believes that much of the change can happen through policy – like encouraging building owners to collect solar energy by paying more for power put into the grid through the day and discounting power drawn down at night – reducing the base load on the power station supplying the city.

He says that one of the smartest cities he has seen is the Spanish city of Barcelona, which is an old city that has a high population density – 200 people per hectare, with 40 percent open space.

“The entire city is built to seven stories. The whole roof of the city can be a solar collector, so there is democratic access to solar energy, which is the technology of the future,” he says.

Adams says that much of the old city's advantages lie in 'blindingly simple' configurations where public life and private life are well-defined.

Streets are set out with buildings surrounding a private shared courtyard; pedestrians walk around the periphery of the block.

Simple controls in cities like a hyper-mix of street frontages and a combination of major streets with lanes and arcades can make a big difference, he says.

“Smart cities are more about smart thinking than about smart technology.”