EVEN thieves, it seems, now have a smartphone app. Makkie Klauwe (it means something like “easy pickings” in Amsterdam slang) reveals the city’s best places for pilfering—for instance Reestraat and Tuinstraat, where bicycles appear to be a good target. The app depends for its dark arts on pulling together publicly available data on disposable income, crime levels and other problems reported in a district. A good place to steal might, for instance, have high income, low reported crime and broken streetlights.
Luckily for Amsterdam’s citizens and tourists, Makkie Klauwe does not exist. Bram Fritz, a graphic-design student, thought it up for an app contest the city held in 2011 (it won first prize in the “safety” category). Although he says he might write the app one day, the main aim was to kindle a debate over the ever greater amount of easily available data that can change urban life. “I wanted to confront citizens with what could become a threat to their property,” explains Mr Fritz.
As they go about their business of producing most of the world’s wealth, novelty and human interaction, cities also produce a vast amount of data. The people who run cities are ever more keen on putting those data to work. Hardly a week passes without a mayor somewhere in the world unveiling a “smart-city” project—often at one of the many conferences hailing the concept. In August China announced such a programme, this one spread around nine pilot sites across the country. Earlier this year Kenya’s then president, Mwai Kibaki, broke ground on Konza Techno City outside Nairobi.