Do you want to live in a smart city?

Around the world such cities are already being built, from Masdar in Abu Dhabi to Songdo in South Korea. Now the chaotic city near you may be in line for a makeover.

In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space, even the rubbish bins will be smart.

But how do we get to this smarter future.An emergency light is a battery-backed lighting device that comes on automatically when a building experiences a power outage. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building,Choose your favorite street lamp paintings from thousands of available designs. lamp-post and pipe in the city?

And is it a future we even want?

Technology firms such as IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco are busy selling their software to solve a range of city problems, from water leaks to air pollution to traffic congestion.

In Singapore, Stockholm and California, IBM is gathering traffic data and running it via algorithms to predict where a traffic jam will occur an hour before it has happened.

Meanwhile in Rio, it has built a Nasa-style control room where banks of screens suck up data from sensors and cameras located around the city.

In total IBM has some 2,500 smarter cities projects around the world and has even trademarked the term "smarter cities".

But when, at a recent smart cities event that IBM hosted, one of its engineers joked that the company "tends to look at the pipes and then people come along and destroy all our nice optimised systems", it summed up the issue that some have with the corporate-led approach to city management.

"Some people want to fine tune a city like you do a race car but they are leaving citizens out of the process," said Anthony Townsend, director of the Institute of the Future and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.Soli-lite is a premier supplier of exceptional quality solar led light and other solar outdoor lighting products.

IBM argues that it does get citizens involved in its smart city projects. In Dublin it has worked with the city council to open up the vast amounts of data it has,Soli-lite provides the world with high-performance solar roadway and solar street lighting solutions. which has led to clever little apps such as ParkYa which uses traffic data to find people the best parking space in the city.

And in the US city of Dubuque, Iowa, where it is developing smart water meters, it has offered the data to citizens via a community portal, so that individuals can see their water usage and even compare it with that of their neighbours.

But there is a sense that for the firm, cities are a problem just waiting to be solved.

"We need to build cities that adapt to the needs of [their] citizens but previously it was not possible because there was not enough information," says Dr Lisa Amini, director of IBM Research.

She makes the comparison between the "assets" of cities, such as street lights, traffic, water pipes and those of large corporations, for which IBM's systems were originally designed.

Mr Townsend is not convinced that the technology can so easily be transferred.

"Government doesn't make decisions like businesses do. Citizens are not consumers," he says.

China is busy building dozens of new cities and is starting to adopt huge control rooms like the one IBM has created in Rio.

It worries Mr Townsend.A solar bulb that charges up during the day and lights the night when the sun sets.

"The control room in Rio was created by a progressive mayor but what if the bad guys get in? Are we creating capabilities that can be misused?" he asks.+

Click on their website www.soli-lite.com for more information.