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An interesting article on Smarter Cities.

"The sick die here because they can't sleep - it costs a lot merely to sleep in this city! That's why everyone's sick: carts clattering through the winding streets, curses hurled at some herd standing still in the middle of the road." This could describe a modern African city, but in fact it comes from the satirist Juvenal in the early second century... and is about the city of Rome.

This is not how people picture Rome; the benchmark of a beautiful city. Yet the cliché that Rome was not built in a day holds true. The Coliseum was built about 30 years before Juvenal wrote his satire and the Pantheon around 20 years later. Chronic sleeplessness was caused by building supplies transported at night. But like many modern cities in Africa, Rome was in the necessary state of chaos it took to create all those monumental buildings, bath houses, sewage systems and aqueducts. Perhaps comparisons could be made with Ghana's capital Accra?

Read on

http://www.idgconnect.com/blog-abstract/889/kathryn-cave-ghana-accra-ibm-s-new-rome

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