Call it what you want—chief innovation officer, chief information officer, director of innovation and technology—either way, the role is increasingly at the center of smart city projects across the US.

• An innovation chief’s responsibilities can vary as much as the cities they work for, but in general, they share one focus: delivering better technology outcomes to residents.
• That can range from improving IT infrastructure for local government workers to city pilots for emerging technologies like drone programs or autonomous vehicles.

A tall technological task: Pretty much every city CIO in the US—with the exception of Telosa’s forthcoming one, of course—is working with decades of accumulated infrastructure, community, and culture, all of which can make implementing new technologies challenging.

It’s no easy task to figure out how new technology fits into any system—let alone the complex physical and social fabric of a city. But what if a city could be shaped without concerns about existing infrastructure, or budget?

To better understand where their priorities lie, we asked CIOs from Albuquerque to Boston to answer one simple question: If you could build a smart city from scratch, what would it look like?

Here’s what the CIOs told us.—JM

This story is part of our new package exploring smart cities—click here to view the full interactive series.

If forecasters predicting future costs of renewable energy were contestants on The Price Is Right, no one would be making it onstage.

Revisiting renewables: Projections about the price of technologies like wind and solar have consistently been too high, leading to the perception that moving away from fossil fuels will come at an economic cost, according to a recent paper published in Joule.

“The narrative that clean energy and the energy transition are expensive and will be expensive—this narrative is deeply embedded in society,” Rupert Way, a study coauthor and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking and at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, told Emerging Tech Brew.

• “For the last 20 years, models have been showing that solar will be expensive well into the future, but it’s not right,” he added.

The findings: A rapid transition to renewable energy is likely to result in trillions of dollars in net savings through 2070, and a global energy system that still relies as heavily on fossil fuels as we do today could cost ~$500 billion more to operate each year than a system generating electricity from mostly renewable sources.

“It doesn’t matter whether you value the future a lot or a little, you still should proceed with a fast transition,” Way said. “Because clean energy costs are so low now, and they’re likely to be in the future, we can justify doing this transition on economic grounds, either way.”

Read about the economics of the energy transition here.—GD

Back in the day, the coolest tech financial institutions had was those pneumatic tube systems that tellers used for drive-thru banking.

Now…Financial institutions are investing in and experimenting with a whole bunch of different eyebrow-raising technologies. Last month, we chronicled a few of them, from voice assistants to EV chargers. Revisit the stories below:

How Truist, product of the decade’s biggest bank merger, built its first AI assistant. After BB&T and SunTrust’s $66 billion merger, an internal team spent a year working on the project.

Why Betterment’s robo-advisor doesn’t use AI. AI-based techniques were less effective than simpler approaches, the company found.

How financial institutions are trying to find their voice (assistants). They’re focused on integrating chat experiences into their own apps instead of building into third parties.

Fleet electrification is opening up a new market for payments companies. Fleetcor’s recent acquisition of Plugsurfing signals the coming consolidation in the EV charging space.

Click here to view all of last month’s theme stories in one place.—DM

Stat: Residents of smaller US cities are both less enthusiastic about the importance of smart city tech and report much lower levels of engagement with it than residents of large cities, per an exclusive Emerging Tech Brew-Harris Poll published this week.

Quote: “He’s thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.”—Ark’s Cathie Wood on Elon Musk’s potential plans for Twitter, in the midst of his chaotic first week helming the app

Read: A profile of Jony Ive, Apple’s former design visionary who retired a few years ago.

Learn: Tired of the same leadership advice that gets you nowhere? Our Leading Questions series delivers a fresh take from industry-leading professionals—and right now, it’s free to access. Sign up here.

Subscribe: The world of crypto can be intimidating. That’s exactly why we created Incrypto—the free newsletter that breaks down crypto in a way that actually makes sense. Check it out.

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out? (Btw, this is a smart cities-themed edition in honor of the interactive we dropped on Tuesday.)

• Japan made a robotic version of a government official to promote a new ID system.
• Telosa, Marc Lore’s planned utopian city, will begin building on a remediated superfund site in New Jersey.
• A flock of 500 drones will create a giant Candy Crush ad above NYC.
• Saudi Arabia claims it has broken ground on the construction of The Line, its 105-mile-long desert smart city.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• From Alphabet to Amazon, tech giants aim to do more with less
• How a fifth-generation farmer and software engineer uses tech in his fields
• Matter is finally live. We asked a few members why they joined the smart-home standard