Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

And IBM’s mirror world is not the only one that matters in Rio.

Nowhere do the country’s contradictions come to a head more than in the fragile squatter settlements that cling to the hillsides above Rio’s posh neighborhoods. For more than a decade, along the boundary that separates the Pereirao favela from the surrounding forest, a group of boys have painstakingly constructed an elaborate scale model of their community, cobbled together from cinder blocks and LEGOs and the very mud upon which their own neighborhood stands. Alessandro Angelini, doctoral student in anthropology at the City University of New York, has studied the boys and Projeto Morrinho, as they call their model, for several years.

Much like the mirror world in the Rio Operations Center, the boys’ model provides a kind of topsight, a view of the workings of the favela as a whole. But, it is also a stage for acting out the everyday stories of the street using LEGO avatars as actors—stories that provide insight into why the people who live there act the way they do. Angelini’s films of their performances run the gamut from Stand By Afe-style boyhood epics to wild strobe-drenched scenes of the infamous baile funk street parties, where local drug lords tote assault rifles on the dance floor. Whereas IBM’s model senses from a distance, the boys’ model is driven by observations on the ground. It’s a rich reflection of the social gyrations of the favela that are hidden even from the government’s view. It is their own representation of the “chaotic multi-sensual reality” that Gelernter saw as the essence of the romantic view of the world, and the side of humanity that mirror worlds would edit out.96

IBM’s creation encodes the entire city into an inelastic stream of data, but the boys’ spins an enriching oral history of a typical favela’s human journey.

The computer model may tell us what is happening, but the boys’ tells us why. The boys’ approach is undoubtedly the way any community would prefer to be modeled, not as a collection of objective physical measurements but as the subjective story of a living, feeling organism.

Angelini has a photo of Projeto Morrinho that shows a tiny replica of a real billboard located nearby, which the boys have placed overlooking the miniature favela from on high. “God knows everything but is not a snitch,” it reads. While it is merely an ad for a 2008 documentary made about the boys, it’s an unwitting reference to the silent watchers in the Intelligent Operations Center. It’s as if the boys’ mirror world senses the technocrats out there as well, reducing the city, and their very lives, to a set of equations, approximations, and data points.

In the 1850s, as Ildefons Cerda envisioned a new Barcelona, he wasn’t on the railroad or the telegraph company’s payroll. He was merely trying to craft a better city by exploiting new technologies. But today big technology companies have usurped a leading role in shaping our visions for future cities.

These new technicians aim to harness the technologies of ubiquitous computing and a new scientific understanding of cities to transform how we manage them. As we have seen, this isn’t the first time technology has played a starring role in the story of urbanization. The massive cities of the Industrial Revolution depended as much on advances in information processing and communications as they did on the rise of steam-powered machines and electricity. In the twentieth century we continued to repeatedly reshape our cities to accommodate and exploit new technologies, wielding new scientific ideas to justify and speed their spread. But employing science and technology in service of reshaping cities has often led to more sorrow than success. We are not the first generation to turn new tools to the problems of cities. But are we clever enough to learn from past mistakes to do it right this time?

From Garden City to Conurbation

By the end of the 1800s, the governments of Europe and the United States faced an urban crisis as dire as the one China, India, and Africa do today. The poor were crowding into booming cities faster than the physical and social infrastructure could be expanded to serve them. There was too much pollution and crime and too little housing, education, and health care. In London, where millions lived in penury, responses ran the gamut. The ruling elite simply abandoned its toxic core for the countryside. Some reformers stayed behind to create new social institutions to help feed, house, and educate the worst off.

Still others argued that cities themselves were the root of the problem. Ebenezer Howard, a clerk for the British Parliament, proposed a simple solution. Start over. A self- made utopian, in 1871 Howard had traveled to America at the age of twenty-one to try his hand at farming in Nebraska. But he was soon drawn to Chicago, where he worked as a shorthand reporter for several years. The city was hastily rebuilding from a devastating fire, largely along its existing lines. Howard watched as a golden opportunity to improve the city was squandered. (Not until Daniel Burnham’s ambitious 1909 plan would Chicago articulate a more modern design and lay out the city’s majestic public spaces we know today.)

After returning to England in 1876, Howard grew increasingly frustrated with the inability of government to tackle the rapidly worsening problems of cities. By 1898 he was finally ready to propose a more rational approach to city planning and design in the only book he would ever write, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. In 1902, this manifesto was republished as the deliciously Victorian sci-fi tome planning aficionados around the world now know simply as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Today, computers provide the technological metaphor that defines our visions of smart cities. Howard drew on the new science of his day—electromagnetism—to describe his model of society. The city and country, he argued, acted as opposing “magnets,” each attracting and repelling people through different innate characteristics. Cities and towns offered jobs and opportunities for social interaction, while the countryside had fresh air and cheap land. The city’s pollution and high rents pushed people away, but so did the boredom of rural life.

The Garden City, Howard proposed, would be a third magnet, a new kind of settlement that combined the most attractive elements of both city and country. Leafing through his plan for utopia, its clear that much of his design didn’t survive its encounter with car-obsessed America. With its town center and dense bands of multifamily housing, the Garden City looks less like exurban sprawl and more like New Urbanism, the design movement that swept across America in the 1990s with its emphasis on walkable neighborhoods. But many of Howard’s ideas, such as relegating industry to the city’s outskirts and clustering shops in a massive covered complex at its center (e.g., a shopping mall), are fundamental motifs in American suburbia.1

The Garden City was the Songdo of its day—network technology undergirded its daring break from the past. While Londoners choked on smoke from a million coal-fired furnaces, Howard’s utopia would run on clean municipal electricity (which, as we saw in chapter 1, had made its world debut only recently in London’s suburbs in 1881).

More importantly, Garden Cities galvanized a growing movement of architects, engineers, and social reformers around rational, comprehensive approaches to the problems of the city. Universities quickly formed programs to train city planners, and by World War II, a whole new profession had emerged. Its practitioners brought Garden City-inspired communities to life throughout Europe and the United States. In 1939, the Regional Planning Association of America, their national organization in the United States, produced a film that captured the excitement surrounding the scientifically designed, technologically powered transformation of the nation. Screened at the same World’s Fair in New York that featured General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, the film heralded a vision directly descended from the Garden City. “We see homes with grass, children riding bicycles, and men walking to work in clean factories and playing softball,” recount historians Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella. It prefigured today’s smart city ambitions. “The world of mankind and technology is in balance once again. The lost Eden is restored by good sense,good planning, and good technology.”