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

Garden Cities set the stage for twentieth-century suburbanization. But Howard’s design might never have caught the public imagination were it not for the help of Patrick Geddes, a polymathic Scottish biologist turned social planner. Howard sought to work from a clean slate, but Geddes believed that mass urbanization was not to be feared. “Civics,” as Geddes called the application of the then-new field of sociology to practical problems, intended to address social decay by mending the physical structure of existing cities. In stark contrast to utopian designers like Howard, who took a decidedly paternalistic approach to the problems of cities, Geddes believed that progress required the full participation of every citizen. A utopian design, no matter how effective, was insufficient. “Whereas Howard proposes a plan,” Kargon and Molella argue, “Geddes announces a movement. Howard, the utopian, lays out a map within which change would arrive, but Geddes elaborates a vision of citizenship (civics’) that will prepare a population to build its change.”

Trained as an evolutionary biologist, Geddes saw the city as an organism rather than a machine, in stark contrast to the engineers and architects who dominated the nascent urban planning movement. “Forms of life and their emergence and development in interaction with the environment were to become a major interest of Geddes,” writes biographer Volker Welter, “determining his life work from his earliest publication to his last book.”4 This unique perspective bestowed Geddes with a view of cities and their evolution that was vast and comprehensive in scope, and he was determined to use it to resolve the growing conflict between city and countryside that Howard’s design had sidestepped. “It takes the whole region to make the city,” he wrote. City and country were simply different parts of the same biological system. Building on his early work in biological classification, Geddes developed a research method he called the “regional survey,” designed to capture a comprehensive snapshot of the entire scope of human settlements, from center to hinterlands. It was also a tool to map their evolution in history. “A city is more than a place in space,” Geddes declared to a group of planning enthusiasts gathered at the University of London in 1904, “it is a drama in time.”5

But Geddes also believed that citizens had “forgotten most of the history of their own city,” as he wrote in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution. If they were to rally behind a progressive, organic, and scientific approach to city planning, they needed to relearn that history. In 1892 he set out to teach them, putting on display a massive regional survey of Edinburgh. Housed inside an old astronomical observatory in central Edinburgh that Geddes renamed Outlook Tower, it was an immersion center for civic education. Starting on the roof, visitors began by taking in a sweeping live view of the region, presented inside a camera obscura—a kind of room-sized pinhole camera. As they descended from the roof, they passed through a succession of chambers that portrayed the city situated at ever-larger scales—within Scotland, within Europe, and in the world—a Victorian precursor of sorts to Rio de Janeiro’s digital dashboard. The building doubled as a repository for the vast archive of information Geddes had gathered about the region, which he intended visitors to experience in its entirety. Upon reaching the ground floor, visitors were ushered out the door into the real city itself.

The Garden City movement spread quickly in the early decades of the twentieth century, its principles inspiring copycat designs around the world. But while Geddes would go on to create several city master plans himself, including Tel Aviv and dozens of Indian cities and towns, it was Howard’s precise physical program that attracted the most attention, from fans and critics alike. Jane Jacobs excoriated Howard in Death and Life of Great American Cities , published in 1961, arguing that “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed.... He was uninterested in the aspects of the city which could not be abstracted to serve his Utopia.”6 She showed little love for Geddes’s legacy, the regional planning movement, either, heaping scorn on urban historian Lewis Mumford, Geddes’s most influential and loyal disciple in America. But ignorant of Geddes’s insistence on full citizen participation in city building, Jacobs’s own work reinvented the ambitions of the Outlook Tower. Her book was itself a regional survey of sorts—a carefully studied and holistic dissection of the social ecology of urban life, delivered in plain prose to a huge public audience. And her critique of top-down planning was entirely consistent with the evolutionary biologist’s understanding of cities. As historian Robert Fishman summarized Jacobs’s argument, the planning elite “completely failed to understand and respect the far more complex order that healthy cities already embodied. This complex order—what she calls close-grained diversity’—was the result not of big plans but of all the little plans of ordinary people that alone can generate the diversity that is the true glory of a great city.” Geddes would have been proud.

Jacobs so thoroughly skewered Howard’s top-down utopian approach that it is still forbidden territory for city planners today (at least in the West). There was much to criticize. The physical master planners who followed in the steps of Howard overreached, destroying vibrant neighborhoods and virgin farmland to make way for lifeless megaprojects. As Tom Campanella puts it, “Postwar urban planners ... abetted some of the most egregious acts of urban vandalism in American history.”9 The Garden City dream has metamorphosed into the banal reality of suburban sprawl. Another Geddes neologism best describes that unbroken patchwork of built-up areas we now inhabit—“conurbation.”

Car Wars

The men—for they were almost all men—who followed in the footsteps of Ebenezer Howard intended to clear-cut slums and countryside alike to make way for progress. They sought to solve the problems of the city by changing its shape, and counted on new technology to stitch their new designs together. But even as they reorganized neighborhoods and regions around the potential of trains, telegraphs, and electrical grids, another technology was emerging whose impact on the physical form of cities would dwarf them all. And in the wake of its devastating impacts, would fundamentally transform the way we plan cities as well.

It all began in Detroit, with Henry Ford’s masterpiece of manufacturing management, the assembly line. Until then a luxury good, almost overnight automobiles became a mass-market product. They took American cities by storm. Today we think of New York City as a place where one can escape auto-dependency and walk or take transit instead. But in the 1920s it was a hotbed of enthusiasm for this new means of locomotion. During that decade, the number of registered motor vehicles almost tripled, from 223,143 in 1920 to nearly 675,000 in 1928. The crowding of so many cars and trucks into the densely populated metropolis paralyzed city streets.

“A Rising Tide of Traffic Rolls Over New York: What Is Being Done to Relieve the Ever-Growing Street Congestion Which Threatens To Slow Up the Vital Processes of Life in the Metropolis,” screamed a New York Times feature headline in February 1930. The newspaper projected some 1.2 million motor vehicles would overwhelm city streets by 1935.10

Throughout the United States, the arrival of huge numbers of cars and trucks in densely populated cities sparked violent conflicts, pitting pedestrians against a newly motorized elite. The battle was literally waged in blood in the streets. Today, most deaths caused by automobiles occur on highways and in rural areas, and most urban accidents are low-speed and nonfatal. But in the 1920s automobiles plowed through city crowds like juggernauts. The vast majority of the deaths in the early days of motorization were urban pedestrians. “After World War I, the scale of death and dismemberment on roads and streets in America grew fast,” writes Peter Norton in Fighting Traffic , his fascinating history of the period. “In the first four years after Armistice Day more Americans were killed in automobile accidents than had died in battle in France. This fact was widely publicized, and the news was greeted with shock.”11 Cars and trucks killed some fifteen thousand people annually in the early 1920s—in New York City, there were some thirteen hundred traffic fatalities in 1929 alone. Mob lynchings of offending drivers were common. Children bore the brunt of the attack, mown down at play in streets hitherto considered their domain. In 1925 one in every three victims of the automobile was a child. That year, cars and trucks killed seven thousand children in the United States.14