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

But the residents of the West Village, who couldn’t afford a consultant to undertake a survey to challenge the city’s blight designation, crowdsourced their own data- driven retort. According to Flint, “The residents volunteered to conduct a study themselves—surveying building owners, residents, and shopkeepers about the conditions of the West Village block by block.” The results, compiled by a volunteer who worked as an analyst in the advertising business, showed that the area’s housing was not overcrowded, was being well maintained, and provided adequate bathroom and kitchen facilities.24 The newspapers conducted their own investigations and verified the survey’s findings. Pressure mounted, and by the end of 1961, less than a year after she had learned of the blight study, the proposal was shelved. Jacobs had thwarted Moses and the city once again.

Jacobs’s battles with Moses were minor skirmishes within the much broader conflict in American civic life during the 1960s, but her efforts cleared the way for the sharply increased demands for citizen participation in city planning and policy making that would follow. Built atop the legacy of paternalistic Utopians like Howard, the profession of planning was thrown into crisis. As Campanella recounts, with its underlying assumptions invalidated, the field moved to “disgorge itself of the muscular physical-interventionist focus that had long been planning’s metier.” It retooled to engage in social planning as much as physical planning. “Drafting tables were tossed for pickets and surveys and spreadsheets,” Campanella writes. “Planners sought new alliances in academe, beyond architecture and design—in political science, law, economics, sociology.” A new focus on the process of planning displaced the primacy of the final outcome, and intended to expand participation.

Planners recast themselves. Previously their role had been that of objective engineers, expected to design an ideal physical solution to be imposed on the city without comment. Now they would serve as expert facilitators of conversations about the future of cities, providing information and analysis that would help communities make their own choices. A new generation of students, radicalized by the broader social struggles of the 1960s, pushed the profession even further, casting themselves as advocates of disadvantaged groups. Since the deck was already stacked against racial minorities, women, and children, the argument went (by developers, corrupt politicians, and planning departments themselves), planners couldn’t simply arbitrate between competing interests.

They had to mold themselves in the image of civil- rights activists and urban advocates like Jacobs, and become champions of the powerless. By the late 1960s, this intellectual turmoil had paralyzed city planning. The Regional Plan Association of New York produced one of the few big plans of the era in 1968, its Second Plan (the first plan was done in the 1920s). But as Tom Wright, who heads the organization today, explains, the group was so conflicted about the changing role of planning that it merely documented existing conditions—it didn’t dare to make any specific recommendations at all.

After a half-century of bigger and bigger plans, we had returned full circle to where Geddes had begun. Geddes championed preservation and surgical redevelopment of existing cities and was strongly opposed to large-scale slum clearance. In 1915 he wrote from India, “The policy of sweeping clearances should be recognised for what I believe it is; one of the most disastrous and pernicious blunders in the chequered history of sanitation.” He practiced what he preached. After marrying in 1886, he and his wife had moved into the top-floor flats of an entire tenement block in the James Court neighborhood of Edinburgh. Over the coming years he lived among the poor while orchestrating a dizzying number of renovation projects in the surrounding area. He described this approach as “conservative surgery.” As his son Alasdair later recounted, using metaphors from his father’s beloved hobby, gardening, “they set about to weed out the worst of the houses that surrounded them, and thus widening the narrow closes into courtyards on which a little sunlight could fall and into which a little air could enter upon the children’s new playing spaces and the elders’ garden plots.” As Mumford described Geddes’s approach to revitalization of cities, “he saw both cities and human beings as wholes; he saw the processes of repair, renewal and rebirth as natural phenomena of development...” For Geddes himself, the ambition “to write in reality—here with flower and tree, and elsewhere with house and city—it is all the same.”

Top-down, or bottom-up? What is the best way to build cities? Even as Howard and Geddes worked together to advance rational, comprehensive approaches to city planning, their methods were diametrically opposed. City planning still struggles to resolve the discord. Adding to the turmoil, in Western countries, Jacobs’s challenge still casts a long shadow over efforts to think big. As Nicolai Ouroussoff, then the New York Times’s architecture critic, wrote a week after Jacobs’s death in 2006, “the pendulum of opinion has swung so far in favor of Ms. Jacobs that it has distorted the public’s understanding of urban planning. As we mourn her death, we may want to mourn a bit for Mr. Moses as well.”33 (Moses died in 1981.)

“How did a profession that roared to life with grand ambitions,” wonders Campanella, “become such a mouse?” Jacobs deserved much of the blame. “She was as opposed to new towns as she was to slum clearance—anything that threatened the vitality of traditional urban forms was the enemy.... How odd that such a conservative,even reactionary stance would galvanize an entire generation” Worse, the advocacy turn she inspired for a generation of young planners had been co-opted by the NIMBYism of urban elites who “weaponized Jane Jacobs to oppose anything they perceived as threatening the status quo—including projects that would reduce our carbon footprint, create more affordable housing and shelter the homeless.”34

The car wars show us the awful longevity of the choices we make about technology’s role in the city. In the end, despite the social turmoil, the destruction of cities and countryside, the discrediting of city planning, the car remains at the center of the city—not just in America. “In some ways the war is finished,” remarked Georges Amar, the head of innovation for the Paris Metro at a New York University lecture in October 2011, “Cars are part of the mobility system.” The struggle triggered by motorization produced a more citizen-centric system of planning. But cities paid a huge price. We will continue to pay for those hasty decisions about urban technology for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, in places like Songdo, the Garden City philosophy of starting over is alive and well, and powered by the new network technologies of our era. The rhetoric of technology giants, heralding efficiency above all, is a page out of the traffic engineers’ 1920s playbook. At a major summit organized by IBM in 2011, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria epitomized this outdated worldview as he shilled for smart cities, declaring, “Everything in your society has to be modernized. Everything has to be smart.”35 Yet, as we have seen, Songdo is setting the pace for much of the rapidly urbanizing world.

By labeling their own visions of cities as “smart,” technology giants today paint all others as inferior. But the lessons of the past cannot be ignored. Make the wrong choice in the design of our smart cities, and our descendants may find themselves a century out, wondering what we were thinking today.

Inventing the Internet

The disappointing legacy of the Garden Cities and the battles over motorization are a sobering lesson for those who think they can master-plan smart cities in the coming century. But the way we create new technologies also went through its own grassroots revolution in the twentieth century, which may be just as important in shaping how we design smart cities. Just as the car wars reached their zenith in the 1960s, battle lines were being drawn over another technological system that has transformed the world—the Internet. Its creators faced a similar dilemma over how to design and build it.