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

We don’t yet know how to build a smart city the way we built the Internet. But it’s clear from what we now know about the best ways to build cities and create new technologies that we need to start the search for ways to do it.

The Need for Urgent Participation

Patrick Geddes’s approach to fixing the problems of cities demanded total participation. This was achievable only by thinking about large-scale transformation as a series of small, incremental changes. Historically, that was the way we always built cities. As writer and architect Bernard Rudofsky explained in Architecture Without Architects , traditional cities were designed and built by everyday people, working together as communities to respond to local challenges using local materials. Over long periods of time, they slowly turned the very earth they stood on into buildings of clay, stone, and mud. This “communal architecture” was highly democratized, decentralized, free-flowing, and adaptive.41

The creators of the Internet embedded the same kind of thinking in the design of some of our most important technologies. We’ve all built the Internet together. It is the most participatory construction project in human history. But participation takes time, which is in short supply for those tackling the world’s urgent urban problems. Climate change marches on in its complex dance with urbanization—simultaneously cities are (a) global warming’s cause, (b) its biggest victim, and (c) our greatest hope for a solution. Health, education, transportation, jobs—all are lacking.

Today, the most progressive cities update their master plan on a five-year cycle. These massive documents are the result of thousands of deliberations and decisions about tough trade-offs. In cities that grew organically over time, those decisions could be made at a very small scale, iteratively, and in response to both local needs and bigger global trends. But as our ability to build has accelerated through improvements in construction engineering, the frenetic business of real estate development, and new financing schemes, that historic way of designing cities has come undone. As a result, in fast-growing cities decisions about the location of different buildings, facilities, or roads have become ad hoc, arbitrary, and ill informed. Architect Rem Koolhaas, who studied the rapid urbanization of China’s Pearl River Delta region in the 1990s, described the pace of design there, telling students, “in China, 40-story buildings are designed on Macintoshes in less than a week.”42 One can hardly expect good decisions amid such haste. Oddly, just as the pace of building the physical world speeds up, there are signs that as computing hits the streets, the pace of innovation is about to slow down, or at least get a lot more complicated. Ubiquitous computing is a thicket of tough design and engineering problems that will take time to sort out. Gene Becker, who launched HP’s first forays into ubiquitous computing in the 1990s, argues that stitching computing into the real world is turning out to be trickier than early visionaries had bet on. “Ubicomp is hard,” he writes, using the computer scientists’ contraction for ubiquitous computing, “understanding people, context, and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high. I used to say ubicomp was a ten-year problem; now I’m starting to think that it’s really a hundred-year problem.”43 Adam Greenfield, in his book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, goes even further, arguing that, if the goal is the “seamless and intangible application of information processing ... in perfect conformity with the user’s will, we may never quite get there however hard we try.”44 Marc Weiser, the visionary pioneer of ubiquitous computing at Xerox PARC, wrote that compared to the challenge of designing interfaces for the screen, “ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.”45 If we are looking to smart cities for urgent solutions, we may need to reset our expectations.

Still, the potential for rapid advances through combinatorial innovation is a tantalizing bet. If the rise of the Internet has shown us anything, it is that organic evolution doesn’t have to be slow—though it may be unpredictable. But for a combinatorial approach to smart city technology to succeed, we must quickly move away from the anachronistic visions of Songdo and Rio and engage a much broader universe of ideas, technologies, and innovators. The technology giants’ designs are a twenty-first-century upgrade to twentieth-century paternalism, an attempt to solve all of our problems for us. But in doing so, these designs fail to realize the full potential of smart cities.

Technology lifted up city planning in the twentieth century only to help shatter it after a few decades of failed dreams. Planning’s long road back to legitimacy and effectiveness has required developing new approaches that involved entire communities in the planning process. Success of any top-down effort to shape the cities of the future will depend on bottom-up participation as well. Geddes lights the way for us. As biographer Helen Meller writes, “His objective in establishing civics’ was to dispel fear of cities and mass urbanisation, and to release the creative responses of individuals towards solving modern urban problems.”46 Lewis Mumford, who after decades of correspondence (though they only met in person twice) knew him best, said: “What Geddes’s outlook and method contribute to the planning of today are precisely the elements that the administrator and bureaucrat, in the interests of economy or efficiency, are tempted to leave out: time, patience, loving care of detail, a watchful inter-relation of past and future, an insistence upon the human scale and the human purpose, above all merely mechanical requirements: finally a willingness to leave an essential part of the process to those who are most intimately connected with it: the ultimate consumers or citizens.”47

We would do well to follow Geddes’s example. A whole cadre of civic hackers is already leading the way.

In the fall of 1970, Red Burns picked up a Sony Portapak video camera for the first time. Hie world’s first portable camcorder, the Portapak cost $1,500 (about $9,000 in today’s dollars) and weighed nearly twenty pounds. But for Burns, a documentary filmmaker, “it was an epiphanal moment.” As she wrote years later, “The skills required to operate the camera were not out of reach for non-professionals. The cost was not prohibitive and for the first time, it was possible for ordinary people to make their own video documents.”1

Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has revolutionized the way we produce and distribute video. Thanks to the rapid decline in the cost of digital video cameras, for only a few hundred dollars anyone can shoot, edit, and broadcast short films to a potential audience of billions on the Web. Even most phones sold today are miniature studios, with high- definition video cameras and sophisticated editing software included as standard features. But in the 1970s, it was the Portapak and a new urban telecommunications network— cable television—that promised to upend the media industry and transform the way we communicate.

Cable technology was a latecomer to the city, having originally been developed to deliver broadcast television to remote mountain communities. The earliest systems were set up in 1948 in Astoria, Oregon, and Mahoney City, Pennsylvania." While broadcast signals couldn’t reach into the valleys where people lived, by placing “community antennas” (or CAs, hence the acronym CATV you’ll see on the back of your set-top box) atop a nearby peak, signals could be run by wire down the mountainside to deliver service to nearby homes.3 But by the 1970s it had become clear that cable’s true value was in its much greater bandwidth compared to over-the-air transmissions. Cable could deliver hundreds of channels to the country’s big media markets, compared to the dozen or so that served most regions on the VHF and UHF broadcast bands. Investment surged into the construction of cable networks in cities and suburbs, more than $15 billion between 1984 and 1992. It was, according to the industry’s trade association, “the largest private construction project since World War II.”4 Today, cable television is so ubiquitous it’s difficult to imagine a time when most homes only received a half-dozen channels of programming. But as recently as 1980, the year Ted Turner launched the first twenty-four-hour Cable News Network (CNN), just one in five—16 million of the United States’ 80 million households —subscribed to cable.5