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

For video artists like Burns, cable television was YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix rolled into one. She was determined to explore the potential of the new medium. In 1971, a year before Charles Dolan and Gerald Levin launched HBO just a few miles uptown, Burns teamed up with fellow documentarian George Stoney to establish the Alternate Media Center (AMC) at New York University. Where there was once scarcity controlled by big business, cable had created an abundance of distribution channels. Burns wanted to see how communities would use them.

Not far from where those early cable networks first appeared decades earlier, the AMC set up shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. There, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, in 1975 they built a primitive, yet functional, two-way interactive cable television network.6 Using a split-screen display and telephone lines to transmit voices, the rudimentary Skype-like multiparty video chat room linked three senior citizens’ centers. Burns and her team intended to experiment with new ways to deliver social services such as counseling, health care, and education online over television cable links—some forty years before Cisco would craft its own vision of a smart city around interactive video in Songdo in South Korea. Much like today’s social networks, the goal was to connect people to each other. “We deliberately set out to use the system as a socializing force,” she wrote.

What happened next surprised Burns, who had expected extensive production and training to really get things going. Volunteers immediately filled the new pipes with their own content. One woman created a weekly chat show where she interviewed local politicians and took questions over the voice link from the distributed audiences. Another hosted a chat-room-style discussion that spanned the different locations. Yet another videotaped interviews with the staff at nursing homes, homing in on issues that “were far more relevant to the needs of older people than any questions we might have designed,” Burns reported.

As Burns described it to me nearly forty years later, the convergence of amateur video and cable in the 1970s was “a perfect storm.” Because cable television was regulated by local governments, the networks had to strike a franchise deal with each municipality where they wanted to operate. And many communities were starting to demand rights to some of the ample array of new channels for “public access” use. Cleverly, Burns teamed up with the cable companies to sweeten the deal and speed the franchising negotiations. Bankrolled by industry and backed by local governments, she launched community video centers in ten American cities. At the centers anyone could learn to shoot, edit, and broadcast their own content.9 In just a few short years, a growing network of public-access activists had torn down barriers to community broadcasting that had existed for nearly fifty years. They had shown, using the revolutionary network technology of their day, that information and communications technology could empower people in cities. Citizens could shape the technology, and the business and regulatory context into which it would be applied, to meet their own needs.

Cable was only a shadow of the media and communications revolution in store for the 1980s. Sensing what was coming, in 1975 Burns and others at NYU began planning a graduate program that would carry on the work of the Alternate Media Center, training the next generation of media and technology activists. With seed funding from the Markle Foundation, the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) opened its doors at NYU in 1979 with teleconferencing expert Martin Elton at the helm. Urban scholar Mitchell Moss (my own mentor during my masters degree studies in urban planning) stepped in from 1981-1983 and rapidly expanded the program before Burns returned in 1983 to lead it for nearly twenty years.10

ITP’s ambition was to challenge top-down thinking about technology. “This is an era of technological promise,” Burns wrote passionately in 1981. “Not surprisingly, those most invested in exploring the new technologies come from the private sector. The focus of their interest is obvious: cost effectiveness. However, in concentrating ... on the bottom line, they have neglected the process through which people harness the technology to create a system. That creative process, although difficult to isolate or quantify, is a crucial element in the achievement of that promise.”11 The whole point of ITP, Burns explained to me, was to “stop paying attention to technology, and start paying attention to people.”

Burns’s assessment of the hopes, ambitions, and potential conflicts that new technologies spurred in the early 1980s was dead on. And as we embark on the development of smart cities, it remains surprisingly accurate and relevant. The technology giants building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology, not people, mostly focused on cost effectiveness and efficiency, mostly ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots.

But the birth of public-access cable in the 1970s is a reminder that truly disruptive applications of new information technologies have almost always come from the bottom up. Throughout the twentieth century, as broadly useful new technologies have spread, hackers have eagerly adapted them in unpredictable ways. In the 1970s it was portable video cameras and cable TV, today it’s smartphones and the Internet. But the basic urge to repurpose technologies designed for one-way communication, like cable, and turn them into interactive conduits for social interaction pops up again and again. Writing in Rolling Stone in 1989, just as the cable era was giving way to the Internet, science fiction author William Gibson explained: “The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular telephone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity.”13 With little to lose, the grass roots readily adapts flexible and abundant new technologies to pressing problems—spreading dissent, eluding law enforcement, or distributing music. When you start paying attention to what people actually do with technology, you find innovation everywhere. The stuff of smart cities—networked, programmable, modular, and increasingly ubiquitous on the streets themselves— may prove the ultimate medium for Gibsonian appropriation. Companies have struggled to make a buck off smart cities so far. But seen from the street level, there are killer apps everywhere.

Today, a nascent movement of civic hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs have begun to find their own uses, and their own designs, for smart-city technology. Not surprisingly, the Interactive Telecommunications Program has become an important center in this nascent revolution. In a sense, its Greenwich Village loft is itself a microcosm of the smart city, a place where a diversity of experience and know-how, infrastructure and technology come together with the challenges of a living city. The result is a flowering of possibility about what smart cities can be, and a radically different approach to imagining them and creating the technologies that will power them. For every hardware and software breakthrough of technology giants, the students and faculty here generate some faster, better, cheaper, and cooler way of doing it. Corporate R&D focuses on efficiency and control in the name of making urban life bearable and economically productive. At ITP, as it is colloquially known, the priorities of this new hacker vanguard are instead about sociability, resilience, serendipity, and delight.