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

“Too often technology drives an application,” Burns once wrote, “because users are intimidated by the technology and do not have a hand in its design.”14 If there’s going to be an open-source alternative to the smart city that comes neatly wrapped in a package from Cisco or IBM, it’s very likely we’ll see it here first.

The City Hack(er)

Walk east from ITP’s loft at Broadway and Waverly Place, and a minute or two later you reach the corner of St. Mark’s Place. There, Third Avenue—extra wide to accommodate the El trains that ran overhead until the tracks were torn down in the 1950s—is a traffic-filled moat that separates the relatively staid core of Greenwich Village around New York University from the bohemian throng of tenements, head shops, and nightclubs to the east. Students, burnouts, expat Japanese hipsters, and trust-fund kids jostle for space on the narrow sidewalks. A block north, the ghost of punk godfather Joey Ramone still haunts the tenth-floor apartment where he lived out the last days of his life. In the building that once housed the Electric Circus, the nightclub where the Velvet Underground held court in the late 1960s, now resides a chain Mexican joint.

In 2003, across the street in the men’s room of the St. Mark’s Ale House, I had my first encounter with mobile social software. The wall space above urinals is essential meme circulation infrastructure for Manhattan’s downtown set. With a captive audience, promoters pile sticker upon sticker, which accumulate in a kind of postmodern sediment. On the underside of the toilet, a placement even more clever and impossible to ignore, a sticker reads “dodgeball.com ... when NYC is your playground ... now available on the wireless web!” There’s a cartoon graphic of a spike-haired kid being beaned in the head by a red rubber ball.

Tracing the origins of the sticker led me to Dennis Crowley, who may just be the first smart-city hacker. In the late 1990s, Crowley had moved to Manhattan to work at Jupiter Communications, a market research firm founded by Josh Harris, one of the most breathless cheerleaders of the Silicon Alley Internet bubble. As a new arrival to New York, Crowley was a heavy user of online city guides. But he thought he could do a better job, and built the first version of a web app he called Dodgeball as an alternative. Today we’d call it crowdsourced. Back then, he described it simply as “a version of City-search”—the most popular guide of the day—“[but] you could write your own reviews on it.”15 When Jupiter was acquired by rival Media Metrix as the dot-com bubble burst in the spring of 2000, Crowley was let go. He splurged, spending half of his final paycheck on stickers to promote the service. Dodgeball soon developed a following among the circle of friends he had made at Jupiter, a diaspora of dot-com castaways whom he affectionately calls “kids.”

Crowley moved on to a new job at Vindigo, a start-up whose Palm Pilot app was one of the first city guides for a mobile device. Before do-it-all smartphones, PalmPilots—wireless-less handheld computers known as “personal digital assistants”—stood in as digital replacements for paper-based daily planners. This was before 3G, and Wi-Fi was just coming to market, and just beginning its infectious spread. The PalmPilot didn’t feature a wireless connection of any kind. Each time you returned to your PC, you snapped the thing into its cradle and hit a button, syncing data across a serial cable. Like other PalmPilot apps, Vindigo used the daily sync as a way of keeping the guide content on your device up to date. But cleverly, it was also a way of soliciting updates and corrections about the real world from the apps users, whom Vindigo recruited to report when someplace went out of business, for instance. For Crowley, it was an adroit solution to the lack of wireless connectivity, and an important lesson in hacking around gaps in the city’s still-incomplete digital infrastructure.

After hours, Crowley continued to work on Dodgeball, which was starting to show the serious potential of the social web. By the end of 2000, the site had hundreds

of users who had contributed over sixteen hundred reviews of restaurants and bars in Manhattan and four other cities.16 But it remained a hobby. As Crowley recalls his days at Vindigo, “I was trying to get them to pull social in, but there was just no concept of social at the time.” But before he could get anything started, he was laid off once again as the venture sputtered out. He moved to Vermont to work for a winter as a snowboard instructor before returning to New York to enroll in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

During his first semester in 2002, Crowley built a second, mobile version of Dodgeball. (The one I’d seen advertised in the bar.) In 1999, Sprint had launched the first line of mobile phones with a rudimentary browser for what it called the “Wireless Web.” The service was slow to catch on with users because there was not much content available and even the newest phones of the day had tiny displays. But the Wireless Web provided an easier way to experiment with putting content in the hands of users when they actually needed it, as Vindigo had. Where to go for sushi? Best burger? Fancy cocktails? The wireless link to make it work in real time was finally in place.

But Crowley’s own technological epiphany lay just ahead. Friendster, the precursor to MySpace and Facebook, launched in March 2003 and news of its digital social circles spread quickly throughout the city’s own. “Friendster happened in between our first year and our second year [at ITP],” he recalled in 2011. “I was like, ‘Okay, so Friendster has laid the groundwork, so a critical mass of people understand—you have a profile, and you send a friend request, and you collect your friends like baseball cards’ Once you had this idea of the social network, it’s like, ‘Dodgeball is Friendster but for cell phones’ People understood it.”

For the third version of Dodgeball, Crowley wanted to take Friendster’s social circles and layer them in real time onto the user-created-venue database he was rapidly accumulating. Friendster eventually fizzled because there wasn’t really much to do once you’d collected all your friends, but social networks were a perfect mechanism for filtering the torrent of tip-sharing content being generated by Dodgeball’s users. Crowley envisioned a service that combined social networks and tips with the immediacy and intimacy of SMS text messaging, which droves of young people were already using to coordinate social gatherings around the city.

Today, we take for granted the rich ecosystem of software that’s available for our mobile phones. But in 2003, building good software for mobile phones was tough for a well-financed start-up, and nearly impossible for a student. Instead of the open Web, wireless carriers exacted tolls for content providers to enter their “walled garden.” It was a business model borrowed from the online services of the 1980s like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, who charged steep fees to big publishers for access to their subscribers (in addition to charging subscribers for access to the service). Walled gardens were a sore spot for the industry, setting back the build-out of the mobile web for years. To make matters worse, every wireless carrier used a different set of technologies.

Recalling how Vindigo had worked around the dearth of wireless data, Crowley came up with a hack around walled gardens to build a universal mobile version of Dodgeball. Just as Vindigo had worked around the dearth of wireless data, Crowley found a hack around the walled gardens—e-mail. In 2003, as he set out to build a universal mobile version of Dodgeball, smartphones were still rare. But most new mobile devices could send and receive short text e-mails wirelessly. Recruiting fellow student and dot-com refugee Alex Rainert to the effort, Crowley began building an e-mail-based interface to Dodgeball. After an intense few months of coding, they had pulled together a few thousand squirrely lines of code written in PHP, an open-source computer language for building Web apps. They set it running on an ITP server, where it waited patiently for e-mails from mobile “kids” across the city.