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

Untethered by Wi-Fi, Arduinos are becoming cheap enough to stick almost anywhere in the city, and could be the rawr material for a kudzu-like explosion of a citizen-built infrastructure of urban sensing and actuation. An example is dontflush.me, a system developed by New York City-based designer Leif Percifield. Like many older cities, New York uses a single network of drains for both sewrage and raimvater. Normally the combined outflow is processed by treatment plants before being released into the surrounding waterways, but during heavy rains the plants can’t keep up; to keep the deluge from backing up into city streets, a nasty mixture of runoff and rawr sewrage is discharged directly into the city’s rivers—some 27 billion gallons a year.40 But by hooking up an Arduino to a proximity sensor and a $15 cell phone he bought off eBay, Percifield’s gadget sits over the outflow pipe and transmits an alert across the Internet to a network of bathroom-based lightbulb overflow- warning indicators 41 The result is a guerrilla sensor net that encourages people to not flush toilets during overflow events, reducing the discharge of sewage. By changing people’s behavior, it could stanch the need for hundreds of millions of dollars of retrofits to the city’s sewage infrastructure. Projects like dontflush.me suggest a future wrhere citizens decide wrhat gets connected to the Internet of Tilings, and why. Instead of being merely a system for remote monitoring and management, as industry visionaries see it today, the Internet of Things could become a platform for local, citizen microcontrol of the physical wrorld.

And that’s wrhat’s so disruptive about Arduino’s growing reach. Torrone suggests more prosaic applications for which Arduino is also the clear technology of choice. “Want to have a coffee pot twreet wrhen the coffee is ready? Arduino. Howr about getting an alert on your phone wrhen there’s physical mail in your mailbox? Arduino.”42 Arduino gives us the tools to thoughtfully structure intelligence into the intimate, everyday, human-scale spaces and objects wre live in. It lets us organically wire up millions of tiny wormholes, tubes of code and circuit that shuttle bits and atoms back and forth between cyberspace and the physical world. Instead of big data, it lets us collect and spread a few bits that really matter. The promise is that we’ll build the hardware of smart cities just like we built the web, by empowered users one little piece at a time. Botanicalls showed simultaneously how silly but also how incredibly useful and social the Internet of Things could be but, more importantly, it hinted at the creative possibilities that lie ahead.

Don’t let Igoe hear you call it an “Internet of Things.” It’s true that things are being connected and rigged with tiny little electronic brains, eyes, and motors, but for him it is a social technology, a creative catalyst that harkens back to Red Burns’s enchantment with portable video, one that lets us pay attention to people instead of technology. Igoe has found that working with Arduino “becomes an excuse to build relationships between people. What happens every time somebody sits down with an Arduino is they turn to ask somebody else for help. Every time somebody makes a new project they’ll go and show it to somebody else. They’re using it the same way we’ve used games and other technologies as social lubricant. They get people talking to each other. Right now the problem with the Internet of Things is we get so focused on the thing itself that we fail to recognize that the potential to find new ways to express ourselves to each other through this medium.”43

As electronics makers all around the world have learned, the most telling sign of success is to have your product knocked off by the “shanzhai” factories of China’s Pearl River Delta region just north of Hong Kong. Numbering in the thousands, these tiny, fiercely competitive manufacturers are always looking for a niche to exploit before the others. In 2011, while trying to troubleshoot one student’s flaky Arduino, Igoe noticed something was off. The reset button was green, instead of the usual red. Flipping it over, he noticed there was also no Italian flag logo, the Arduino team’s patriotic mark of manufacturing quality on the boards. “I asked the student where it came from and she told me she got it at a shop in Beijing,” Igoe told me, grinning. “I told her it was a clone.”44 The shanzhai had voted. If Arduino was worth knocking off, it had truly arrived.

There is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities,” wrote Christopher Alexander in Architectural Forum in the spring of 1965. “When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.” But as much as Alexander revered what he called “natural cities,” the appealing ones that had evolved “more or less spontaneously over many, many years,” he had little patience for critics like Jane Jacobs who, he argued, “wants the great modern city to be a sort of mixture between Greenwich Village and some Italian hill town.” Alexander didn’t want to replicate only the appearance of those ancient cities, but rather their DNA. “Too many designers today seem to be yearning for the physical and plastic characteristics of the past They merely imitate the appearance of the old, its concrete substance: they fail to unearth its inner nature.”

Alexander was well equipped to see order in the vast complexity of great cities. Though a professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, he was trained as a mathematician and saw the structure and dynamics of the city through mathematical analogies. To Alexander, the sprawl of postwar suburbia, with its single-use zones and cul de sacs, looked structurally like “trees.” In a tree, individual pieces link together up and down in a rigid branching hierarchy, but there are no connections between branches. For Alexander, the architecture and layout of these artificial cities imposed too much top-down order, their individual elements nested like Russian dolls, with each subcomponent enclosed and isolated from those around it.

But “a city is not a tree,” Alexander argued in the title of the essay. Cities that develop organically over time possess a rich web of overlapping connections, which to his mathematical brain looked like a semilattice. (For simplicity’s sake we’ll just use the lay term lattice here.) In a lattice, individual elements can be a part of many different sets. They can link up into a hierarchy, or cross-connect in flatter networks.

To explain how lattices worked to create the richness of interactions that he found lacking in modern communities, Alexander described a newspaper rack outside a drugstore near his office in Berkeley. Nominally part of the shop, it became a vital part of the street corner whenever pedestrians waited for the light to change and lingered to peek at the headlines. “This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interdependent,” he argued. The newsrack, the people, the sidewalk, even the electrical impulses that controlled the traffic signal were woven together in networks of surprising complexity that formed a distinct urban place. Lattices are why the fine-grained hubbub of Greenwich Village or Florence feels so rich and full of wonder, and the single-use suburbs of Los Angeles so empty and banal.

What plagued artificial designs, Alexander argued, was that their hierarchical structure fought against complexity. In theory, because elements in a semi-lattice can be combined with any others, “A tree based on 20 elements can contain at most 19 further subsets of the 20, while a semi-lattice based on the same 20 elements can contain more than one million different subsets.” Compare a map of an old, great city with the layout of a modern auto-centric suburb and you will see this clearly. The city is a crisscross of streets and public spaces; there are many ways one could travel across it between any set of two points, interacting with different people, places, and things along the way. But in the suburb, the branching hierarchy of arterials and feeder roads constrains you to a single path. The city is an open grid of possibilities, the suburb a universe of dead ends. “It is this lack of structural complexity, characteristic of trees, which is crippling our conceptions of the city,” he wrote. As a remedy, over the next decade Alexander and his colleagues studied traditional cities around the world, distilling their timeless design elements—“the unchanging receptacle in which the changing parts of the system ... can work together,” as he had described the corner in Berkeley.2 The results, published in 1977 as A Pattern Language , were a crib sheet for lattice-friendly city building.