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

Standing outside the St. Mark’s Ale House once again in 2011, almost ten years to the day after I first encountered Dodgeball inside, I browsed the East Village’s lattice with my iPhone using Dennis Crowley’s newest app, Foursquare. Alexander’s ideas about trees, lattices, and patterns have lingered on the margins of architecture and urban design since the 1970s. But they had an enormous impact on computer science, where his writings inspired the development of object-oriented programming. Its philosophy of modular, reusable pieces of code that can be brought together in useful semi-lattices—much like the objects on Alexander’s street corner—dominates software design to this day, including the computer language used by iPhone app developers (Objective-C).3 A fifty-year feedback loop closed as I realized that Alexander’s vision of the city as a lattice underpinned the design of the software that now filtered my own view of it.

Foursquare had turned my phone into a handheld scanner that senses the meaningful bits of urban life around me. The home screen opened with a list of nearby attractions: restaurants and bars, shops, even food trucks. A large button at the top urged me to check in, as over one billion others around the world had in the last two years. With Dodgeball, you had to spell out the place you wanted to check in to, and cross your fingers that the system didn’t read “Times Square” and mistakenly check you into “Times Square XXX Theater.”

With Foursquare, putting your pin on the map involves one simple click to select the venue from an automatically populated list of nearby places, and one more to plant your flag.

Digging deeper into the lattice, clicking on people who are checked in at nearby places, I found friends who had recently visited, photos they’d taken, and Twitter­sized tips about things I should do or eat. The app’s Radar feature scanned constantly in the background, and chirped an alert about a nearby coffee shop I wanted to check out. It’s on a “list” I was following, a scripted guide created by a friend. Lists let you curate collections of places for others to explore—“Best Burgers in NYC” or “Chelsea Art Galleries,” for instance. By design, Foursquare was here to do penance for the spontaneity-sapping and serendipity-killing devices of the digital revolution that immerse us in messages from elsewhere as we shamble down the street, oblivious to the world around us. Even more effectively than Dodgeball, Foursquare draped a new digital lattice atop the city’s physical one, and connected the two with code. It was perhaps the one piece of software that could turn a skeptical Christopher Alexander into a believer.

In chapter 4 we saw how places like New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program are generating new designs for technologies that could power more human-centered smart cities. But ITP is just one hub of a grassroots countercurrent of civic hacking, built on open-source and consumer technologies, that is crafting an alternative to the corporate smart cities we toured earlier. Across the globe, others are building on these foundations. In the future, they will create an entirely different kind of smart city, where computers and networks help us connect to each other and the things around us in new and weird but deeply human ways. But can their ideas about smart-city technology grow up and become a real force to be reckoned with?

It had been three years since I last met up with Crowley over a beer right here at the St. Mark’s. After ITP, he and Alex Rainert spent two fruitless years trying to convince Google to put resources into scaling up Dodgeball. But the sociable Dodgeball crew didn’t fit in at a company where job candidates are screened with math puzzles such as “How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?” (apparently grammar skills are less prized) or “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?”4 When their contract expired in 2007, Rainert went back to Web design and Crowley spent a year on unemployment, wandering around Manhattan’s Lower East Side on a used bicycle. Biding time while he waited for the world to come around to his vision, he promised the Dodgeball community that if Google ever abandoned the project, he’d build them a bigger and better replacement. On January 14, 2009, when Google announced it was pulling the plug on Dodgeball, Foursquare was already in the works. That evening, after the first meet-up of a new civic hacker group called DIYcity, I listened as Crowley described the plans he and programmer Naveen Selvadurai had for the new app. It would exploit all of the new technologies that had come on the scene since the early days of Dodgeball. Two months later, Foursquare launched at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, one of the Internet start-up community’s biggest and trendiest annual gatherings. It immediately captured the imagination of the tech elite, and after the brief hiatus since Dodgeball had died, a torrent of check-ins flowed once again. Over the next two years Foursquare grew even faster than Twitter or Facebook did in their start-up stage. By August 2011, over 10 million users were collectively logging an average of 3 million check-ins each day.5 By early 2012, some 1.5 billion check-ins had been recorded worldwide and Foursquare dominated the now booming category of “local, social, mobile” software that Crowley had invented with Dodgeball. Fast followers like Austin-based Gowalla, which had launched at the same festival in 2009 (with a hometown advantage, no less!) failed to keep up. Facebook first tried to buy Foursquare, then competed with its own Places service (with Crowley’s former Interactive Telecommunications Program classmate Michael Sharon at the helm), then bought Gowalla in 2011 and shut it down in March 2012. (All of these moves presaged Facebook’s later, more desperate efforts to catch up in mobile apps, such as the $1 billion acquisition of mobile photo app Instagram in 2012.) Celebrities started using Foursquare to promote events and parties. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, reminiscing about his early days as a tech entrepreneur as he showcased the city’s new crop of tech start-ups, visited Foursquare’s office on April 16, 2011, to proclaim the city’s first official “Foursquare Day” (16=4 ). In August 2011, White House staff began checking President Obama in at stump speeches.

I stowed my lattice browser in my pocket and walked over to Foursquare’s office on Cooper Square, just upstairs from where the Village Voice had chronicled downtown counterculture for over twenty years. (Both organizations would leave the building in 2012—Foursquare decamped a few blocks south to 568 Broadway in SoHo; the Voice announced plans to vacate its space to make way for a school). Crowley hadn’t strayed far physically or philosophically from ITP, but now instead of hacking together PHP code, he had a war chest of over $70 million, raised from some of the tech industry’s most sought-after investors. Out the window, the fast- gentrifying neighborhood pulsed with the creative tension between newcomers and old-timers, rich and poor, hipsters and derelicts. Until 2008, just across the Bowery you could rent a cot at the Salvation Army flophouse for S6 a night. Now you would have to settle for the posh Bowery Hotel just fifty feet to the south, where a suite will run you $600 a night.

It was 10:00 a.m. on a Friday in early May 2011, and a small flock of disheveled twentysomethings trickled into Foursquare’s offices with their MacBooks tucked into their bike messenger bags. Tweets and check-in alerts percolated through the air like cricket chirps as the staff slowly recovered from the Foursquare-fueled night before. Being your own lead user is always hard work, but when your product gives you an easy way to find a place to drink and meet new people, it takes its toll. Surrounded by this fast-growing band of coders and designers, Crowley was well on his way to joining the ranks of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter, the princelings of the social web.