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

Experimentation

At the middle of this emerging battlefield sits City Hall. Encamped on one flank are industry sales teams, proffering lump sums up front in return for exclusive contracts to manage the infrastructure of cash-strapped local governments. On the other flank, civic hackers demand access to public data and infrastructure. But even as they face the worst fiscal situation in a generation—in the United States, in Europe, even in China—cities are rapidly emerging as the most innovative and agile layer of government. Citizens routinely transcend the tyranny of geography by going online, but local governments are still the most plugged in to their daily concerns. Yet citizen expectations of innovation in public services continue to grow, while budgets shrink. Something has to give.

For a new cadre of civic leaders, smart technology isn’t just a way to do more with less. It’s a historic opportunity to rethink and reinvent government on a more open, transparent, democratic, and responsive model. They are deploying social media to create more responsive channels of communication with citizens, publishing vast troves of government data on the Web, and sharing real-time feeds on the location of everything from subways to snowplows. There’s also a huge economic opportunity. By unlocking public databases and building broadband infrastructure, many cities hope to spawn homegrown inventions that others will want to buy, and attract highly mobile entrepreneurs and creative talent. Looking smart, perhaps even more than actually being smart, is crucial to competing in today’s global economy.

Zoom out from the local to the global scale and, like a satellite photo of the earth at night, a twinkling planet of civic laboratories comes into view. According to Living Labs Global, a Barcelona-based think tank that tracks the international trade in smart-city innovations, there are over 557,000 local governments worldwide.31 As they begin to experiment with smart technology, each faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities with a different pool of resources. Much as there are mobile apps for every purpose we can imagine, smart cities are being crafted in every imaginable configuration. Local is the perfect scale for smart-technology innovation for the same reasons it’s been good for policy innovation—it’s much easier to engage citizens and identify problems, and the impact of new solutions can be seen immediately. Each of these civic laboratories is an opportunity to invent.

But each local invention is also an opportunity to share with other communities. For the last few decades, as the pace of globalization accelerated, multinational corporations were the primary means by which technological innovation spread from place to place. Industry would love to play the role of Johnny Appleseed again with smart-city technology. But cities have become highly adept at sharing and copying new innovations on their own, as evidenced in an accelerating diffusion of good ideas. Bus rapid transit, a scheme for improving the capacity of bus lines with dedicated lanes and other clever tweaks, has taken forty years to spread from its birthplace in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1974 to over 120 cities all over the world.' Public bike sharing, which surged onto the global stage with the launch of Paris’s Velib system in 2007, has reached a similar footprint in just a few years. Today, there is a bustling trade not just in case studies and best practices of smart-city innovations but actual working technology: code, computer models, data, and hardware designs. These digital solutions can spread quite literally overnight.

The spectacular array of local innovations being cooked up in the world’s civic laboratories will challenge our assumptions about both technology and cities, and how they should shape each other. Technologists often want to cut to the chase, find the killer app, and corner the market—this dynamic is already at work in corporate plans for cookie-cutter smart cities. But if we want to get the design of smart cities right, we need to take into account local quirks and involve citizens in their creation. Over time, we’ll surely extract the essence of what’s reusable and share it widely. But building smart cities is going to take time. It will by necessity be a long, messy, incremental process.

Crash

Every city contains the DNA of its own destruction—some existing fissure that, under pressure, can erupt into conflict or cascade into collapse

Smart technologies are already fueling conflict between factions in divided cities. The extent of the role played by social media in the 2011 urban uprisings of the Arab Spring has been hotly debated. But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were a mere sideshow to the torrent of text messages that turned angry crowds into smart mobs, as they have done numerous times since 2001, when they summoned some 700,000 Filipinos to protests against corrupt President Joseph Estrada. These wireless channels, which provide what is for all intents and purposes a rudimentary form of telepathic communication, were so important that at the height of the Egyptian uprising authorities lobotomized Cairo by ordering a shutdown of the nations cellular networks. While this act didn’t stop the revolution (and probably hastened the flow of remaining bystanders out into the streets), blacking out cities’ wireless networks is becoming a disturbingly appealing option for security officials in the West as well—in August 2011 transit police jammed cellular signals during antipolice protests in San Francisco. The same week officials in the United Kingdom discussed blocking the BlackBerry Messenger mobile messaging service and other social media being used to coordinate widespread urban rioting.33

Smart cities may also amplify a more commonplace kind of violence—that inflicted by poverty—by worsening gaps between haves and have-nots. This may happen by design, when sensors and surveillance are used to harden borders and wall off the poor from private gated communities. Or it may simply be an unintended consequence of poorly thought-through interventions.

In 2001, the government of India’s Karnataka state set out to reform the way it tracked land ownership, ostensibly to root out village-level corruption. Bhoomi, as the new digital recording system was called, was funded by the World Bank as a model for e-government reforms throughout the developing world. But it had the opposite impact. The village-level officials who had administered the old system had always taken bribes, but in return, they interpreted documents for the illiterate and provided advice on how to navigate complex legal procedures. Bhoomi certainly curbed village level corruption—the number of persons reporting paying bribes fell from 66 percent to 3 percent. But centralizing records merely centralized corruption. Wealthy speculators with deep pockets simply targeted officials at higher levels, allowing them to rapidly appropriate land in the expansion path of the region’s fast-growing capital, Bangalore.34 As one development scholar has noted, “While in theory, the initiative was intended to democratize access to information, in practice the result was to empower the empowered.”35 As similar digitization efforts transform government everywhere, the stakes for the poor are enormous. In this new computational arms race, poor communities will be at the mercy of those who can measure and control them from a distance.

Even if there is peace and equality, the smart city may come crashing down under its own weight because it is already buggy, brittle, and bugged, and will only become more so. Smart cities are almost guaranteed to be chock full of bugs, from smart toilets and faucets that won’t operate to public screens sporting Microsoft’s ominous Blue Screen of Death. But even when their code is clean, the innards of smart cities will be so complex that so-called normal accidents will be inevitable. The only questions will be when smart cities fail, and how much damage they cause when they crash. Layered atop the fragile power grid, already prone to overload during crises and open to sabotage, the communications networks that patch the smart city together are as brittle an infrastructure as we’ve ever had.