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

before.”

Meetup’s appeal is a powerful reminder that bringing people together for social interaction is the true killer app for smart cities. But we are merely writing the latest chapter in thousands of years of urban evolution—the purpose of cities has always been to facilitate human gatherings. While we celebrate their diversity, as economists such as Harvard University’s Ed Glaeser argue, cities are actually social search engines that help like-minded people find each other and do stuff. “People who live in cities can connect with a broader range of friends whose interests are well matched with their own,” he argues in his 2010 book Triumph of the City. The big buildings we associate with urbanity are merely the support system that facilitates all of those exchanges. As Geoffrey West, a physicist who studies how cities grow, explains, “Cities are the result of clustering of interactions of social networks.”24 And they are repositories of the civilization and culture that grow from these dealings. They are, as urban design theorist Kevin Lynch once put it, “a vast mnemonic system for the retention of group history and ideals.” Cities are indeed an efficient way of organizing activity, since infrastructure can be shared. But efficiency isn’t why we build cities in the first place. It’s more of a convenient side effect of their ability to expedite human contact.

Yet as timeless as urban sociability is, we are experiencing it on a new scale. From the hubs of communication and exchange that sprang up in the markets, palaces, and temples of ancient cities, the size of human settlements has grown, and grown, and grown. Today, the largest megacities tie together tens of millions of people who have come together to work and play in countless groupings. New technologies like Meetup (and Foursquare) are vital to helping people navigate the vast sea of opportunities for social interaction that are available in the modern megacity.

We focus on the physical aspects of cities because they are the most tangible. But telecommunications networks let us see, increasingly in real time, the vital social processes of cities. As much as they enable urban sociability, they are an indispensable tool for studying this ephemeral layer of the city as well.

The telephone has played a key role in urban life for more than a century. Inspired by cybernetics, social scientists first started to study the crucial role of telecommunications in the development of urban social networks in the 1960s, when French geographer Jean Gottmann mapped telephone calling patterns among the cities of the Northeast corridor. In his 1961 treatise Megalopolis , Gottmann described how the sprawl of urbanization stretching unbroken literally from Arlington, Massachusetts, to Arlington, Virginia, functioned as a single massive city. In one chapter full of maps he detailed the ebbs and flows of telephone traffic up and down the Eastern Seaboard, arguing that the telephone was the means by which great cities like New York and Washington exerted economic, political, and social dominance over the nation. These cities placed vastly more calls than they received, as their residents gathered information and disseminated decisions from headquarters to the hinterlands. In the 1980s New York University’s Mitchell Moss expanded the analysis to the whole world, using similar data to show how Wall Street banks and Midtown media giants were extending this informational trade imbalance to a planetary scale, exploiting new telecommunications technologies to consolidate and dominate entire global markets. In 2008 MIT’s SENSEable City Lab brought these studies into the supercomputer age. The “New York Talk Exchange” visualized a year’s worth of phone traffic between New York and the world carried over AT&T’s global network. On a 3-D rendering of a spinning globe, glowing lines map the flow of calls arcing up from the Big Apple and raining down onto subordinate cities around the world.

It wasn’t until very recently that researchers began studying the sociability of cities by looking at the flow of telecommunications happening inside cities rather than between them. In 2006 another SENSEable City Lab project, Real-Time Rome, mapped the movements and communications of an entire city. Drawing on subscriber data harvested from Telecom Italia’s mobile network, Real-Time Rome was the first crude EEG of a city’s untethered hive mind, depicting millions of fans moving and communicating across the city during Italy’s 2006 World Cup victory. As new sources of geographically tagged data from social networks like Twitter and Foursquare proliferate, these diagnostics of urban sociability are becoming more prevalent and more captivating. One of the most compelling projects visualized Twitter traffic in Spain leading up to the massive anti-austerity protests of May 15, 2011.

Created by a group of researchers at the University of Zaragoza, the video is a six-minute snapshot of an entire nation’s social network in the throes of a digital seizure.

The sociability of cities isn’t all upside. As cities grow, they create social problems too. They typically have higher rates of crime and more disease. But social technology also enhances our ability to address the problems of big urbanism. Nowhere is this clearer than the ways these technologies are created. Whether its Foursquare’s API workshops or DIYcity s all-night hackathons, grassroots smart-city hackers all share a vital bit of DNA—the desire to connect, collaborate, and share. They fully leverage the sociability of big cities—the ease of face-to-face meeting, the diverse range of talents and interests—in order to create tools to amplify urban sociability even further. This approach gives them a distinct advantage over big technology companies, where openness is often an impossible cultural mind shift.

Sociability will also provide new tools to address global warming, the greatest threat of all to cities’ future. Because cities tend to cluster along coasts, they are especially at risk from rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps. And so, through organizations like the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (also known as C40), in the absence of a global compact on climate change, cities from Amsterdam to New York have launched their own coordinated greenhouse-gas- emission reduction efforts. The smart-city visions of the technology industry—increasing efficiency through investments in smart infrastructure—are an important part of these cities’ efforts. But efficiency is not enough. Even in Amsterdam, one of the world’s leaders, emissions are still climbing.

One promising approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that exploits sociability is what design geeks call “product-service systems”—most people just call it “sharing.” The basic idea is to use energy-intensive manufactured goods more intensively, so we don’t have to make as many in the first place. Take the car-sharing service Zipcar, for instance. By transforming cars from something you own into a service you subscribe to, Zipcar claims that each of its shared vehicles replaces some twenty private ones. Smart technology plays a huge role in making Zipcar practical, by automating many of the traditional tasks involved in renting a car. GPS telemetry tracks vehicle location and use, Web and mobile services eliminate centralized rental depots so cars can be placed close by, and an RFID card identifies allows the renter to unlock one.

But as smart as Zipcar is, it’s not very social. But take the same business model and weave in social software to connect people to others with idle vehicles, and suddenly you don’t even need Zipcar. San Francisco-based RelayRides helps its members to rent their cars to each other, using a social-reputation system to instill trust and good behavior. While insurance companies have recoiled, three states have passed laws to protect car-sharers from losing coverage. The model is spreading, and now there are social technologies powering peer-to-peer systems for sharing all kinds of expensive private assets. Airbnb does the same for renting out homes for short­term stays, and logged 5 million bookings worldwide in 2011. While they do compete on price with traditional businesses, these services also bait us into more efficient behaviors by turning faceless commercial transactions into human social encounters. It’s infinitely more rewarding to rent the poet’s flat in San Francisco on Airbnb than to book a soulless hotel room on Expedia.