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

Sharing systems can be deployed rapidly—often the only additional infrastructure that’s needed is the Web. And there are tangible environmental benefits. While spending a night in some hotels is less carbon-intensive than spending a night in the average US home, building the hotel in the first place accounts for a significant share of its total lifetime carbon emissions.31 Construction is an incredibly wasteful sector of the economy—according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative, “the construction, renovation and demolition of buildings constitute about 40 per cent of solid waste streams in developed countries.” Frank Duffy, an architect who is one of the world’s leading experts on workspace design, argued that—at least in developed economies—we have already built all of the buildings we will ever need. We just need to use them more intensively.33 Sociability is a strategy for achieving that by motivating us to share; social software now provides the tools to do so widely.

Bugs in the Grass Roots

These new tools are both a better lens through which to see what really makes cities tick, as well as to graft an entirely new latticework for urban sociability onto them. But are civic hackers up to the task of bringing a bottom-up vision of the smart city into existence? Can we evolve the smart city organically—one app, one check-in, one API call, one Arduino, one hot spot at a time? Perhaps, but for all its promise, there are a lot of bugs to be worked out in the grass roots too.

“This is the time for people to throw their hats up in the air and think,” Red Burns said with a shrug when I asked her to speculate about the shape of a world filled with all of the mobile, social, sensing things her students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program are cooking up. I guess I’d hoped for some more concrete vision, but she’d nailed the mood of the present. ITP is a microcosm of this movement of young people all across the world who, weaned on the mobile Web and social media, are experimenting with human-centered designs for smart cities. DIYcity was a glimpse of a new utopian vision—open, social, participatory, and extensible— dramatically different than the one technology giants are selling. It wanted to bring into being a smart city modeled not after a mainframe, but the Web.

History is littered with failed plans and false utopias that didn’t live up to their promises. Or, as often happens, they evolved in unexpected directions. For Burns, public-access television fell short. “Now I look at public access,” she told me, “and I’m disappointed because people don’t use it the way I’d hoped.” Even ITP turned out differently than she had expected. “I thought it was going to work on social projects like domestic violence. But what happened was when the tools came, people wanted to play.”34 If the risk of corporate visions of the smart city is their singular focus on efficiency, their advantage is clarity of purpose. The organic flexibility of the bottom- up smart city is also its biggest flaw.

Or so say the naysayers. To them, civic hackers are nice kids with good intentions playing with gadgets or trying to strike it rich. City leaders have real problems to solve right now—global warming, decaying infrastructure, and overburdened public services. They don’t have time to play with Arduino. They need the might of sustained industrial engineering applied to replumb entire cities over the span of a decade. The grass roots may be a source of new ideas, but what they need is someone who can design and deliver a robust infrastructure that is centrally planned to be safe, efficient, and reliable at a reasonable cost. To an extent, they’re right. Scaling up things that work at the grass roots is a challenge few have overcome. Foursquare, even with all its resources, went through a wrenching series of outages before it was able to work out a scalable database scheme (although one of the worst problems was caused by an outage on Amazon’s cloud-computing services, the epitome of large- scale smart infrastructure).

Even when they can manage the technical hurdles that come with growth, many civic hacks never get that far. They solve a problem for a small group of users, but fail to sustain the effort to refine their design into something that can connect to a larger audience. As DIYcity s Geraci explained, “it’s dead simple to prototype version one of a smart city app. Getting it to version seven, where an entire city’s population can use it, is another story.”35 But both scaling and evolving software, it turns out, are exactly the kind of tasks that big companies and professional engineers are particularly good at. Finding ways to effectively integrate industrial engineering and grassroots tinkering is one of the keys to building smart cities well, as we’ll see.

More of a problem, though, is the lack of a coherent ideology or even sense of identity. DIYcity was a flash in the pan: there’s no equivalent of the People’s Computer Company today. And as we’ve seen, the energy is diffused across different technical communities—wireless geeks, Arduino hackers, apps developers, etc. Their emphasis on openness and collaboration accelerates innovation, but the focus is still exclusively on the technology. There’s a growing sense that a “civic tech” movement is coalescing, but it has no clear shared aims.

Even at ITP you can sense this yearning for a larger purpose, for a renewed thrust to complete the unfinished manifesto DIYcity left behind. As Burns showed me to the elevator after a visit in 2011, she tugged on the passing sleeve of John Schimmel, a new faculty member who was building an app called Access Together that would support a crowdsourcing effort to gather data to help disabled people navigate the streets and sidewalks of New York City. Waving a thumb at him, she told me, “This is what I’d do, what I’d work on.” I sensed a frustration in Burns that more students weren’t driven by the same desire for social impact that drove her as a young woman. While ITP students often have a keen sense of the social dynamics in their tightly knit group (as Crowley did), like anyone engaged in intense study, they often lose sight of the larger world around them. But if this place wasn’t going to birth the next People’s Computer Company, where could it possibly happen?

Perhaps this new vanguard of smart-city hackers is just navel-gazing kids playing with gadgets. Clustered as they are in the affluent “creative class” districts of New York and San Francisco, should we be surprised when they solve their own problems first? With NYCwireless, it took years before we ventured beyond Manhattan’s trendy neighborhoods and refocused on broadband projects in poor areas. Not only do they not represent the full range of the city’s people; often these hackers lack a sense that it’s even their duty to help others. And unlike the pioneers of the PC and public access cable, they’ve been raised on a steady diet of personal technology. Hacking is just as often an attempt to seize control of consumer products for personal gain, rather than to employ them in the pursuit of social change. But as the tools to forge a different kind of smart city from the one that industry would spoon-feed us get into the hands of more activists, artists, and designers who yearn for change, will a new social movement emerge?

For Red Burns, the real allure of video was how it democratized visual storytelling. Film was for experts. It needed to be developed and edited, a tricky and time- consuming process that required a lot of training. “But when you work with video, you can see it immediately,” she said. “Anyone can learn how to use it, and it throws a whole different cast on communications.” It was real time, and that empowered real people. “We would train the students to go into the field to teach people in the communities how to use this equipment and give them the freedom to do what they wanted.”