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

Burns recalled a group that made a video about a dangerous Upper West Side intersection and took it to City Hall to demand a new traffic signal. “They got the light,” she said. “I realized it wasn’t about technology. It was about community organizing. That, I think, made the difference. I cared about the fact that nobody had a voice.

It was hot in Chisinau.

In August 2010 the worst heat wave in a generation baked eastern Europe. Smoke filled the air as wildfires burned across Russia, where the soaring temperatures killed thousands. But in the capital city of Moldova, the most pressing problem was the economy.

A tiny, landlocked backwater of the former USSR, Moldova hides tucked away in the hills between Romania and Ukraine. Once a Florida of sorts for mighty Russia, a coveted retirement destination for Communist Party apparatchiks, it had become the poorest country in Europe. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former republics such as Estonia embraced Western-style reforms and thrived. Moldova, however, never managed to shake off Communist influence. After flirtations with democratic reforms in the 1990s, the party was voted back into power in 2001. Over the next decade, the economy imploded, and a quarter of the working age population left in search of work abroad. Twenty years ago Moldova was wealthier than Romania, with which it shares a language and culture. By 2010, when I visited, its per capita GDP was just a quarter of its booming neighbor’s.

The previous spring, the country had reached a breaking point. After the Communists narrowly won the April 2009 election in a suspiciously strong showing, outrage turned to violence in the streets. Rallied by investigative journalist Natalia Morar and a handful of social-media mavens, Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution” followed the SMS-powered one in neighboring Ukraine a few years earlier.1 Protestors lit bonfires and waged angry demonstrations in the city center. That June, unable to elect a president, the parliament was dissolved. In the ensuing snap election a coalition of anti-Communist parties snatched a close victory. Within months, they had reached out to the West for help reforming and reinvigorating the economy. At the invitation of the World Bank, I was there to help the new government kick off “e-Transformation,” a project intent on leveraging smart technology to modernize the country’s archaic bureaucracy. With their uprising, its flames fanned by social media, the Moldovans had already launched their own digital transformation. Our job was merely to help clear the way for it to continue.

I wasn’t expecting much from Moldova, starved as it was of talent and investment, both of which had more lucrative prospects elsewhere. The World Bank didn’t impress me much either. After decades of trying to slow the growth of cities by investing in rural infrastructure, the organization had only belatedly started to address the planet’s new urban reality. Accustomed to start-ups with trendy vowel-deficient names like Flickr and Tumblr, to my ears “e-Transformation” sounded like something from the 1980s. But when I found out that Robert Zoellick, the president of the bank, would travel to Moldova to personally launch the initiative, my antennae perked up.

As deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush in 2005, Zoellick had delivered one of the most fascinating foreign-policy speeches in modern American history, challenging a reluctant China focused on domestic stability to become a “responsible stakeholder” and take a more active role in global affairs. He’d helped mediate the German reunification in the 1990s, and more recently traveled repeatedly to Sudan’s Darfur region to intervene in the government-backed genocide occurring there.

Zoellick also was breaking down the World Bank’s secretive culture by sharing its data with the outside world. Just a few months earlier, in April 2010, he had announced a new open-data initiative and released online, at no cost, statistics that the bank had long closely held—the World Development Indicators, Africa Development Indicators, and the Millennium Development Goals Indicators (which track progress on the UN’s poverty eradication efforts). Soon after the event in Moldova, he would launch a competition to entice programmers to use this data to build apps for development practitioners.The bank’s agenda in Moldova was urgent. With new elections less than a year away, if the country’s fledgling liberal democracy was to survive, it needed to deliver reforms and economic results quickly. Failure to meet the electorate’s high expectations could send them running back to the familiar, if penurious, stability of Communist rule. But Moldova was also an opportunity to airlift the same ideas about openness that Zoellick was using to reinvent the bank and drop them onto an entire country.

e-Transformation aimed to sweep aside Moldova’s entire Soviet-era paper-based bureaucracy and put all government services online. Even in 2010, basic transactions —such as obtaining an exit visa to work overseas—required a long and costly trip to the capital. With $23 million in loans from the World Bank, parceled out over five years, the new government would build a “g-cloud” (a cloud-computing infrastructure that would allow for the delivery of services to both fixed and mobile devices), create a new digital citizen-identity program, and rewrite legislation to encourage private investment in online services. In a country where most rural people still stored their savings under their mattress or in a hole in the backyard, new rules would allow mobile banking. Zoellick spent an hour and a half of his day in Moldova at our workshop (just one of several more conventional programs launched that day). His presence testified to the importance of this project, the first of its kind for the bank and potentially a model for many other countries. On its face, e-Transformation was the worst kind of development aid—driven by an external ideology of neoliberalism, focused on technology, and hastily implemented. But as the people’s self-organized Twitter Revolution demonstrated, Moldovans badly wanted change, and saw an important role for mobile technology in securing it. With the bank’s help, for better or worse, they were about it get it.

The incongruity between the Communist legacy of privation and the digital abundance of the present was everywhere in Chisinau. In search of a gift for my daughter, I wandered the main street market that comprises nearly the entirety of the city’s shopping. All I could find were basic goods—vegetables, drab polyester shirts, school supplies. There was little to the local economy beyond the staples. But just around the corner, a poster advertised 100-megabit-per-second Internet service, delivered to the home over a brand-new citywide fiber-optic network, for the equivalent of $20. Moldova apparently had faster, cheaper broadband than Manhattan or San Francisco. Back home in America, policy makers were wringing their hands over the slow pace of investment in our nation’s broadband infrastructure. But here, in tiny, poor Moldova, they’d found a way to make it happen.

The rapid spread of fast connectivity was unleashing the nation’s potential. If Moldova’s surge into an uncertain digital future was only powered by government, I’d have been more skeptical. But it was also riding a fast-growing wave of entrepreneurship. By 2010, over five hundred technology companies employing some seven thousand people had popped up in Chisinau, little shops of engineers booking over $150 million a year in outsourced work with corporate clients throughout Europe. And that was just the ones that operated in the open. World Bank analysts believed that a parallel shadow industry of freelance web programmers, peddling their services on outsourcing sites like oDesk and Elance and taking payment to offshore accounts, probably generated half that much economic activity again. As wages surged in Russia, the jobs that had popped up there a decade ago were moving south in search of cheaper labor. But it was a passing moment, on which the foundation for higher-value-added industries needed to be swiftly laid. Moldova had only a few years to move up the value chain before Turkey, Uzbekistan, and other places with lower labor costs to the east and south would steal these wage-sensitive jobs away.