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

It’s the fragility of this nascent tech bubble that e-Transformation has to address if the Moldovan experiment is to succeed. The best way to do that, and to ensure the broader success of the country’s democratic turn, is to appeal to its diaspora. The hundreds of thousands of bright young Moldovans scattered across the world represent a brain drain of devastating proportions. But thousands are employed abroad in technology firms—over two hundred at Microsoft alone. South Korea, Taiwan, China, and India have all created home-grown tech bubbles by turning the brain drain into “brain circulation,” according to AnnaLee Saxenian, who studies immigrant engineers in Silicon Valley.3 Moldova needs its expats to come home and plug themselves and their social networks back into the local economy. It also doesn’t hurt that overseas Moldovans are the country’s most strident anti-Communists, and participate actively in the civic life of the country on social sites like Facebook. While they are permitted to vote, they have to go to the embassy in their country of residence to do it. If e-Transformation can bring the polling booth to them directly, the revolution will be secured forever. And, as has happened in India, China, and other countries where emigrants have come home to build businesses, it might just set the stage for their eventual, triumphant return.

ICT4D

My experience in Moldova gnawed at me. Endemic poverty and a host of social ills left little room for debate over the decision to use technology to get results fast, and try to make government work for everybody. Yet the poor were conspicuously absent in the digital utopia put on display by Cisco that same summer at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. In Eduardo Paes’s Rio, they were a problem to be measured and managed with IBM’s software, so the Olympic games could go off without a glitch, and the globalization of Brazil could proceed unchecked. The cyber-utopias of the apps start-ups and open-data hackers demanded a college degree, a downtown Manhattan flat, a $400 phone and a crew of hip friends. Everywhere, the people who needed the benefits of technology the most seemed to be missing out or, even worse, suppressed by a new technological elite. Plato’s observation in The Republic seemed as true in the emerging smart city as when he wrote it more than two thousand years ago, “any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.”

Around that time, the Rockefeller Foundation came to a similar conclusion—in the rush to wire up smart cities, the poor were at risk of being left behind, or worse. The foundation was already deeply engaged in contemporary urban issues, as it had been since its founding in 1913. Just a year earlier, in 2009, it had published a call to arms for the philanthropic community, the alarmingly titled Century of the City: No Time to Lose. The book was a compendium of research presented by a global group of experts during a 2007 workshop at the foundation’s Bellagio retreat center near the Italian Alps. It made a compelling case for action, arguing that throughout history, rapid urbanization has always been accompanied by growing inequality and social tension. In the nineteenth century, New York and London packed the poor into tenements in unspeakable living conditions before working them half to death in factories. From the Chinese shadow cities of migrant laborers squatting in abandoned Cold War bunkers underneath Beijing to the Indian and Pakistani guest workers of Dubai who sleep in shipping containers, today’s urban boom was rehashing this inequity on an unprecedented scale.

At first, it didn’t feel right talking about improving the lot of the poor at the Rockefeller Foundation’s headquarters, a $15 million multistory complex of midtown Manhattan office space. An atrium soared over the reception area, where Maya Lin’s sculpture 10 Degrees North provided a serene retreat from the chaotic streets outside, a lavish citadel of granite, wood, bamboo, and cane. But when I visited in the summer of 2010,1 found Benjamin de la Pena, the philanthropy’s associate director for urban development, to be the physical manifestation of the foundation’s new institutional urgency and renewed commitment to cities. In the staccato diction of his native Philippines, he greeted me and ushered me into his office. There were stacks of books about cities and technology, dog-eared and crammed with multicolored sticky notes. A degree in urban planning from Harvard hung on the wall. As he explained to me, de la Pena believed that the destinies of cities and smart technology were now inseparable, but he worried that the explosion of data about cities wasn’t only an opportunity for the poor but a huge risk. What did the push for smart cities mean for the projected 3 billion people the United Nations feared would be living in slums by 2050?

There were more questions than answers. What new economic opportunities were there for the poor and other excluded groups? Could city governments use new technology and data to enable e-Transformations of their own? Would the poor suffer from new kinds of victimization at the hands of those wielding tools that could control and exploit them? The challenge, as de la Pena saw it, was to find opportunities for the poor to get ahead or at least keep up, and to shield them from the worst of the unintended consequences. But he needed a map to convince others that there were clear avenues of change that philanthropy could accelerate or try to block. He wanted a forecast of the opportunities and challenges at the intersection of cities, information, and inclusion.

After our meeting I walked the few short blocks over to Bryant Park’s free wireless zone, which seemed as good a place as any to draw up a research plan. I had long been interested in the use of technology and data in poor communities. As a college student, I’d run a dial-up electronic bulletin board system out of my apartment and tried (in vain mostly) to sign up kids from the poor parts of town for free e-mail accounts. In grad school, I helped design a wireless network for a public housing project in Boston with fellow student Richard O’Bryant, and later initiated a partnership between NYCwireless and Community Access, an NGO that builds transitional housing for people coming out of the mental health system. Neither was I a stranger to the challenges of urban poverty, having spent my summer internship in 1994 working for a developer of affordable housing in and around Camden, New Jersey, then the second poorest city in the United States.

Over the preceding decade, a timely confluence of technological change and an international push to end poverty had provided the focal point for a thriving new academic field and activist movement that called itself Information and Communication Technologies for Development (shortened in practice to the slightly less clunky acronym ICT4D). By the late 1990s, as the Internet was powering social and economic transformation in the developed world, people started to think about how its benefits might be exported to developing countries. The pronouncement of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in 2000 brought a renewed international focus on the 3 billion people who at the time lived on less than $2 per day.6 In the years that followed, thousands of projects were launched to deploy computers and the Internet as tools for education, health care, and economic development in poor communities throughout the world.

By 2008, there was such a huge body of research and activism that Richard Heeks, a professor of development informatics at the University of Manchester, penned a retrospective look at what had clearly become a movement. “ICT4D 1.0,” as Heeks described that first wave of efforts, had largely been a reckless failure: