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

With timescales short and pressure to show tangible delivery, the development actors involved with ICT4D did what everyone does in such circumstances:

They sought a quick, off-the-shelf solution that could be replicated in developing countries’ poor communities.

Given that poverty concentrates in rural areas, the model that fell into everyone’s lap was the rural telecottage or telecenter that had been rolled out in the European and North American periphery during the 1980s and early 1990s. Understood to mean a room or building with one or more Internet-connected PCs, this model could be installed fairly quickly; provide tangible evidence of achievement; deliver information, communication, and services to poor communities; and provide sales for the ICT companies that were partners in most ICT4D forums. Thus, a host of colorfully named projects began rolling out, from InforCauca in Colombia to CLICs in Mali to Gyandoot in India.

With greater effort going into marketing and publicity than end-user engagement and financial management, few of the telecenters were sustainable. “Sadly,” Heeks continued, “these efforts often resulted in failure, restriction, and anecdote.”

The most stunning telecenter failure was the work of one of the world’s most revered technology academies, the MIT Media Lab. Little Intelligent Communities (Lincos) was a brilliant design that packed what it called a “digital town center” into a shipping container that was connected to the Internet by satellite. The idea was to air-drop the boxes into remote villages, thus plugging them into a global web of learning, culture, and commerce. In 2000 the first Lincos telecenter was installed in the Costa Rican town of San Marcos de Tarrazu. But just two and a half years after it opened, its initial operating subsidy exhausted, it shut down. Only one other telecenter was installed in Costa Rica, at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology, to be used as a monitoring center for a proposed nationwide network of Lincos sites that was never to be.

Subsequent efforts to scale up Lincos in the Dominican Republic showed that the novel containerized design itself was also deeply flawed, not just its subsidy- hungry financing scheme. The plan for that country called for sixty Lincos boxes scattered around the countryside, a number quickly reduced to thirty. And after installing just five, the container design was scrapped in favor of traditional structures. Government officials apparently found the container design, so revolutionary for the MIT engineers, a symbol of poverty. Dominicans wouldn’t be caught dead walking into one. “[T]he Lincos container was the brainchild of a group of Western and Western-trained technocrats,” concluded researchers Paul Brand and Anke Schwittay in 2006, “They did not include indigenous designs, materials or needs into their broader design methodology, and the product of this methodology was ultimately rejected by the constituents the designers were supposed to serve.

A Computer for the Rest of Us

Undeterred by Lincos’s failure, in 2005 MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte announced an ambitious project, One Laptop Per Child, with a bold goal: to deploy millions of laptops to children in the developing world, for less than $100 per unit. By 2012 the group had shipped some 2.5 million computers to more than forty countries.10 Despite many setbacks, the project was considered a success by many, having spurred the development of a whole new class of low-cost laptops— netbooks.

Yet in the same time span, Nokia and its competitors sold over 2.5 billion mobile phones, nearly doubling the number of mobile subscribers worldwide from just over 3 billion in 2006 to 5.9 billion in 2011.11 The transformation of the worlds poorest continent is astounding. In Uganda, for instance, there are now more mobile phones than lightbulbs. “Half of Africa’s one billion population has a mobile phone,” declared a 2011 headline in London’s Sunday newspaper The Observer , “and not just for talking.”13 And in 2012, the rich world finally delivered an affordable computer to the developing world, when a price war in Kenya between South Korea’s Samsung and China’s Huawei drove smartphone prices there under $100.14 One industry analyst believes that half the population of Africa will own one by 2017.13 All across the globe, smartphones, rather than cheap laptops, are destined to be the true face of ubiquitous computing.

The economic impact of mobile phones has been transformative for the world’s urban poor. A 2009 World Bank study of 120 countries found that for every ten percentage points increase in the penetration of mobile phones, GDP increased by 0.8 percent. The bank’s chief economist, Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, argues that “Mobile phones have made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology. They have spread the fastest and have become

the single most transformative tool for development.”16 For Nancy Odendaal, an urban planner who studies technology use in the townships of South Africa, “enabling livelihoods is the killer app” for these humble devices. ' They have become indispensable tools for work, education, and health.

Developing countries have long struggled to build ubiquitous wired networks. In many places, as soon as telephone lines were laid, they would be torn out by thieves and sold as scrap copper. But wireless networks can be built faster and securely, allowing the benefits of connectivity to be quickly brought to large numbers of people.

While the cost of building fiber-optic networks is thousands of dollars per home, delivering broadband wirelessly can cost one-fiftieth that much. As a result, 80 percent of the world’s mobile broadband subscribers are in developing countries.19 Wireless is the infrastructure of inclusion—nothing else approaches the speed and cost with which we can now blanket entire cities with low-cost connectivity.

With the basic infrastructure of smartphones and mobile broadband in place, there has been an explosion in services aimed at the poor. Several innovation hot spots have emerged where start-ups are translating business ideas born on the desktop Web of the rich world into SMS-based services for megacities’ poor.

In India, where one in six of the world’s slum dwellers lives, mobile phones are creating tangible opportunities for work and education. Bangalore-based Babajob, in India’s Silicon Valley, is an SMS-based social network for the millions of people working in the country’s informal sector—day laborers, maids, drivers, and so on. One tech blog described the service as “Linkedln for villages.” Another Bangalore nonprofit, Mapunity, emulates Google’s sophisticated mapping services using people’s mobile devices to sense traffic speed through phone movements and taxi radios. It then returns real-time traffic alerts via SMS. South Africa’s Dr. Math provides a tutoring service via SMS. Its American equivalent, the Khan Academy, requires an expensive laptop and high-speed Internet connection to access its recorded video lectures and chat rooms.

In Kenya mobiles are the backbone of a new branchless banking system that is bringing financial services to millions for the first time. M-Pesa, named after the Swahili word for money, launched in 2007 and is now used by over 15 million people. Instead of building out a costly network of branches, or even automated teller machines, M-Pesa uses small retailers as its tellers. Through a secure process that confirms the electronic transfer in seconds, customers can withdraw or deposit cash with a few clicks. But as more of the country moves to electronic transfers, many transactions never even materialize as cash, flowing through the system entirely electronically. Safaricom, the country’s dominant wireless carrier, created M-Pesa as a public-service initiative with a million-pound grant from the British government, and never expected it to turn a profit. Instead, it broke even in just two years and now delivers nearly one-sixth of the firms revenues. During peak use, over two hundred transactions per second and 20 percent of Kenya’s GDP streams through the M-Pesa network. It is being rolled out across India, where it could eventually bring banking to hundreds of millions of poor people.