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

In another project, Global Pulse mined the web for real-time microeconomic signals. Working with PriceStats, a company that monitors online prices for some 5 million goods worldwide, researchers tracked daily prices for staples like bread, as opposed to the usual monthly government surveys. Surprisingly, this method even works in countries that lack widespread e-commerce. Even in countries with few Internet users, prices can still usually be harvested from online advertisements.

As promising as these new early warning networks were, Kirkpatrick was quick to temper the General Assembly delegates’ expectations. “This is only a first exploration to confirm the potential of real-time data,” he cautioned them. “We have not found the pulse, but we have a pretty good idea where to put our finger.” To make the data actionable, Global Pulse created a collaborative website called Hunch Works that allows researchers, UN staff, and government officials to share insights about the data. Groups can create hypotheses using the data, score and discuss them, and then package up a dossier and mail the evidence off to a government and hopefully spur action.

Global Pulse is leading the development community’s push into the next phase of ICT4D. Rather than pushing new technology onto the poor, it practices a kind of sensory jujitsu, leveraging the technology they are already using to better understand them. But in the end, that may limit its efficacy, for Global Pulse can only work in countries that invite the team in. Sadly, its ability to capture the plight of the poor in real-time, fine-grained details will be a hard sell in many nations whose governments have no wish to draw attention to their own failure to protect the poor and vulnerable.

Teach A Man to Fish ...

Once upon a time, pedestrians in American and European cities lived in fear of airborne feces: before modern sanitation was introduced, the cry of “Gardez l’eau” (literally “Look out for the water!”) would herald the evacuation of one’s chamber pot into the street.34 As cities like London boomed during the nineteenth century, every available body of water, from creeks to rivers to ponds, became an open cesspool. Only repeated cholera epidemics, and the “Great Stink” of 1858 (which forced Parliament to soak the curtains of the House of Commons in lime to mask the foul odor of the Thames River) would spur government action.33

Today, this ugly practice has reemerged for a whole new generation of city dwellers in the developing world, an ad hoc adaptation to unplanned urban growth and a lack of investment in sanitation. In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, in place of chamber pots the residents of the massive Kibera slum have put the ubiquitous plastic bag to work. The process is much the same, however. Squat, step to the window, and hurl. Throughout the night, “Scud missiles,” as the locals mockingly dub the flying waste packets, rain down on tin rooftops and hapless pedestrians. Compared to nineteenth-century London, the results are actually quite good. Sealed in their plastic tomb, disease-carrying microbes have a much harder time spreading. Cholera, dispersed through London’s contaminated water supply, killed more than ten thousand people in 1853-54 alone. Kibera has its share of water-borne disease but nothing on that scale.

Home to an estimated 250,000 residents, Kibera is one of Africa’s largest slums. But if you looked it up on Google Maps in 2008 and toggled between the satellite view and street-map view, you could make it disappear. One second it was there, a zoomable patina of corrugated tin shacks amid a rich tapestry of alleys and roads, unable to hide from a camera floating in space. Then it was gone, replaced by a blank spot drawn from a government map that still identified the area as the forest that previously stood there. Kibera’s omission spoke volumes about how officials and the public saw it. Instead of the reality of a quarter-million people striving to build a future with their bare hands, all they knew were the sensational horror stories of Scud missiles.

Slums are often simply invisible to outsiders who lack basic information about who lives there. While Rio de Janeiro’s top-down surveillance raises troubling questions about remote sensing of poor communities, the fact is that slums have much to gain from being documented. Being counted is the most basic act of inclusion —for a slum to assert its rights within the official city surrounding it, it needs to be measured and mapped. Many slum dwellers are taking matters into their own hands and arming themselves with new tools and methods to survey their own communities. Computerized mapping of cities is a half-century-old idea, originally developed by the US military and the census, but the first large-scale efforts to map slums didn’t begin until 1994, in the Indian city of Pune. Led by Shelter Associates, an NGO formed by local architects and planners, “the project was based on the philosophy that poor people are the best people to find solutions to their housing problems,” its founders wrote in the journal Environment & Urbanization. Teaming up with Baandhani, an informal network of women who pool their savings to invest in better housing, the group surveyed slum residents, their homes, and the availability of fuel and electricity. In 2000 the city began funding the effort and in just two years it had surveyed some two-thirds of Pune’s 450 slum settlements, mapping some 130,000 households.

The effort to put Kibera on the map was started by two geeks from the rich world, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron, who in 2009 joined forces with a trio of Kenyan community-development groups to launch Map Kibera. They recruited a handful of twentysomethings who were active in the community, one from each of the slums thirteen villages. With just two days of training in how to use consumer-grade GPS receivers, these volunteer mappers were sent out to traverse Kibera on foot, using their bodies as tools to collect traces of the thousands of streets, alleys, and paths that would form the first-ever digital base map of the thriving community. Results came quickly. “We did the first map in three weeks,” Maron recalls.

The mapping technique used in Kibera was imported from an unlikely place, which was also the source of the first modern surveys of Kenya—the country’s former colonial ruler, the United Kingdom. Its development was the result of a dispute between the government and citizens. In the United States (and a handful of other countries, including Denmark and New Zealand), governments allow anyone to use a free digital version of their master street maps. But in the United Kingdom this data was tightly controlled by the government’s cartographic agency, the Royal Ordnance Survey, which charged a fee for users until 2010.40 This policy was widely regarded as a barrier to innovation, as it imposed substantial costs for amateurs, students, and others of little means who wanted to build new digital services that used maps.

By the early 2000s, artists and hobbyists in England had discovered that by plotting the position logs recorded by personal GPS navigators they could quickly collect the data required to re-create a digital base map of the street grid. Inspired by Wikipedia’s model of collaborative knowledge production, in 2004 British computer scientist Steve Coast launched OpenStreetMap. Suddenly, anyone could upload a record of his or her movements along the nation’s road network. By systematically traveling the streets of every city, town, and village in the United Kingdom, an army of volunteers set out to make a freely-usable map. As of 2013, after years of collective surveying and annotation, the crowdsourced street map of England was finally nearing completion. The effort has since expanded around the world, and in poor countries often rivals the government’s own maps. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which obliterated the nation’s mapping agency in a building collapse, OpenStreetMap provided essential data to relief organizations.