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

The Indian activists who pioneered slum mapping in the 1990s saw their work as a way to begin integrating poor communities into existing city-planning efforts in the hope of securing a fairer share of government resources. But with the new chart living online in OpenStreetMap, Map Kibera is focused instead on powering new tools that change how the community is represented in the media, and how organizers lobby the government to address local problems. Voice of Kibera, for instance, is a citizen-reporting site built using another open-source tool called Ushahidi. The name means “testimony” in Swahili, and it was developed in 2008 to monitor election violence in Kenya. Voice of Kibera plots media stories about the community onto the open digital map, and allows residents to send in their own reports by SMS. Another Map Kibera effort recruits residents to monitor the progress of infrastructure projects. Government-funded slum upgrades, such as the installation of water pumps and latrines, are hot spots for graft in Kenya. Many of the projects are awarded to friends of parliament members, and the government doesn’t effectively monitor or audit contractors. Using this tool, residents can post reports on the actual state of construction, frequently contradicting the government’s own claims. Over time, slowly but surely, the map is helping shift public perception of Kibera away from flying bags of crap and toward a view of a community of real people. As Maron told me, “People like living in Kibera. What they don’t like is having raw sewage running by their house.”41

Map Kibera represents a shift in how we think about using technology to help poor communities. We can ship all of the laptops we want to the world’s slums, but we can’t force anyone to use them, and even if they do we certainly can’t guarantee it will have the intended impact. The United Nations can track all of the weak signals of economic distress from afar through efforts like Global Pulse, but the tools to intervene once a crisis is identified haven’t changed much from yesteryear. Map Kibera demonstrates how open-source tools, put in place on behalf of poor communities, can empower them to create knowledge relevant to the problems they face. As Hagen described Map Kibera in a 2010 article, “It is founded on the premise that the advent of the digital age means that gatekeepers to information and data can often be bypassed or ignored completely, allowing for a new and sometimes parallel information system to be created and used by marginalized citizens.”42

Since the 1990s, ICT4D projects mostly operated on an approach that Richard Heeks calls “pro-poor.” As he puts it, in projects like One Laptop Per Child, “innovation occurs outside poor communities, but on their behalf.” Truly sustainable solutions require people to participate in a projects design and implementation. Heeks calls this model “para-poor”: outsiders work alongside members of poor communities in “participative, user-engaged design processes.”43 As the movement evolves, and technologies like the mobile phone trickle down, Heeks envisions a second shift to “per-poor” innovation, done entirely by and for the poor. While Map Kibera is clearly a para-poor project, with Westerners bringing in new technology and design ideas, it has created a framework on which per-poor innovation can happen.

Mapping has tremendous power to improve the slums of the developing world. John Snows map of cholera deaths in 1850s London recast the public understanding of slum conditions, and spurred reforms that eventually rid the city of the disease for good. In India, slum mapping is helping change the practice of city planning, which long considered those communities “chaotic masses rather than coherent urban areas,” according to Shelter Associates.44 But in both cases, governments responded achingly slowly. Map Kibera offers the hope that by using maps to power community-based initiatives, rather than simply lobby government, progress will be faster.

Its unconscionable that governments continue to ignore the slums, to pretend that they are invisible. But in sub-Saharan Africa, where the UN estimates that six out of ten people live in slums, with a little help from concerned outsiders slum dwellers are rewriting the map themselves.45 But it wont happen on its own. Map Kibera’s lesson is clear—it isn’t enough to simply drop technology into poor communities. Do-gooders will have to stick around long enough to teach people how to use it. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,” the Chinese proverb goes, “teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

From Digital Divide to Digital Dilemmas

While the simple rubric of the “digital divide” has been used for nearly twenty years now to frame policy debates about technology and the poor, it is no longer useful. The problem isn’t just access to technology; it is the lack of capacity to exploit it for good. As the World Bank argues, “Not all economies are the same and not all economies are equally prepared to absorb broadband and embrace it to reap its potential benefits.”46 Thinking simply of a digital divide tricks us into believing this is a simple binary problem of haves and have-nots, when in fact it is a set of interlocking dilemmas that defy easy solution. This is as true in the poor parts of the developed world as it is in the developing countries. Moldova and Detroit, Kibera and Cleveland share many similar challenges in realizing the potential of smart technology.

The first dilemma concerns access and agency. Putting technology in the hands of the poor, as OLPC did, is one step. But expecting that access alone will create opportunity is no longer appropriate. Helping the poor secure the skills and support to make use of it is far more challenging. This was one of the most painful lessons from the first generation of ICT4D efforts, and the problem is endemic to smart-city projects, not just those in the developing world.

Take 311 telephone hotlines, which have become a widely used means to access government information and services. On the surface, they appear the most universally accessible of all smart-city systems, with few of the barriers that hinder use of Web-based tools or mobile apps: 311 services run over the nearly ubiquitous telephone network, are open twenty-four hours a day, and are typically offered in many languages. In New York City, whose 311 system averages some sixty thousand calls each day, more than 170 languages are offered.47 A resident can use 311 to interact with government without even knowing how to read or write. It would be difficult to design a more accessible system. But 311 has its own secret digital divide. According to a 2007 study conducted by Columbia University for the New York City Department of Sanitation, poor neighborhoods with large minority populations complained less frequently to 311 about missed trash pickups.48 And New York isn’t alone in its underutilization of 311 by historically disadvantaged groups. When I visited Vancouver in 2011, City Councilor Andrea Reims explained to me how that polyglot city has had a similar experience with its large Cantonese-speaking population. The reasons why non-native English speakers do not use the system are not well understood, but presumably they stem from unfamiliarity with this new way of interacting with government, legitimate and/or irrational fears among immigrant communities about government, or different cultural norms for how issues are dealt with at a local level. Nonetheless, the result is the same. Native English speakers are complaining more, and their complaints are being used to disproportionately dispatch resources to address their problems. Layered on the injustice is the fact that native English speakers are already more well off: they tend to be better educated and have higher incomes.