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

The point is that great vigilance is needed to ensure that smart systems don’t create new exclusions. Development economists used to measure poverty solely on the basis of per capita income. Today, they increasingly use multidimensional measures that paint a richer picture of health, education, and living standards.49 To truly understand what prevents poor people from making use of technology we will need to develop multidimensional assessments of technology and information literacy.

Another dilemma will revolve around the use of big data in real time, as systems like Global Pulse start to inform decisions in everything from urban planning to aid programs to disaster relief. It is one thing for data to render a problem visible, and quite another for that data to inform a response. Instead of reducing the role of guesswork and intuition, big data might create even greater uncertainty. In everyday situations, leaders who don’t understand or trust the data will simply fall back on their instincts. Worse, during a crisis, the pressure to act decisively could lead to inadvertent use of immature data and a rush to improper conclusions.

Deep, large-scale sensing of data about populations creates its own dilemma—the need to balance the privacy rights of individuals and small groups against the larger public good. Every society will have to find its own balance. While Kibera highlights the risks of being left off the official map, in many cases the poor may resist external efforts to measure and manage their communities. Global Pulse takes great pains to explain its data-privacy precautions, presumably knowing full well that in many countries its data-gathering tools could rival those of national intelligence agencies. New techniques of monitoring populations in order to help them could be copied or co-opted by governments looking to subdue them.

The most gut-wrenching question is whether haves should play a role in changing the fate of have-nots. For the past several decades, the goal of aid programs has been to modernize poor communities and bring them up to the standards of the rest of the world. Many of these efforts have failed, often because they didn’t take into account existing knowledge and assets in poor communities. The spread of cheap smartphones, fast wireless networks, and open data—along with the skills to make use of these tools—will be a boon for self-propelled development. Slum dwellers are incredibly facile in upgrading and improving their homes and infrastructure with the most basic of resources. A parallel digital effort is likely to produce just as much innovation. But the independent bootstrapping of smart slums, however romantic or politically incorrect, seems unrealistic. And there will always be an urge to “do something,” if only for self-preservation. As Heeks argues, “In a globalized world, the problems of the poor today can, tomorrow—through migration, terrorism, and disease epidemics—become the problems of those at the pyramid’s top.”50

This brings us to the final dilemma: crowdsourcing and the future role of government in delivering basic services. In smart cities, there will be many new crowdsourcing tools that, like OpenStreetMap, create opportunities for people to pool efforts and resources outside of government. Will governments respond by casting off their responsibilities? In rich countries, governments facing tough spending choices may simply withdraw services as citizen-driven alternatives expand, creating huge gaps in support for the poor. In the slums of the developing world’s megacities, where those responsibilities were hardly acknowledged to begin with, crowdsourced alternatives may allow governments to free themselves from the obligation to equalize services in the future. As fashionable as it has become in the developed world, crowdsourcing is highly regressive. It presumes a surplus of volunteer time and energy. For the working poor, every second of every day is devoted to basic survival. The withdrawal of any government services would remove a critical base of support for these extremely vulnerable communities.

For engineers and technologists, the intractability of these dilemmas is deeply uncomfortable. Information technology has remarkable power to help the poor help themselves, but to date its greatest impact has been to lure them off their farms to squatter cities where they now wait to see if they’ll be permitted to grow rich too. Whether or not they do, the democratization of smart technology is certain to allow poor communities to pursue their own vision of a smart city. Across Africa, more than fifty “tech hubs, labs, incubators and accelerators” have opened doors in recent years, according to the BBC. Nairobi has six alone.31 Inevitably, what happens in these new centers of innovation will shape the way we think about the place of technology as well. For I have no doubt that right now, somewhere in Kibera or Soweto or Dharavi, some young civic hacker is cobbling together a few transformational bits of technology that will change the world

hether it’s built by big companies or wireless activists, the first prerequisite for entry into the club of smart cities is a world-class broadband infrastructure. Over the last decade, a growing number of cities have tried to speed the process and introduce competition by building new networks themselves. But across the United States, the telecommunications industry has fought these civic initiatives to a standstill. Perhaps it is fitting that one of the first battles over the smart city took place in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy

“Forget cheese steaks, cream cheese and brotherly love,” the New York Times gushed. “Philadelphia wants to be known as the city of laptops.”1 On March 5, 2004, Mayor John Street stood before a crowd at Love Park in Center City to inaugurate the first hot spot of Wireless Philadelphia, an ambitious project to blanket the city’s 135 square miles with low-cost Wi-Fi. At the time, a handful of smaller cities—such as Long Beach, California—had built public wireless networks in their downtowns. But Philadelphia was the first major American city to aim for ubiquitous, citywide coverage. Street, himself a technophile, saw the network as an engine of rejuvenation for the economically depressed city. As Greg Goldman, the project’s former CEO, reflected some years later, the whole point was “to make Philly a cooler place to live. John Street understood the power of technology and getting it into the hands of the neighborhoods.”3

The city was soon abuzz. A 2005 Philadelphia Magazine cover story on the city’s resurgence boasted, “the Street administration’s plan to turn the entire city into a Wi-Fi hot spot of low-cost wireless Internet access has generated more positive attention than anything we’ve done here since 1776.”4 It was a bold plan, seemingly without political risk for Street or financial risk for the city. The network’s projected cost was just $10 million, to be raised entirely from private sources. Work was to start within the year and be completed in just twelve months. For Goldman, it promised to mark a transformational moment for the city. “It had tremendous political support, it had private capital driving its expansion, it had a tremendous degree of public engagement, it even had strong media support,” he says. The formula was rapidly copied by San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, Miami, and Chicago. As other cities followed Philadelphia’s lead, it seemed an endorsement of the plan.

The city quickly inked a deal with Internet service provider EarthLink to push the public-private partnership forward. After growing into one of the largest dial-up purveyors during the 1990s, EarthLink was trying to get out of that rapidly declining business and elbow its way into the broadband market. Federal telecommunications reforms enacted in 1996 to increase competition had ordered regional telephone companies (the “Baby Bells”) to provide competitors access to their new high-speed digital subscriber lines (DSL). But in practice the Bells were slow to process requests for access, creating long installation delays for companies like EarthLink, which struggled to gain market share. Tacking, the company placed a bold bet on municipal Wi-Fi as a way to deliver broadband directly to homes and businesses. The design for Philadelphia now called for a $20 million build-out, lighting up 80 percent of the city with over 3,500 light-pole-mounted transceivers, according to Goldman.