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

All of these factors—the focus on citizens, the substantial human resources, the severe constraints on project scope, the political reality that Menino doesn’t have to grab headlines with every tech initiative—united to chart a markedly different path for Boston, an almost guerrilla approach to smart-city building. Like the minutemen of the Massachusetts rebellion, the New Urban Mechanics team picked its targets carefully, and struck fast with a tiny force. It’s a point not lost on the team. Jacob saw early on that the contestants in city apps contests were “basically developing solutions for themselves. Which makes sense, right? Because that’s how you scratch your itch.” Boston chose not to follow that path. As Osgood saw it, Menino’s focus on accountability to his constituents dictated a more engaged approach to apps. “Because of our mayor, we take very seriously the responsibility that government has to understand the problems that residents have, and to try and solve those particular problems.” Ensuring that the apps New Urban Mechanics built were both useful to Boston residents and “piloting something interesting and creative” perhaps results in fewer apps, he says, but apps that will be “sustained and evolved and resonate more.”51

Unlike other cities, where technology is seen as the catalyst of change, Menino made technology subservient. Although it’s a unique creation of his long tenure and style of governance, Boston’s strategy could be the most universally viable model for civic technology out there. It’s the first approach to smart cities that feels as though it was designed by a political scientist rather than a software engineer. It is subtle and measured where others are bombastic about the benefits of technology. Jacob’s assessment is telling of the team’s cautious approach to tinkering with the relationship between government, people, and innovation. “I think in general cities have only a very weak understanding of what people need or how technology could be used to address social problems,” he concluded.

Boston’s approach of guiding technological innovation with smart politics has caught the attention of mayors elsewhere. As Jacob explained to me later, in August 2012 he had taken on a new role advising his peers in several other American cities on how to replicate the success of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Philadelphia, the first to come knocking “actually called and asked ‘Can we just franchise what you guys do?’ ” Jacob proudly said.53 He was also working to help spread to other cities some of the projects kick-started in Boston. One such tool, Community Planlt, was an online game designed by Eric Gordon, a visual and media arts professor at Emerson College, to enhance the value of community meetings. When we spoke, Community Planlt had been successfully rolled out in two of Boston’s suburbs as well as Detroit.

Although it was poised to go viral, can New Urban Mechanics survive a change of leadership at home in Boston? Menino will finally leave office after the 2013 mayoral election, having served a record five terms. Both Jacob and Osgood believed that their approach already had the critical buy-in from citizens that eluded efforts in other cities. As Jacob saw it, “There [has] definitely been a problem ... with some cities where the focus of innovation is about business process and improvement.

Those are easy things to cut at budget time. Its very hard to argue against a program that has been rolled out to the constituents ... especially if its something that is successful and the people are engaged.” For Osgood, engagement may even be what really matters in the end, more than any particular innovation itself—the novelty of the new technology “should be a distant second, relative to improving new models of civic engagement or adding value to the lives of constituents.”54

For Jacob, technology had opened the door for change driven from, but mostly happening outside, City Hall. “When I imagine the city operating on a different model,” he opined, “I think that people will be empowered to do things that, right now, are done exclusively by government. We would need to rethink a lot of the traditional roles.... People need to be able to see a way to make life better for themselves, as opposed to waiting for government or for some magical start-up to do it for them.”35

Betting the Farm On Smart

So far, American forays into building smart cities have been spasmodic, on-again/off-again affairs. But in Spain, with an economy in free fall, the city of Zaragoza is completely reinventing its physical landscape, its economy, and its government with smart technology.

“There is the antenna,” Daniel Sarasa says, pointing. A tiny white plastic bud juts from a street lamp, just beyond the bust of Spanish painter Francisco Goya that dominates this end of Plaza del Pilar, Zaragozas central square. He steps out of a long winter shadow cast by of the looming basilica cathedral, an austere block of Iberian stone. “The whole plaza was filled with tents.”56

Months before American cities faced the “99 percent” during the fall 2011 Occupy protests, Spain erupted in dissent. Plaza del Pilar was the epicenter of the “15-M” movement (for May 15, the day the protests started) in Spains fifth largest city. At their peak some ten thousand people gathered here to demonstrate against austerity measures taken by the Spanish government as the country struggled to stabilize its debt and stay in the good graces of international bond markets.

In the United States, Occupy encampments used cellular networks to keep organizers online, but in Zaragoza a new public Wi-Fi network, years in the making, was coming online just as the protests swelled. One of the mayors key digital strategists, Sarasa explains that the antenna in Plaza del Pilar was just one of a cluster installed earlier that spring throughout the city at locations suggested by citizens in a public survey the year before. As May 15 approached, the network was going through final beta tests and had not yet been formally launched. But protesters quickly discovered the service and logged on in droves, bringing transfer speeds to a crawl. Conspiracy theories of a city-ordered shutdown swept across Twitter, much to Sarasa’s surprise. “I tweeted, telling them about other nearby hot spots, and urging them to go there to connect.” In American cities it was police, often outfitted in riot gear, who dealt with protesters that year. But in Zaragoza, city agencies instead used social networks to shepherd them in peaceful digital dissent across an archipelago of wireless hot spots.

When fully built out Zaragozas Wi-Fi network will involve over two hundred hot spots blanketing a zone dubbed the Digital Mile (or Milla Digital, in Spanish). The Digital Mile stretches from the Plaza del Pilar at the city’s center to the site of the 2008 World Expo across the Ebro River, a riverfront to which the city had long turned a cold shoulder. The path is a microcosm of the city’s journey through history. At one end is the basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar (Nuestra Senora del Pilar), the cathedral whose construction from 1681 to the middle of the twentieth century, when its towers were finally completed, coincided with Spain’s decline from global empire to shattered, war-weary backwater. At the other end, the Expo site had served briefly in 2008 as a venue for reimagining the city’s future.

The Digital Mile is the centerpiece of a broad effort to turn Zaragoza into what Sarasa describes as an “open-source city.” “We had to come up with something new,” he explains. While Zaragoza occupies a strategic redoubt on the road from the political and economic capital, Madrid, and the resurgent seaside cultural entrepot of Barcelona, it lives in the shadow of both. “When we started out, we knew this wasn’t Madrid. And there’s no beach. Woody Allen isn’t coming here to make movies,” he says, referring to the director’s 2008 hit Vicky Cristina Barcelona , shot on location in that city. If it were to be anything more than a provincial hub, Zaragoza had to do something radical. As the city worked with a group of MIT urban design professors, plans for the Digital Mile quickly took shape. The Media Labs William Mitchell, author of several books on cities and digital technology, teamed up with Dennis Frenchman, the head of MIT’s urban design program. Frenchman had previously crafted designs for smart streets in South Korea, England, and Abu Dhabi that shrewdly deployed new digital technologies to enhance the vitality of public places. For instance, in Seoul’s Digital Media City, a predecessor to Songdo, Frenchman designed a series of multistory screens that would stretch in an unbroken line down the site’s main, pedestrianized “media street.” It was akin to Times Square’s brilliant signage, but instead of a dizzying jumble of ads, the entire system could be operated as a single screen to display artwork, celebratory images, or, in an emergency, evacuation instructions.5' For Zaragoza he proposed a necklace of new buildings and public technology exhibitions that would similarly weave connections between the digital and physical city.