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

My tour of Zaragoza had begun earlier that morning with Juan Pradas, one of Sarasa’s colleagues, at the center of the Digital Mile, where Zaragoza has literally put itself back on the map. At a massive new rail station, bigger than most airport terminals, sleek new bullet trains slide to a stop before whisking passengers off to Barcelona and Madrid, less than two hours in either direction.

The station has sparked a miniature building boom. Traversing a delicate pedestrian bridge designed by Frenchman to overstep a mid-twentieth-century traffic circle that couldn’t be moved, we approach a trio of sleek new buildings clad in frosted white glass. The two larger ones will house the Center for Art and Technology —“the CAT” in Pradas’s jargon. It is a spitting image of the Media Lab’s new building in Cambridge, and it was the last great dream of Mitchell, who had passed away a year earlier. The resemblance is more than cosmetic, for the CAT is also destined to become the kind of place where artists, technologists, and citizens come together to explore the possibilities of smart technologies to reshape the city. It is to be, as Michael Joroff— another MIT advisor to Zaragoza has told me—not merely a think tank but a “think-do tank.” The hope is that it will be a source of bottom-up innovations, an open-source department of civic works. The smallest of the three buildings, a business incubator, is already open. We peek inside, and the pleasant hum of digital designing fills the air—a buzzing espresso machine, electronica beats, and fingers tickling keyboards.

Water defines the Digital Mile: it was the theme of the 2008 Expo and is a precious resource in the city’s arid region. Moving on from the CAT, we explore a network of technology-studded public spaces, including MIT professor Carlo Ratti’s Digital Water Pavilion, which encourages people to interact with and even program smart systems. A fountain that works like an ink-jet printer, the Pavilion sports two long lines of water cannons that shoot sheets of liquid down from an overhead canopy. As you bravely leap through, a sensor catches you and magically cuts off the flow, creating a human-sized safe haven. After you pass through, the watery wall closes behind you.

More important, though, the Pavilion is a literal interpretation of the idea of an open-source city, with multiple layers of programmability. Amateur hackers can send a text message to the controls, directing the jets to fire in sequences that write your message in patterns of falling drops. A few pecks on my phone and I’m programming the streetscape of Zaragoza. For the pros, there’s an API for coding apps that add new behaviors to the fountain.

More digital waterworks are planned. Sarasa describes plans for the Digital Diamond, a public swimming pool proposed for a nearby residential area, that he hopes will be warmed on the region’s cold desert nights by the waste heat from a nearby server farm. Across the river lies the empty Expo site, stuck, as those kinds of places always are, in limbo as the city tries to figure out how to best reuse it.

Backtracking past the CAT, the Digital Mile winds its way through the existing city on its way to Plaza del Pilar. We cross over into La Almozara, a high-rise block built atop the former site of a chemical factory, now home to a large community of working-class Romanian immigrants. At its center, I find more Wi-Fi hot spots, clustered around the neighborhood’s Centro Civico community center. A utilitarian relic of Spain’s post-Franco socialist renaissance, the boxy brick low-rise sits in a small plaza surrounded by ten-story apartment buildings. Zaragoza is upgrading these community centers for the twenty-first century. One side effect of the Wi-Fi project was that it created an excuse to run fiber-optic lines to all seventeen Centros Civicos throughout the city. The guard at the front desk, no doubt himself a member of the left wing’s old guard, turns to open a cabinet and reveals a twinkling array of Cisco routers.

More than the fastest Wi-Fi, the biggest new tech center, or the entire Digital Mile, the humble “citizen card,” issued under a new city initiative, is already transforming Zaragoza. The cards are only available to residents—migrants from other cities who don’t register with authorities can’t get one. But, I suppose, even in a smart city, you can bend the rules on occasion. Pradas beckons me outside to a rack of public bicycles just outside and taps a card to unlock my ride. I offer some euros, but he shrugs and smiles. “It’s OK, it’s my daughter’s card.”

A stunningly simple innovation for a world of face recognition and predictive modeling, the citizen card is a key that unlocks Zaragoza both online and in the real world. The same card that unlocks a bike share will get you on the Wi-Fi, check out your books at the library, and pay for the bus ride home. Shops and cafes offer cardholders discounts, which has made the program wildly successful—over 20 percent of the city’s 750,000 residents signed up in the first year. As Sarasa explains, “This is all about engagement....” Pradas cuts him off, pronouncing with certainty, “the card creates a sense of belonging.”

The citizen card promises to fundamentally change how the city works. There are plans to create a kind of game, a frequent-user program that offers “digital miles” as rewards to heavy users of the bus system and Wi-Fi network. “The card generates a lot of data on activities, and is a powerful tool for planning,” Sarasa points out. Patterns in card use allow city managers to see how people use public services in great detail, allowing those services to be managed in a more holistic way. Unlike Global Pulse’s contortions to anonymize and obscure individuals’ data, Sarasa sees the city as the best possible referee in a world of urban sensing. “There is a Big Brother aspect we are aware of. But we think the City can be a very good keeper of citizens’ privacy.” Given the hand-wringing debates around the proliferation of individually identifiable data online, and the near-total lack of good ideas about how to deal with it, the idea of local governments as custodians of our personal data is intriguing to me. Is it a power grab by government or inspired leadership? My feeling leans to the latter. But the thought of American cities stepping into this role seems, sadly, unlikely given the enormous responsibility it would entail.

Zaragoza certainly is one to beat in the emerging world of smart cities. Its physical transformation has been bold but carefully measured. It is building world-class facilities that will enable smart-city innovation and economic growth in the future, but has balanced it with upgrades to community centers and public spaces. The citizen card has enormous potential to change the nature of citizenship. None of these pieces alone is a silver bullet. But together they are a “platform for innovation,” as Sarasa describes it. This is no company town rising in an open field, an enclave of iPhone-toting hipsters, or a bid for headlines as an election approaches. It’s a real city, with real problems, thinking and investing long-term in the most promising set of tools at hand.

For all its promise, Zaragoza has a rough road ahead. As the Digital Mile moved into the second half of its first decade, Spain’s economic crisis went from bad to worse. The outlook was more dire than at any time since the nation’s devastating Civil War in the 1930s. Overall unemployment hovered around 25 percent. For those under twenty-five years of age, the Digital Mile’s future caretakers, it surged past 50 percent and underscored their angry 2011 occupation.

Spain’s economic troubles have turned the Center for Art and Technology into a rallying point for the civic and business leadership of Zaragoza. As Pradas explained to me, before the crisis local business leaders barely paid attention to the project. But as the opening in summer 2012 approached, his phone was ringing off the hook with offers of assistance. But building support among young people will be far more difficult. In the past, open-source hacker groups and free-wireless cooperatives had built working relationships with the city. For instance, “Cachirulo Valley,” a colorful group jovially named after a kind of knitted scarf worn in the region, holds its meetings in a conference room carved out of the basement of the Digital Water Pavilion. But a new crop of movements, formed by the May 15 protests, have refused to deal with government. Pradas sees the Center, which will be run by an independent foundation, as a possible neutral ground to bring the parties together.