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

But for all his enthusiasm, Shirky was deeply skeptical of situated software’s ability to scale beyond small social groups like his students. “By relying on existing social fabric”—the casual face-to-face encounters with fellow users—“situated software is guaranteed not to work at the scale Web School apps do.” Situated software, by definition, needed an element of face-to-face interaction among its users.

But as we are seeing in these burgeoning civic laboratories, the scale of the city is an interesting intermediate scale at which many kinds of situated software can succeed. Beyond the intimate realm Shirky observed his students sharing, there are lots of shared contexts at the city level that aren’t shared at the scale of the whole Web. Transit systems, with all their quirks, are distinctly different between cities and have spawned a whole category of situated software—developers in Portland,Oregon, a city of just 590,000 people, have created fifty apps for the regions transit system, each with its own unique package of features.13 Climate is another trait that is relatively uniform at the city scale but distinguishes one city from another. (San Francisco, with its extensive range of micro-climates, is an outlier here). All of these local variations are starting points for situated software. Apps for pedestrians, for instance, will have to understand differences in street culture. New Yorkers are chronic jaywalkers, but in Seattle people wait obediently at the corner for the signal to change.

It should come as no surprise that our civic laboratories are spinning out their own situated software. In fact, it would be weird if they didn’t. “For if each human individuality be unique, how much more must that of every city?” asked Patrick Geddes.14 The same urge that drives communities to differentiate themselves through physical design, regulation, and social norms will shape the way smart technologies are used to retrofit them. Its a mistake to assume that everything could or should be copied from city to city, however commercially attractive that may be. There are economies of scale, but there are also big benefits to doing it your own way. At the scale of big cities, these tradeoffs tend to be in balance.

“Build Locally, Spread Nationally”

Good ideas about smart technology are indeed spreading from city to city, but not quite the way IBM envisions. Rather, it’s happening peer-to-peer, driven by a new crop of NGOs working nationally and internationally to cross-fertilize innovations.

For much of the history of cities, good ideas about how to design and govern them have spread slowly. As recently as the nineteenth century, if you wanted to spread a new idea in city planning, the best way to do it was colonization. The Romans laid down the basic template for much of urban Europe. British-trained engineers designed the flawless Hong Kong metro system (prior to the 1997 return to Chinese rule) by tapping a century’s worth of knowledge gained building the London Underground. But, as we saw in chapter 3, professional urban planning and the peaceful and systematic exchange of best practices between cities is barely a hundred years old.

Recently, this flow has gone global. Rather than just borrow ideas from neighboring communities or national leaders, innovations are crossing borders at an increasing clip. Bus rapid transit, which combines curbside payment to expedite boarding with dedicated lanes to bypass traffic, began in Brazil in the 1970s but in the last decade has been implemented in Europe, Asia, and North America. Public bicycle sharing schemes have spread even faster, popping up all over the world after the launch of Paris’s massive Velib system in 2007.

Cheap air travel and the Web have been key to spreading these ideas. Watching a video of a huge crowd board a bus in seconds communicates the power of the idea faster than a pile of studies. Hearing the mayor of another city explain how he convinced voters to go along with the scheme is indispensable knowledge when you launch your own campaign at home.

So what happens when some hackathon or city agency comes up with a smart-technology idea that could work elsewhere? One organization, Code for America, wants to play Johnny Appleseed. “While each city has its own character and personality,” writes founder Jennifer Pahlka, “at their core there are common needs, which can be addressed with shared and reusable solutions. In this age of shrinking budgets and rising needs, each city acting in isolation is no longer sustainable.” The group’s mission, in her words—“Build locally, spread nationally.”15

Code for America actually started as an idea about how to fix the national government, but its proponents soon found that it worked better when scaled down to the local level. In 2008 Pahlka was running O’Reilly Media’s annual Web 2.0 conference. She was a superconnected node in the tech community, and after the presidential election that year, she noticed that people in the tech industry were being tapped for transition team spots for the new administration. “It was clear that there was going to be an opportunity to do something with technology in the federal government that hadn’t been possible earlier,” she says. With Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of technical books and the tireless open-source advocate who coined the term “Web 2.0,” she launched a new conference, Gov 2.0, to “bring the principles and values of the web to government.

At first, Gov 2.0 had nothing to do with cities. The tech community, energized by the Obama campaign’s promise of systemic change, was focused on transformation at the federal level. But as Pahlka filled her Twitter feed with thoughts and news about government technology, it caught the attention of Andrew Greenhill, chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, Arizona, and the husband of one of Pahlka’s childhood friends. As she recalls, Greenhill implored her by e-mail to help, wanting to know how he could entice developers to come to Tucson and write apps for the city. Puzzled and frustrated, Pahlka said she wrote back, “I don’t know. I can’t help you.”17

Greenhill continued to bug her. He called her, castigating Gov 2.0’s focus on the federal government. Cities were facing “a huge financial crisis no one’s talking about,” Pahlka recalls him saying. Property values were falling, cutting into tax revenues, and cuts in consumer spending had hit sales-tax receipts hard. Pension funds were taking a huge hit just as boomers were lining up to retire. States, facing their own fiscal disaster, were rapidly cutting aid to cities. In a period of retrenchment, apps were a rare opportunity to innovate without spending a lot.

Cities also offered a chance for a visible and tangible impact on citizens’ lives. “The federal government is so far removed from what actually happens to people in their daily lives,” Pahlka explained to me. “But if your pothole gets fixed quicker, you notice. If your mayor is more responsive, you notice. If you’re able to have an impact on your city’s budget, you feel that. That was compelling to me.”

Code for America was born, of all places, over a beer at an Arizona barbecue. In the summer of 2009, on a family vacation in Flagstaff, Pahlka’s debate with Greenhill finally came to a head. “Andrew had done Teach for America, and we were talking about its impact and whether it was a good experience for him,” she recalled. “We were talking about how people will do things that aren’t money-driven in order to give back.” The thread had come full circle when Greenhill asked yet again for help writing apps. “We need a Teach for America for geeks!” she blurted out.

Pahlka was electrified. “That night, I said to my dad and stepmom who were there with me, ‘I’m going to quit my job and go to start this thing.’ ” Returning to San Francisco, she raised $20,000 from the Sunlight Foundation and the Case Foundation while producing one last Web 2.0 conference that fall in New York. In December she tendered her letter of resignation, and on January 1, 2010, Code for America began accepting applications for its first fellowship program.