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

Code for America is an exemplar of what I call “computational leadership networks,” which are national and international organizations that go beyond just sharing stories and case studies of smart-city innovations. A thicket of international intercity organizations already exist for that purpose, issuing endless streams of reports and organizing costly, often pointless junkets. Instead, these new networks help cities share real resources—actual working code, models, and data. The intensity of this exchange is evident in Code for America’s 2011 stats: 21 civic apps produced, 12,828 code commits (a measure of programmer productivity), 390 civic leaders engaged, 546 code community members registered. It’s a fundamental challenge to the big companies who have traditionally extracted a hefty profit for the service of porting solutions from one city to another.

The other challenge, which we’ll examine more deeply in the next section, is the parochialism in software procurement that’s found in city governments everywhere. City-led efforts to innovate new digital services are usually tied to some effort to spearhead development of a local technology industry. The technology people in city government may understand the value of simply repurposing a system from another city or an existing company. But the economic-development officials want to see government contracts spent locally. As a result, many city-funded technology projects end up reinventing the wheel. For Pahlka the challenge is to “Get cities to get over this notion that ‘this has to be about our city.’ You need to be a leader in cooperating with other cities.” Sometimes, too much situated software is a bad thing.

Code for America’s biggest challenge to growth, just as we saw with IBM in chapter 2, is scaling its business model and technology down. It’s a big, rich city model that requires a well-funded tech staff and infrastructure to support its fellows. How will it work in the thousands of communities of ten thousand or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand whose civil servants are often supported by a single IT person? Pahlka’s solution is to use the rest of Google’s money to launch the Code for America Brigade, an online community to connect individuals who want to deploy Code for America apps in their communities and contribute back to the common code base. “We’re not going to fix government until we fix citizenship,” she says. In her future, knowing how to code will be an important skill for civic improvement.

Not Invented Here

Sascha Haselmayer is livid. “That solution I sent you for the blind is just astounding,” he raves. “Just in New York, it would allow 380,000 people to navigate completely independently through the city for the first time in human history.”

It was a pretty remarkable gadget. Invented by Swedish firm Astando, e-Adept was financed in part by the city of Stockholm in its quest to become, according to the city’s website, “the most accessible capital in the world.” Using an exquisitely detailed digital map of the city’s terrain, the GPS-enabled headset talks to the user, calling out obstacles and safe paths. “It has had a huge impact—empowering those people to find jobs, releasing their relatives, and reducing demand on social services,” Haselmayer says. He claims that for just $500,000 in annual operating costs, the system is generating $20 million a year in direct economic benefits for Stockholm.

Haselmayer is the founder of another start-up that’s cross-fertilizing smart-city innovation from its base in Barcelona, Living Labs Global. Earlier that year, Haselmayer had pitched e-Adept to city officials in New York. But their response was the same as many other cities. “If you put something like that on the table of any

CIO in any city,” he laments, referring to a relatively new high-level executive position being created in many cities, the Chief Information Officer, “they will say it doesn’t fit into their architecture.” What they mean is that it’s not a priority, not worth the hassle of making it work with their existing systems. Haselmeyer sighs. “Do you think it will fit into the lives of 380,000 people in your city? To get up in the morning and go to work?” I can tell from his tone he didn’t close the deal.

As I speak with him by Skype from his office in Barcelona, Haselmayer paints a convincing picture of situated software gone wrong. “Look at Germany. You have twenty-four cities which each have their own mobile app for parking. Every city backs its own local service provider thinking that they’re helping the next Google to emerge. They reinvent the wheel and dress it up as a big local innovation program.” Across Europe, he has discovered fifty-six cities that have built their own bad variations of the same service. And not only are citizens stuck with subpar apps, they need to use a different one every time they drive to the next town.

Meanwhile, the Estonian firm that invented mobile parking in the first place has struggled to grow for over a decade. After the success of its ParkNOW! service, which launched in the Baltic nation’s capital of Tallinn in 2000, NOW! Innovations had pitched “a thousand cities around the world,” Haselmayer explains. “In every country they had to hire a local representative to actually present the project for them. They spent almost $10 million dollars on marketing.” Despite being the first business to enter a market that Haselmayer estimates could be as big as S65 billion globally, the company had grown at a snail’s pace.

This ineffective duplication of smart-city technologies is a global problem. “Every city orders an innovation project to invent something without actually seeing what has been done before elsewhere,” Haselmayer explained. “You can see that in the worst-managed cities and in the best-managed cities... where they spend hundreds of millions reinventing everything from scratch. Absolutely everything.” In Connected Cities , a book he coauthored with his Living Labs Global cofounders, he estimated that it was costing European cities tens of millions of dollars each year in duplicated efforts. Of smart-city entrepreneurs, he tells me, “We’re killing them one after another, and then they end up doing ringtones for BlackBerrys, because they know how to make money with that.”

But why weren’t the people who invented mobile parking able to succeed? Haselmayer has catalogued hundreds of start-ups and entrepreneurs around the world with cutting-edge smart technologies, and what he discovered is that they all suffer from the same visibility problem and a “not invented here” attitude among their potential customers abroad. “How can a city trust someone approaching them and saying ‘I’ve invented mobile parking. You should help me make it happen.’ ” What smart-city start-ups needed was a cost-effective way to market themselves outside their hometowns and compete with the big technology giants.

Haselmayer set out to design a fix. In 2010 he drafted a handful of cities to issue challenges, and invited his network of start-ups to show how their technology could address them. The Living Labs Global Awards, which entered its fourth year in 2013, are selected by a jury convened by each city. After the contest, cities can engage the winner to implement the solution, or write the affair off as a brainstorming exercise. The award was designed to “give these companies visibility, help them to get an opening internationally.” When we spoke in late 2011, there were signs that the model was working—he reported that pilots based on winning projects in 2011 were up and running in Chicago, Taipei, and Lagos.

A few months after our conversation over Skype, I met up with Haselmayer in Barcelona. As we wove our way across the old city, ducking in and out of medieval plazas, Haselmayer beamed as he explained the latest thrust in his campaign to promote smart-city start-ups, a new website called CityMart. He recited his pitch: “It’s a platform that provides cities with market intelligence about what kind of solutions are being developed, and where they are working.” “You mean it’s an Amazon for smart cities?” I asked. “Exactly!” he said, grinning.30