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

In 2010, Geoffrey West, the physicist who studies cities, remarked at a gathering of urban scholars in New York that if we don’t have a science of cities, “then all cities need to be dealt with individually.”34 But for designers, dealing with cities individually is the only proper approach. This growing tension between expedient deployment and careful design in smart cities isn’t going away. Every city is its own sticky knot of people, places, and policies. Even if every smart city was crafted from a common template, it will need to be customized to get the right fit with the existing city. Every city will have to strike a balance based on its patience, its financial resources, and its capacity to innovate locally.

Clearly, this is going to take time. We should settle in for the long hack.

Like the Internet, this planet of civic laboratories is destined to become more than the sum of its parts as ideas circulate within and between cities. But how the balance between local innovation and cross-fertilization plays out is still unclear. If Shirky’s forecast is right, and the future is filled by millions of apps that nail the needs of small groups, the combinatorial approach will dominate. If industry is right, success will stem from the spread of a handful of core breakthroughs and standards.

Somewhere in the middle is the more realistic future, a weblike global network of smart cities, swapping ideas, tools, and data in real time. But to make that happen, we’ll need to get better at extracting the repurposable improvements from situated software that can be cross-fertilized elsewhere. We’ll need more ways to share them between cities, faster ways to graft them onto new places, and at least some universal standards to make the process as cheap as possible. And we’ll have to manage all of this without preempting too many of the design decisions that should be made locally.

Overstandardization could weed out too much of the competitive urge that has driven creativity and innovation throughout history—there’s a long precedent for this planet of civic laboratories. In 1948 the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell explained how arts had flourished before industrialization through intercity competition. “The inferiority of our age,” in integrating the arts into everyone’s daily lives, he said, “is an inevitable result of the fact that society is centralised and organised to such a degree that individual initiative is reduced to a minimum. Where art has flourished in the past it has flourished as a rule amongst rival small communities, such as the Greek City States, the little Principalities of the Italian Renaissance, and the petty Courts of German eighteenth-century rulers.” Russell yearned for the dynamic that’s at play in smart cities today. “It would be a good thing if cities could develop an artistic pride leading them to mutual rivalry, and if each had its own school of music and painting, not without a vigorous contempt for the school of the next city.... I think that this problem of giving importance to localities will have to be tackled if human life is not to become increasingly drab and monotonous.”

Our standards must be set with care, for unlike consumers, cities wont be able to just throw their legacy technologies away when they become obsolete. The consequences of decisions made today will be with us for years and even decades to come. As Eran Ben-Joseph, a scholar of urban design at MIT, has written, standards for subdividing land, laying utilities, and configuring streets and sidewalks that were promulgated a century ago in the name of progress now constrain us from addressing new problems. “Originating in the desire to improve conditions in urban areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, standards became the essential tool for solving the problems of health, safety and morality.... Because so much has been built according to these dictates, the accumulated rules now have the force of universal acceptance—standards have become the definers, delineators, and promoters of places, regardless of variations in landform, natural systems, and human culture.”36

Should we rush too quickly to lock in the design of our smart cities and the technology that powers them, we may miss the last and greatest chance to recapture the elaborate diversity that makes them special.

Calafia Cafe in Palo Alto is one of the smartest eateries in the world. With Google’s former executive chef Charlie Ayers at the helm, the food here isn’t just for sustenance. This is California—eating is also a path to self-improvement. Each dish is carefully crafted with ingredients that not only keep you slim, but make you smarter and more energized too. A half-dozen venture capitalists pick at their dandelion salads. A sleepy suburb at night, by day Palo Alto becomes the beating heart of Silicon Valley, the monied epicenter of the greatest gathering of scientific and engineering talent in the history of human civilization. To the west, across the street, lies Stanford University. The Googleplex sprawls a few miles to the east. In the surrounding region, some half-million engineers live and work. A tech tycoon or two wouldn’t be out of place here. Steve Jobs was a regular.

Excusing myself to the men’s room, however, I discover that Calafia Cafe has a major technology problem. Despite the pedigree of its clientele, the smart toilet doesn’t work. As I stare hopefully at the stainless steel throne, a red light peering out from the small black plastic box that contains the bowl’s “brains” blinks at me fruitlessly. Just above, a sign directs an escape path. “If sensor does not work,” it reads, “use manual flush button.” And so I bail out, sidestepping fifty years of progress in computer science and industrial engineering in the blink of an eye.

Back at my table, I try to reverse-engineer the model of human-waste production encoded in the toilet’s CPU. I imagine a lab somewhere in Japan. Technicians in white lab coats wield stopwatches as they methodically clock an army of immodest volunteers seated upon row after row of smart johns. The complexity of the problem becomes clear. Is it supposed to flush as soon as you stand up? Or when you turn around? Or pause for a fixed amount of time? But how long? Can it tell if you need another flush? It’s not quite as challenging an engineering task as putting a man on the moon, or calculating driving directions to the airport. Somehow, though, that stuff works every time.

My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? Someone probably just cured cancer in the biotechnology lab across the street and is here celebrating over lunch. Yet that same genius will press the manual flush button just as I did, and never think twice about how consistently this new world of smart technology is letting us down. We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies—but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all.

I know I should stop worrying, and learn to love the smart john. But what if it’s a harbinger of bigger problems? What if the seeds of smart cities’ own destruction are already built into their DNA? Up to this point, I’ve argued that smart cities are a solution to the challenges of twenty-first-century urbanization. I’ve told you that despite potential pitfalls, the benefits outweigh the risks, especially if we are aggressive about confronting the unintended consequences of our choices. But in reality we’ve only scratched the surface.

What if the smart cities of the future are buggy, brittle, and bugged? What are we getting ourselves into?