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

Generator was never built, as concerns about the cost of maintaining the building came to light and Gilman struggled with his younger brother Chris over control of the family fortune. Yet it was an important early vision of how a building—and by extension entire cities—might be transformed by their coming integration with computers. By combining digital sensing, networking, intelligence, and robotics, Price and the Frazers had invented what architect Royston Landau described as “a computerized leisure facility, which not only could be formed and reformed but, through its interaction with users, could learn, remember and develop an intelligent awareness of their needs.”9

The Automatic City

Economic shocks have an uncanny ability to distill impractical but promising new technologies into commercial successes. Just as Generator was prodding architects to think about computers as architectural materials, the oil embargoes of the 1970s spurred a more prosaic, yet more widespread interest in building automation. “At the time, buildings tended to be over-designed and over-ventilated, and energy efficiency was rarely an issue,” notes one industry retrospective.10 It was clear that a new way of running buildings was needed and automation was the key. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, energy management systems began appearing in new constructions —simple controls that could adjust heating and cooling controls on a pre-programmed schedule. But as energy costs collapsed in the 1990s, interest in building automation waned, almost as quickly as America’s interest in compact, fuel-efficient cars.

Today, high energy costs are back, but the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the driving force behind a new surge of investment in building automation. Price’s and Frazer’s vision of intelligent structures that would adapt to uplift the soul has devolved into something more mundane. The blueprints for smart buildings today co-opt automation merely to sustain the human body on a low-carbon diet. High architectural art has become a tool for cost-cutting and environmental compliance.

This new commercial reality is on display at yet another great gathering space, the Songdo Convensia Convention Center, the hub of a vast new city in South Korea. Rising atop 1,500 acres of landfill reclaimed from the shallows of the Yellow Sea, Songdo International Business District seeks to scale building automation up to an entire city, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds.

Convensias own soaring metal trusses evoke those of the Crystal Palace a century and a half earlier. Overhead they bear the weight of three long, peaked roof sections that enclose one of the largest column-free spans in Asia, according to the buildings official website. But behind the scenes, Convensias true homage to Paxton lies in the control systems that govern every aspect of building function. Here, everything is connected, everything is automated.

Upon entering the building, conventioneers pick up their ID badges, embedded with a “u-chip” (for “ubiquitous” computing), a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag that functions as a wireless bar code. To enter the exhibition hall, one swipes the card across a reader mounted atop each turnstile, much like entering a subway station. Its a familiar move for Korean city dwellers. For over a decade, they have used local tech giant LG’s rechargeable T-money cards not just to board buses and subways, but to pay for taxis and convenience-store purchases as well. From the earliest planning stages, the nation’s economic planners intended Songdo to be a test bed for RFID and a center for research and development in this crucial ubiquitous computing technology. In 2005 the government announced a $300 million, 20- acre RFID-focused industrial park in Songdo.

Inside Convensia, your interactions with computers seem far from ubiquitous, broken up into a fragmented series of gestures and glances—swiping your RFID card to enter a room or pressing a button to request that an elevator be dispatched to your location. As they move through the complex, visitors locate meeting rooms by reading digital displays mounted beside entryways, which draw down the latest events schedule from a central master calendar. Other smart technologies inhabit Convensias unseen innards—controls for climate systems, lighting, safety and security systems are there, yet invisible to the average person.

Step outside, however, and the street springs to life as a less patient, more proactive set of automated technologies takes over. Songdo is the world’s largest experiment in urban automation, with millions of sensors deployed in its roads, electrical grids, water and waste systems to precisely track, respond to, and even predict the flow of people and material. According to CEO John Chambers of Cisco Systems, which committed $47 million in 2009 to build out the city’s digital nervous system, it is a place that will “run on information.” 13 Plans call for cameras that detect the presence of pedestrians at night in order to save energy safely by automatically extinguishing street lighting on empty blocks. Passing automobiles with RFID-equipped license plates will be scanned, just the way conventioneers are at Convensias main gate, to create a real-time map of vehicle movements and, over time, the ability to predict future traffic patterns based on the trove of past measurements.14 A smart electricity grid will communicate with home appliances, perhaps anticipating the evening drawdown of juice as tens of thousands of programmable rice cookers count down to dinnertime.

Just above the northern horizon, a line of wide-body jets stretches out over the water, on final approach into the massive Incheon International Airport, which opened in March 2001. The airport is to Songdo what New York’s harbor or Chicago’s railyards once were. As John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay explain in their 2011 book AerotropoliSy Songdo was originally conceived as “a weapon for fighting trade wars.” The plan was to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo, where they would be able to reach any of East Asia’s boomtowns quickly by air. It was to be a special economic zone, with lower taxes and less regulation, inspired by those created in Shenzhen and Shanghai in the 1980s by premier Deng Xiaoping, which kick-started China’s economic rise.

But in an odd twist of fate, Songdo now aspires to be a model for China instead. The site itself is deeply symbolic. Viewed from the sky, its street grid forms an arrow aimed straight at the heart of coastal China. It is a kind of neoliberal feng shui diagram, drawing energy from the rapidly urbanizing nation just over the western horizon. Massive in its own right, Songdo is merely a test bed for the technology and business models that will underpin the construction of pop-up megacities across Asia. It is the birth of what Michael Joroff of MIT describes as a “new city-building industry,” novel partnerships between real estate developers, institutional investors, national governments, and the information technology industry. This ambition to become the archetype for Asia’s hundreds of new towns is why scale matters so much for Songdo. Begun in 2004 and scheduled for completion in 2015, it is the largest private real estate project in history at some $35 billion. For Lindsay, it is simply “a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities.”

South Korea is fertile ground for rethinking the future. It’s an anxious place inhabited by driven people, where the phrase pali pali is a ubiquitous incantation. Hearing it spoken so often, the foreign ear easily assumes that it is local parlance for “yes” or “please.” But it really means “hurry, hurry.” It’s the verbal expression of the