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

Today, our own doomsday scenario is also man-made. To avoid irreversible climate change, the International Energy Agency estimates that we need to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million. At current rates of greenhouse-gas emission, the point of no return will arrive sometime around 2017. After that, global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius can still be avoided, but it will cost four to five times as much as we extensively retrofit old, inefficient power plants and infrastructure.

Economist Edward Glaeser of Harvard University sees cities as green alternatives to help stabilize emissions. That makes sense in America, where higher population density would dramatically slash the energy we waste through sprawl. Residents of transit-dependent Manhattan have the lowest per capita carbon output of any American community, argues David Owen in Green Metropolis. But for the newly emerging global middle class, even a Manhattan lifestyle represents an enormous increase in energy consumption. We have to figure out how to support a middle-class urban existence with only the carbon footprint of a villager if we are to keep global emissions from ballooning. Even Manhattanites will have to clean up their act.

The technology giants we saw in chapters 1 and 2 are pitching smart technology as the solution to this Gordian knot. In their view, there is no alternative. Smart cities are the best last hope for our survival as a species. But there are at least five different ways that we might not make it. Each is as unthinkable as the next.

First, smart technology might not deliver enough efficiency. The improvement needed to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions are “neither trivial nor impossible,” according to a 2007 United Nations Foundation report. But they are certainly not a sure thing. Global energy demand grew 50 percent from 1980 to 2005, and is expected to rise another 50 percent through 2030. To stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide below an even less ambitious target of 550 parts per million, the G8 group of industrialized nations would have to double their average annual rate of increase in energy efficiency to 2.5 percent right now, and maintain that pace of improvement through 2030. But even in cities that are aggressively pursuing efficiency, progress is slow. As we saw in chapter 5, even in Amsterdam—widely regarded as a global leader in sustainability—emissions are still rising by one percent annually. In the worst case, more efficient smart infrastructure will actually work to hold down the price of energy and stimulate even more consumption—what economists call the “rebound effect.”

Second, smart technology might turn out to be less effective in curbing energy use, yet highly effective for reducing traffic congestion and fighting crime. Although cities would become more appealing places to live as quality of life improved, and in America, this might help with the energy problem indirectly, by enticing people back from the suburbs to denser communities, in the developing world it could speed up the growth of megacities powered by todays dirty energy technologies. That would be an economic success story of epic proportion, but a global ecological disaster. Imagine a smart Johannesburg suddenly free of crime and booming, absorbing millions of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa into a ramshackle infrastructure of dirty minibuses and smoky coal- and dung-fueled stoves.

A third doomsday story goes like this—we do crack the code of sustainable design and bring the needed technologies to market, just not in time. Building a smart city is not like buying a mobile phone or installing a software update; its more like open-heart surgery. Even in Singapore, with its long and proven tradition of technocratic planning, smart infrastructure projects move at a snails pace. Since the 1970s, city managers had used a paper-based system of tolls to control access to the congested city center.79 But when it came time to digitize the system in the 1990s, it took fully twelve years to implement the change. Londons congestion-pricing system took just a year to implement after the green light was given in February 2002. But that was after thirty-eight years of deliberation. The idea was first proposed in 196480

The fourth way things could go wrong is economic stagnation. If the malaise of the developing world is too much growth, for the rich cities of the global north it may be too little. If smart technology doesn’t improve our productivity, we might not be able to pay for further improvements in energy efficiency. Many hope for a return to the “New Economy” of the late 1990s, when the United States experienced a historic period of rapid increases in productivity driven, we thought, by advances in information technology. But recent research has questioned this explanation. Robert Gordon at Northwestern University notes that the greatest productivity gains from information technology during that expansion were in manufacturing of durable goods, and that it was small in historical terms. “Computers and the internet do not measure up to the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” he argued, “and in this sense do not merit the label of‘Industrial Revolution.” Furthermore, these gains soon disappeared and most developed economies saw little productivity growth during the 2000s. Any thought of an economic boom as we upgrade cities with more of the same may be premature.

In our final unthinkable future only the wealthy thrive, retreating to smart enclaves sustained by captured resources managed solely for their own benefit, or traded at onerous rates with the poor. This scenario is already the norm across much of the developing world, where the poor have less access to clean water, healthy food, and basic sanitation, and pay vastly higher prices for them when they do. As competition for natural resources heats up over the next century, and the impacts of climate change disrupt supplies, the rich may be able to wall themselves off from the consequences of their own overconsumption. Instead of making cities more resilient to the challenges of rapid growth and climate change, smart technology could limit the ability of poor and vulnerable communities to adapt.

Every smart city will be buggy, brittle, and bugged in its own peculiar ways. It is self-delusion to expect anything else. Thinking about the unthinkable needs to be a bigger part of our discussions about the future of the city, the role technology should play, and how we manage the risks that come along with it.

A half-century ago, motorization promised to save us from the environmental crises of the day—the crowding of cities, and their lack of fresh air and green space. But imagine if we had stopped to think about the unthinkable. Could we have anticipated smog, sprawl, dependence on foreign oil, childhood obesity, and global warming? We will never know if these negative impacts could have been avoided, but it would not have cost much to try. We might have even avoided the very unintended consequences we now invent smart technologies to undo.

We have seen that putting the needs of citizens first isn’t only a more just way to build cities. It is also a way to craft better technology, and do so faster and more frugally.

And giving people a role in the process will ultimately lead to greater success in tackling thorny urban problems and greater acceptance of the solutions smart cities will offer. Oscar

Wilde once wrote, “At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”1 It is up to us to create the right conditions. But if we want to put people first, where do we begin?

I believe we need a new set of principles to guide us. These principles need to build not only on our growing scientific understanding of cities and how technology shapes and is shaped by them, but also a broader appreciation of the human condition and how it is changing in this first predominantly urban century. To put it simply, we need science, but we also need culture to chart the way forward.