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

In chapter 3 we saw how the roots of modern city planning grew from Patrick Geddes’s evolutionary understanding of cities and his belief that the practical application of sociology was crucial to solving the fast-multiplying problems of industrial-era cities. Geddes would no doubt approve of how today’s smart-city builders are applying technology to urban challenges and seeking to develop a new, rigorous empirical science of cities. But he also understood the limits of science, and the need to view cities with eyes that see not only facts, but wonder as well. As biographer Helen Meller wrote, Geddes believed that “the city had to be seen as a whole, not as an amalgam of disparate elements each requiring specific treatment Seeing the city as a whole however, was not straightforward; it required a special combination of science and art. Scientific facts, observations made in a systematic manner, combined with an artistic understanding based on cultural criteria, together made a new subject Geddes called ‘civics’ It was only possible to study this subject in a specific context and therefore the beginning of such a study had to be a practical social survey.”2

Geddes recognized that a thorough knowledge of culture—the creative social expression of humanity in a particular local setting—was necessary to understand what science could not explain. Today, as computers do more and more of the work of observing cities for us, we must redouble our efforts to see those intangible aspects of urban life they may never be capable of measuring. Without this more holistic lens on the city, it will be impossible to recognize problems, design appropriate solutions, and engage citizens to participate in their implementation.

Yet evidence that we are moving in the wrong direction is everywhere. As we saw in chapter 2, visionary computer scientist David Gelernter was deeply conflicted about the death of Romantic thought under the relentless scrutiny of mirror worlds—technological contraptions not unlike the ones that IBM has engineered in Rio de Janeiro. When I think about how Mayor Eduardo Paes’s remote-control city reduces the people of the favelas to a stream of data, the words of E. E. Cummings, who railed against the mechanization of a life ruthlessly measured, come to mind:

—bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose

flowers guess and miss

machinery is the more accurate, yesit delivers the goods, Heaven knows

Smart cities designed by corporations will deliver, indeed. But what? A landscape of automated cookie-cutter urbanism that doubles down on industrial capitalism and inevitably crushes our souls? Again, a few lines down, towards the end of the poem, Cummings draws our attention to the stakes:

who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

What we stand to lose from this urge to wire up the planet with sensors is, ironically, itself immeasurable. I wonder if its time to jet down to Rio, pull the plug on the Intelligent Operations Center, and put the boys of Projecto Morrinho, with their Lilliputian model of the city, in charge instead.

Failure to put people at the center of our schemes for smart cities risks repeating the failed designs of the twentieth century. Only this time, the stakes are much higher, because by the end of this century, with as much as 80 percent of the worlds population already living in urban areas, there will be few cities left to build. As economist Paul Romer points out, “in the lifetimes of our children, the urbanization project will be completed. We will have built the system of cities that their descendants will live with forever.”4 Walk amid new Songdos shiny new towers, and one thing is abundantly clear—it is a twenty-first-century update of the Garden City. Jane Jacobs was right about the pointlessness of model cities designed by professional planners. But this is where we are placing our bets.

Until now, smart-city visions have been about controlling us. What we need is a new social code to bring meaning to and exert control over the technological code of urban operating systems. We need a new civics for the smart city that takes what we know about making good places as well as good technology, and shows us how to put them into practice. Only a sound set of guidelines will allow the designs for smart cities to emerge organically and to be shaped by the desires and choices of the people who must live in them.

In these closing pages, I offer a set of tenets that we can use to build this new civics. They are my distillation of the crucial design, planning, and governance principles we must uphold to build smart cities that are human-centered, inclusive, and resilient. It is unavoidably incomplete—the fast-changing nature of both cities and computing makes it impossible to capture all of the important issues. We might heed the words of the late William Mitchell, the former dean of MITs School of Architecture and a pioneering thinker on smart cities, who wrote, “our job is to design the future we want not to predict its predetermined path.”5 This is, I hope, the beginning of a new phase in our collective conversation about how to do that.

Opt In to Smart

The commercial success and cultural ascendance of the Internet lends an air of inevitability to the idea of smart cities. But are we too eager to ask engineers to solve every urban problem? The technology industry’s hard sell on smart depends on this. But only the company towns of the twenty-first century will see technology as the end goal. The first tenet of our new civics is that we should never default to smart technology as the solution. It’s tempting to think that new gadgets always offer better solutions to old problems. But they are just another set of tools in an already well-equipped box.

One need only open up Christopher Alexanders monumental book A Pattern Language to understand just how big that toolbox is. The result of a decades worth of painstaking research, it is a fascinating distillation of humanity’s built legacy, describing over two hundred traditional architectural and urban design tropes from cities around the world. What A Pattern Language argues is that most urban design problems were solved long ago by ancient builders. We have but to borrow from our ancestors, and many problems can be adequately addressed simply by conventional design.

Instead, however, we are creating technological bandages to fix flaws in the poor designs of mass-produced cities. Consider the distribution of commerce and industry. Alexanders Pattern 9, “Scattered Work,” described the network of small workshops intermixed with homes that’s typical in cities that have grown organically. Scattering work integrates the social and economic life of cities, provides opportunities for young people to learn about work, enhances walkability, and reduces the commuting burden on transportation systems. Yet in the world’s rapidly urbanizing countries these traditional forms, and their fine-grained mix of uses and building types, are being bulldozed to make way for single-use districts. In a headlong rush to modernize, Chinese cities are repeating one of the West’s worst mistakes of the twentieth century, and doing so on an epic scale. But, as Cisco pitched at the 2010 World Expo, technology can undo the damage—ubiquitous videoconferencing will patch Shanghai’s fractured landscape back together. However, this strategy can only postpone the inevitable structural changes needed to make these modern designs stand the test of time as well as Alexander’s patterns have.

We needn’t all become Luddites overnight. Treat smart as an add-on, an upgrade, and not the end itself. The best thing about smart technologies is that you don’t have to clear-cut your existing city to make way for them. But ask the hard questions: What new solutions do smart technologies really enable? Where do they enhance existing solutions? Most important, where do they interfere and create new problems of their own? You can also future-proof conventional designs for smart retrofits later on. When you replace street lamps, provide a mounting point for whatever wireless or sensor technology comes next. When you dig up streets, lay conduit for future broadband lines. Whatever they may be made of, there will be powerful economic reasons to squeeze them into the same slots, just as fiber optics followed the paths laid down by the telephone and telegraph wires that preceded them. When you create urban software, make it simple, modular, and open source. Anytime you generate a new data stream, document and archive it as openly as you can.