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

It is in the long-term interest of industry to map the success of the Internet and open-source software onto the city. Some of the big players are starting to get this, most notably IBM, which long ago embraced open-source software. Putting such a framework in place means mapping out the essential minimal components required to share data, process transactions, and secure critical systems. It would be a huge step toward realizing a smart city that, in Christopher Alexander’s view, would look more like a lattice than a tree.

Establishing the right standards will take time, but as we saw in chapter 3, this approach has proven highly effective at driving innovation in Internet technology. And for now, the lack of standards is slowing the adoption of smart technology by making it harder for cities to combine their efforts. As Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka asks, “what are the standards that will allow us to collaborate without discussing it?”14

A truly citizen-focused urban operating system should recognize, as MIT’s Carlo Ratti says, that “people are the ultimate actuators of cities.” With greater openness and flexibility, a Web-like operating system for cities would give developers and even users the ability to design new solutions. A web of smart urban things and services will reinforce the sociability that makes cities thrive. Instead of being centralized, many vital services could be left to the social networks of small communities. A corporate operating system, by contrast, may save on the lighting bill and keep the crooks out, but in the process it could sap the vitality of the community it was trying to protect in the first place.

Extend Public Ownership

Even if one firm doesn’t capture an entire city’s smart infrastructure by controlling its operating system, critical pieces will inevitably be privatized. The global recession has decimated municipal ledgers everywhere. Under the benevolent guise of public-private partnerships, financiers offer capital and technology in exchange for exclusive rights to operate urban infrastructure. The most shocking instance of this occurred in 2008 when Chicago tendered a seventy-six-year lease of its thirty-six thousand parking meters to a firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi for a $1 billion balloon payment. With cities struggling to invest in even basic infrastructure, there is little appetite for costly smart systems. But industry is getting creative. In 2012, for instance, IBM partnered with Citibank to set up a $25 million loan fund to finance smart parking systems for American cities.16

But what companies really lust after is our big data.

The first sign of the struggles to come showed up in San Francisco. In the early 2000s, the city’s Muni transit system contracted with NextBus, a firm that provided vehicle-tracking technology, to create an arrival-time information service on its website and in transit stations. But in 2009, when civic hacker Steven Peterson launched Routesy, an iPhone app that pulled arrival times from the transit agency’s website, Muni made an unpleasant discovery. It didn’t own the results of the arrival predictions generated by NextBus’s algorithms. In 2005, in a near-death financial crisis, NextBus had sold those rights in a fire sale to a shell company set up by one of its founders. San Francisco could post the arrival predictions on its own website, but anyone who wanted to use them for other purposes had to pay. Luckily, the issue was resolved in the city’s favor when the company’s contract came up for renewal later that year. ' But as the open-data movement grows, cities everywhere are taking another look at their agreements with technology vendors and service providers.

A handful of cities, as we saw in Zaragoza, are eager to take on an expanded role as stewards of citizens’ sensitive private data. They see decisions about how, where, when, why, and on what terms to share, make public, or otherwise reuse this data as important matters of public policy. They are the exception. Most local governments, especially risk-averse and fiscally constrained ones in the United States, will shun this enormous responsibility. They lack the capacity to even negotiate controls over the data streams generated by their citizens as they interact with private vendors’ technologies. Watchdog groups will need to step in and identify where the crucial conflicts lie. (And in fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing just this on behalf of a number of transit agencies being sued by another transit-arrival patent troll, Luxembourg-based ArrivalStar). Cities will need regular audits, perhaps conducted by a chief privacy officer or chief data officer charged with extending public control over government- and citizen-generated data.

An intriguing option is to hand off this data to a trust equipped to manage it on behalf of citizens, covering its costs—and possibly generating a revenue stream for the city—by licensing the data. A growing number of start-ups and open-source projects, like the Personal Locker project started by Jeremie Miller, are exploring ways for individuals to control and even pool their private data to trade with companies. (As the creator of Jabber, the dominant global protocol for instant messaging, Miller has a proven knack for standards.) Others are developing the technologies to aggregate and store hyperlocal data. In Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute has deployed a community mapping system called Tidepools that runs off local servers instead of the cloud. Institutionalizing this infrastructure at a community scale would give cities the ability to dictate when and how citizens’ data is used.

Regardless of how cities choose to manage their data, they need to think more broadly and long-term about its value. Extended public ownership of the data exhaust of cities could potentially drive new business models to pay for investments in smart systems. Even today, only a handful of cities share data through a central repository. This means there is still an opportunity to design more sophisticated models for aggregating and distributing data locally generated by government and citizens alike. Chicago’s CTO John Tolva sees city data as a raw material for business. “There is an economic development argument around open data,” he explained to me. “It’s a platform that businesses can be built upon, just as the weather industry sits on top of the National Weather Service. We could foster the growth of companies that analyze the vital signs of cities.”19 But if companies profit from data generated by cities and their inhabitants, shouldn’t the community reap a share?

Extending public control over the hardware and software of smart cities will be trickier. Much of it will be privately owned and operated by outsourcing firms under contract to city governments. Cities will have financed this smart infrastructure through fees but won’t own it. More troublesome, however, is that information systems that used to be packaged as products are being restructured as services delivered across the Internet—computing power is now rented rather than sold. But this business model, pushed hard by IBM, among others, is unsettlingly similar to the one Herman Hollerith imposed on the Census Office in the 1890s. For decades, IBM thrived on its usurious relationship with customers, until a 1956 antitrust action by the US government forced it to sell, as well as lease, computers and tabulators. This unbundling was critical to breaking the firms monopoly in the fast-growing industry.

The rise of cloud-computing also raises other tricky questions for smart city governments. The first is about jurisdiction. As the servers that used to be housed in the basement at City Hall migrate into the cloud, cities critical data and infrastructure will often physically reside in locations that may be outside their legal reach. For now, its great to reap the lower costs of an infrastructure you share with other cities. But what if there is a dispute? How will you ever switch vendors when your data is sitting on a server in another country running proprietary software? The lack of standards for cloud services is equally disturbing because it makes vendors indispensable. You cant simply move to another company’s technology because you’d have to rebuild all of the underlying systems while somehow trying to recover and migrate your old data. Imagine if we ran our physical infrastructure the way IBM would run our smart-city cloud. As Dom Ricci, a financial risk manager for a large international bank who tracks smart-city developments, points out, “you don’t tear off the subway rails and replace them with a different gauge every time you change operators.” Put simply, smart cities need to be savvy about what data and service infrastructure they own and what they give up to private interests in the cloud. As the financial pressures of even the most basic smart systems mount, the appeal of outsourcing and privatizing will grow. (Citing costs, Detroit instead simply pulled the plug on its 311 telephone hotline in 2012). But the short-term savings may evaporate quickly once they are locked out of their own data and locked in to proprietary services.