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

Cities must set high expectations for reliability as they work with industry, and create capacity for more resilient fallbacks. Meanwhile, they must prepare for the worst. This means having a clear division of authority, plans for backup controls and services, checklists for relief efforts, methods for preventing cascading failures between interconnected urban systems, and organizational capacity to cope with surprises. Many cities already conduct environmental impact assessments, intense audits of the risks of new infrastructure and development projects. Applying this kind of scrutiny to smart-technology projects would help address public concerns about reliability, as well as provide a stamp of approval for technology products, much the way the testing and certification by independent groups like Underwriters Laboratories helped instill trust in the safeness of industrial and consumer goods.

There is a dark side to graceful failure—the same precautions taken to manage an orderly shutdown of urban infrastructure might be used to do it deliberately. There is a very real potential for politics or social upheaval to trigger graduated withdrawals of public services. Many governments already have the equivalent of an Internet “kill switch” in place, as evidenced by the Egyptian authorities’ shutdown of Cairo’s Internet and cellular grid by coercing telecommunications providers and ISPs to disconnect during the peak of the January 2011 Arab Spring revolt. As urban dashboards like Rio’s Intelligent Operations Center evolve into remote controls as well, they’ll provide a new level of precision for targeted blackouts of infrastructure and services. Entire districts of the city, or even individual buildings or dwelling units, could be selectively disconnected from the grid. Even more insidious kinds of brownouts are possible too—the flow of water, power and communications to a neighborhood might be throttled back to deliver political punishment, but controlled by carefully calibrated algorithms to level off the embargo just before it provokes an organized response from the people living there.

Build Locally, Trade Globally

Where we build the technology we use in our smart cities may matter almost as much as what we build. There are few killer apps for smart cities today. But now is not the time to close off our thinking. In the coming decade each city must strive to be as good a civic laboratory as it can be, spin out its own situated software, and with luck evolve a few smart-city genes that can spread and thrive globally.

Doing this properly will mean sustaining a modest level of investment in smart-city public works over the next ten years. One possible model is the set-aside. Many cities already mandate that a small fraction (as little as one percent) of the construction budget for public buildings be spent on public art. What if we required a similar approach to smart technology? Jay Nath, San Francisco’s director of innovation, proposed just such an idea on his blog in early 2012. “A new playground could experiment with intelligent lighting that operates based on time and motion,” he imagined. Such a regulation would need to be carefully crafted to generate innovations with high civic value. But it would create a steady market for local smart-city tech start-ups that doesn’t exist today.

Every civic laboratory needs a physical and social support system for hackers and entrepreneurs to experiment within. Contests, contracts for specific apps, and networking events are critical. Open data and read/write government information systems like Open311 create opportunities for both conceptual and commercial experiments. Physical hack spaces like New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Zaragoza’s Center for Art and Technology, and Code for America’s accelerator literally create laboratories for inventors to work on future smart-city technologies. Big private-sector infrastructure projects, like Google’s Kansas City fiber grid, can mobilize resources across the board. Before Google’s geeks pulled a single strand of glass, dozens of self-organizing civic initiatives sprang to life to anticipate and maximize its impact.

Building local innovation capacity isn’t enough. Smart cities will need to tap into the rich international trade in urban technology. Groups like Code for America and Living Labs Global provide access to a fast-growing pool of resources, so that cities don’t have to invent from scratch a tool for every project. But more of these computational leadership networks will need to be created and sustained. They must continue to evolve beyond sharing case studies and anecdotes, to cross-fertilizing actual data, models, software, hardware designs, and business models. They must provide cities with incentives to share, and designers with advice on how to build systems that can solve local problems and be reused elsewhere.

The economic potential for cities is obvious: the best way to share is to incubate businesses that can export their innovations. But it’s not just other cities that will buy them. Civic labs are already having interesting spillovers into other sectors, because they are ideal settings to explore new ways of communicating and computing. Megaphone Labs, another spin-out from ITP, was originally created by Dan Albritton and Jury Hahn as a way to play games on the massive digital screens of Times Square using touch-tone phone codes. But after struggling to find a market for the technology, the company “pivoted”—in start-up speak. Recruiting media industry veteran Mark Yackanich as CEO, Megaphone employed the same technology to turn your phone into a remote control, and launched an assault on the cable industry’s stranglehold on interactive TV. This kind of experimentation in civic labs will have ripple effects on the media, culture, and industry that can create sizable economic returns.

The key will be to balance what you build, what you import as-is, and what you tailor from a borrowed template. The risk of too many bespoke inventions is a quirky local fork that reduces your ability to borrow from others. The risk of too much borrowing or standardizing around a single tool is generic design. As Phil Bernstein of AutoDesk, a maker of architectural software, has said, “I used to be able to drive around American cities and tell you what version of AutoCAD was used to design each building.”33

The greatest risk of this approach is that cities that lack the capacity to design their own smart solutions will fall behind. Today, only a handful of cities have the capacity to develop their own technologies locally; a somewhat larger group is able to import solutions and replicate what others have done. But just as we have struggled to expand broadband networks in smaller and poorer communities, directed effort to expand access and literacy in smart city technology will be needed.

Cross-Train Designers

Inspired by Patrick Geddes’s view of the region as an integrated human and natural system, New Urbanism pioneer Andres Duany developed the notion of the “urban transect” in the 1990s. A cross-sectional diagram, the transect describes the zones of ever-greater density that characterize the journey from a city center through suburbs and into the hinterlands. The transect was a tool to help designers think about the interfaces and the transitions between different parts of the built and natural world.34 The challenge for designers of smart cities will be navigating another transect, the one that connects the physical and the virtual world. To do so effectively, they’ll need to cross-train.

This cross-training will take two forms. First, they will need to heed Geddes’s admonition to see cities as both scientists and artists. As Red Burns, the cofounder of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, once described the curriculum’s goal: “we are training a new kind of professional—one who is comfortable with both analytical and creative modes of thinking.” Similarly, it won’t be enough to just put together teams with both planners and programmers. Smart-city designers will also need to be transdisciplinary—able to think across disciplines inside their own minds. As author Howard Rheingold describes it, transdisciplinarity “means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines—biologists who have an understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology.”36 Architects and engineers of smart cities will need to draw on both informatics and urbanism simultaneously. There are about a dozen people in the world today who can do this proficiently. One of them, Adam Greenfield, argues that future designers of smart cities, “will have to be at least as familiar with the work of Jane Jacobs ...as they are with that of Vint Cerf,” the computer scientist widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of the Internet. To be effective in getting their designs built, they will need to deeply understand smart systems and their risks and benefits, and be able to explain it all to nonexpert stakeholders.