Google Data Center, Douglas County, Georgia, February 2012. Connie Zhou/Google/Associated Press
November 24, 2013
In 2008, our global civilization reached three historic
thresholds.
The first came in February when United Nations demographers
predicted that within the year, the millennia-long project of settling the
planet would move into its final act. “The world population will reach a
landmark in 2008,” they declared; “for the first time in history the urban
population will equal the rural population of the world.” We would give up the
farm for good and become a mostly urban species.
For thousands of years, we’ve migrated to cities to connect.
Cities accelerate time by compressing space and let us do more with less of
both. They are where jobs, wealth and ideas are created. They exert a powerful
gravitational pull on the young and the ambitious, and we are drawn to them by
the millions, in search of opportunities to work, live and socialize with each
other. While in the end it took slightly longer than the original forecast, by
the spring of 2009, most likely in one of China’s booming coastal cities or the
swelling slums of Africa, a young migrant from the hinterlands stepped off a
train or a jitney and tipped the balance between town and country forever.
Cities flourished during the twentieth century, despite
humanity’s best efforts to destroy them by aerial bombardment and suburban
sprawl. In 1900, just 200 million people lived in cities, about one-eighth of
the world’s population at the time. Today, just over a century later, 3.5
billion call a city home. By 2050, United Nations projections indicate, the
urban population will expand to nearly 6.5 billion. By 2100, the global
population could top ten billion, and cities could be home to as many as eight billion
people.
This urban expansion is the biggest building boom humanity
will ever undertake. Today, India needs to build the equivalent of a new
Chicago every year to keep up with demand for urban housing. In 2001, China announced plans to build twenty new cities each year through 2020, to
accommodate an estimated twelve million migrants arriving annually from rural
areas. Already largely urbanized, Brazil will instead spend the twenty-first
century rebuilding its vast squatter cities, the favelas. In sub-Saharan
Africa, where 62 percent of city dwellers live in slums, the urban population
is projected to double in the next decade alone. Just in the developing world,
it is estimated that one million people are born in or migrate to cities every
single week.
The next step was to untether ourselves from the grid. In
2008, for the first time, the number of Internet users who beamed their
bandwidth down over the airwaves surpassed those who piped it in over a cable.
In the technical jargon of telecommunications industry statisticians, the
number of mobile cellular broadband subscribers surpassed the number of fixed
DSL, cable and fiber-optic lines. This shift is being driven by the rapid
spread of cheap mobile devices in the developing world, where the mobile web
has already won. In India the volume of data sent across wireless networks now
surpasses what’s conveyed by wire.
Smartphones in hand—over a billion worldwide by 2016,
according to Forrester, a market research firm—we are reorganizing our lives
and our communities around mass mobile communications. Talking on the go is
hardly a new idea—the first mobile phone call was placed in the United States
in 1946. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that personal mobility came to so
dominate and define our lives and demand a telecommunications infrastructure
that could keep up. By freeing us to gather where we wish, our mobiles are a
catalyst for density; the most robust cellular networks are those that blanket
stadiums in bandwidth so spectators can share every score by talking, texting
and photos sent to the social web. But these same networks can be a substrate
for sprawl, a metropolitan nervous system conveniently connecting our cars to
the cloud. They may be our most critical infrastructure and seem to be our
highest priority. Even as we struggle to find the public will to fund basic
maintenance for crumbling roads and bridges, we gladly line up to hand over
hard-earned cash to our wireless carriers. Flush with funds, the U.S. wireless
industry pumps some $20 billion a year into network construction. While the
capital stock invested in the century-old power grid is estimated at $1
trillion in North America alone, nearly $350 billion has been spent in the last
twenty-five years on the 285,000 towers that blanket American cities with
wireless bandwidth.
The transition away from wires is almost complete. Mobile
phones are the most successful consumer electronic devices of all time. Some
six billion are in service around the globe. Three-quarters are in the
developing world. In just a few years, it will be unusual for a human being to
live without one.
The final transformation of 2008 caught us by surprise. The
urban inflection point and the ascendance of wireless were two trends
demographers and market watchers had long seen approaching. But just as we
verged on linking all of humanity to the global mobile web, we became a
minority online. We’ll never know what tipped the balance—perhaps a new city
bus fired up its GPS tracker for the first time, or some grad students at MIT
plugged their coffee pot into Facebook. But at some point the Internet of People gave way to the Internet of Things.
Today, there are at least two additional things connected to
the Internet for every human being’s personal device. But by 2020 we will be
hopelessly outnumbered—some fifty billion networked objects will prowl the
reaches of cyberspace, with a few billion humans merely mingling among them. If
you think banal chatter dominates the Web today, get ready for the cacophony of
billions of sensors tweeting from our pockets, the walls, and city sidewalks,
reporting on minutiae of every kind: vehicle locations, room temperatures,
seismic tremors and more. By 2016, the torrent of readings generated by this
Internet of Things could exceed 6 petabytes a year on our mobile networks alone
(one petabyte equaling one billion gigabytes). It will drown out the entire
human web—the ten billion photos currently archived on Facebook total a mere
1.5 petabytes. Software in the service of businesses, governments and even
citizens will tap this pool of observations to understand the world, react and
predict. This “big data,” as it is increasingly known, will be an immanent
force that pervades and sustains our urban world.
This crowded and connected world isn’t our future—we are
already living in it. Comparing today’s China to his first glimpses of the Communist state in the 1980s, U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke captured the historic
nature of this shift. “Now…it is skyscrapers, among the tallest in the world,”
he told PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose on the air in early 2012. “It is
phenomenal growth…using smartphones everywhere you go. The transformation is
just astounding.”
But the transformation is just getting started. How we guide
the integration of these historic forces, the intersection between urbanization
and ubiquitous digital technology, will, to a great extent, determine the kind
of world our children’s children will inhabit when they reach the other end of
this century.
Symbiosis
The symbiotic relationship between cities and information
technology began in the ancient world. Nearly six thousand years ago, the first
markets, temples and palaces arose amid the irrigated fields of the Middle East
and served as physical hubs for social networks devoted to commerce, worship
and government. As wealth and culture flourished, writing was invented to keep
tabs on all of the transactions, rituals and rulings. It was the world’s first
information technology.
In more recent eras, each time human settlements have grown
larger, advances in information technology have kept pace to manage their
ever-expanding complexity. During the nineteenth century, industrialization
kicked this evolutionary process into high gear. New York, Chicago, London and
other great industrial cities boomed on a steady diet of steam power and
electricity. But this urban expansion wasn’t driven only by new machines that
amplified our physical might, but also by inventions that multiplied our
ability to process information and communicate quickly over great distances. As
Henry Estabrook, the Republican orator (and attorney for Western Union)
bombastically declared in a speech honoring Charles Minot, who pioneered the
use of the telegraph in railroad operations in 1851, “The railroad and the
telegraph are the Siamese twins of commerce, born at the same period of time,
developed side by side, united by necessity.”
The telegraph revolutionized the management of big
industrial enterprises. But it also transformed the administration of city
government. Police departments were among the earliest adopters, using the tool
to coordinate security over growing jurisdictions. Innovations flowed from
government to industry as well—the electro-mechanical tabulators invented to
tally the massive 1890 census were soon put to use by corporations to track the
vital signs of continent-spanning enterprises. By enabling business to flourish
and municipalities to govern more effectively, these technologies removed
critical obstacles to the growth of cities. By 1910, historian Herbert Casson
could declare matter-of-factly what was clear to all about yet another
technology. “No invention has been more timely than the telephone,” he wrote.
“It arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of
great cities and the unification of nations.”
For anyone who has telecommuted to work or watched a live
broadcast from the other side of the planet, it seems counterintuitive that the
growth of cities and the spread of information technology are so strongly
linked. Many have argued the opposite—that new technologies undermine the need
for cities and all of the productive yet expensive and sometimes unpleasant
proximity they provide. In 1964 science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke
articulated a vision of the future where, thanks to satellite communications,
“It will be possible…perhaps only fifty years from now, for a man to conduct
his business from Tahiti or Bali, just as well as he could from London.” More
recently, as the Internet began its meteoric rise in the mid-1990s, tech pundit
George Gilder wrote off cities as “leftover baggage from the industrial era.”
But instead of disintegrating, London grew bigger, richer, more vital and
connected than ever. Instead of undermining the city, new telecommunications
technologies played a crucial role in London’s success—it is the hub of a
global tangle of fiber-optic networks that plug its financiers and media
tycoons directly into the lives of billions of people all over the world.
We experience the symbiosis of place and cyberspace every
day. It’s almost impossible to imagine city life without our connected gadgets.
In my own pocket, I carry an iPhone. It is my megacity survival kit, a digital
Swiss Army knife that helps me search, navigate, communicate, and coordinate
with everyone and everything around me. I have apps for finding restaurants,
taxis and my friends. A networked calendar keeps me in sync with my colleagues
and my family. If I’m running late, there are three different ways to send a
message and buy some time. But I’m not alone. We’ve all become digital
telepaths, hooked on the rush we get as these devices untether us from the
tyranny of clocks, fixed schedules, and prearranged meeting points. The
addiction started, as all do, slowly at first. But now it governs the metabolism
of our urban lives. With our days and nights increasingly stretched across the
vastness of megacities, we’ve turned to these smart little gadgets to keep it
all synchronized. It’s no accident that the most common text message, sent
billions of times a year all over the world, is “where r u?”
The digital revolution didn’t kill cities. In fact, cities
everywhere are flourishing because new technologies make them even more
valuable and effective as face-to-face gathering places.
Struggle
Beginning in the 1930s, men like Robert Moses began
rebuilding cities around a new technology, the automobile. Moses was an
autocrat and technocrat, a master planner and “power broker” (the title of
Robert Caro’s epic biography). His disdain for the accumulated architectural
canvas he inherited was no secret. “You can draw any kind of picture you like
on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a
New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia,” he said of the new capital cities of that
era, “but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way
with a meat ax.” For three decades, in various public posts in New York and
elsewhere as a consultant, Moses brought to life the dazzling vision of a
middle-class, motorized America first unveiled by General Motors at the 1939
World’s Fair in New York City. To make way for the future, he bulldozed the
homes of over a quarter-million unfortunate New Yorkers.
Today, a new group of companies have taken GM’s spot in the
driver’s seat and are beginning to steer us toward a new utopia, delivered not
by road networks but by digital networks. Instead of paving expressways through
vibrant neighborhoods, these companies hope to engineer a soft transformation
of cities through computing and telecommunications. “Drivers now see traffic
jams before they happen,” boasts an IBM advertisement posted in airports all
over the world. “In Singapore, smarter traffic systems can predict congestion
with 90 percent accuracy.” With upgrades like these, unlike Moses, we may never
need to pave another mile of roadway.
For the giants of the technology industry, smart cities are
fixes for the dumb designs of the last century to prepare them for the
challenges of the next, a new industrial revolution to deal with the unintended
consequences of the first one. Congestion, global warming, declining health—all
can simply be computed away behind the scenes. Sensors, software, digital
networks, and remote controls will automate the things we now operate manually.
Where there is now waste, there will be efficiency. Where there is volatility
and risk, there will be predictions and early warnings. Where there is crime
and insecurity, there will be watchful eyes. Where you now stand in line, you
will instead access government services online. The information technology
revolution of the nineteenth century made it possible to govern industrial
cities as their populations swelled into the millions. This revolution hopes to
wrest control over cities of previously unthinkable size—ten, twenty, fifty, or
even one hundred million people.
With a potential market of more than $100 billion through
the end of this decade, many of the world’s largest companies are jockeying for
position around smart cities. There are the engineering conglomerates that grew
to greatness building the systems that control our world: IBM, which sprang
from the company that built the tabulators for the 1890 census; Siemens, which
got its start by wiring up German cities with telegraph cables; and General
Electric, which lit up America’s cities with artificial light. But there are
newcomers, too, like Cisco Systems, the master plumber of the Internet. For
each, success in selling us on smart cities will pave the way for decades of
growth. Peering out from the cover of Forbes in 2011, CEO Peter Löscher of
Siemens summed up the hopes of corporate leaders everywhere as he gushed at the
prospect of supplying infrastructure for the cities of the developing world,
“This is a huge, huge opportunity.”
By the 1970s, the construction of urban expressways in the
United States had ground to a halt, stopped by a grassroots rebellion that held
very different views of the role of cars, how city planning should be conducted
and even the very nature of the city itself. The first signs of a similar
backlash to corporate visions of smart cities are now coming to light, as a
radically different vision of how we might design and build them bubbles up
from the street. Unlike the mainframes of IBM’s heyday, computing is no longer
solely in the hands of big companies and governments. The raw material and the
means of producing the smart city—smartphones, social software, open-source
hardware, and cheap bandwidth—are widely democratized and inexpensive.
Combining and recombining them in endless variations is cheap, easy, and fun.
All over the world, a motley assortment of activists,
entrepreneurs and civic hackers are tinkering their ways toward a different
kind of utopia. They eschew efficiency, instead seeking to amplify and
accelerate the natural sociability of city life. Instead of stockpiling big
data, they build mechanisms to share it with others. Instead of optimizing
government operations behind the scenes, they create digital interfaces for
people to see, touch, and feel the city in completely new ways. Instead of
proprietary monopolies, they build collaborative networks. These bottom-up
efforts thrive on their small scale, but hold the potential to spread virally
on the Web. Everywhere that industry attempts to impose its vision of clean,
computed, centrally managed order, they propose messy, decentralized and
democratic alternatives.
It’s only a matter of time before they come to blows.
Experimentation
At the middle of this emerging battlefield sits City Hall.
Encamped on one flank are industry sales teams, proffering lump sums up front
in return for exclusive contracts to manage the infrastructure of cash-strapped
local governments. On the other flank, civic hackers demand access to public
data and infrastructure. But even as they face the worst fiscal situation in a
generation—in the United States, in Europe, even in China—cities are rapidly
emerging as the most innovative and agile layer of government. Citizens
routinely transcend the tyranny of geography by going online, but local
governments are still the most plugged in to their daily concerns. Yet citizen
expectations of innovation in public services continue to grow, while budgets
shrink. Something has to give.
For a new cadre of civic leaders, smart technology isn’t
just a way to do more with less. It’s a historic opportunity to rethink and
reinvent government on a more open, transparent, democratic, and responsive
model. They are deploying social media to create more responsive channels of
communication with citizens, publishing vast troves of government data on the
Web and sharing real-time feeds on the location of everything from subways to
snowplows. There’s also a huge economic opportunity. By unlocking public
databases and building broadband infrastructure, many cities hope to spawn
homegrown inventions that others will want to buy, and attract highly mobile
entrepreneurs and creative talent. Looking smart, perhaps even more than
actually being smart, is crucial to competing in today’s global economy.
Zoom out from the local to the global scale and, like a
satellite photo of the earth at night, a twinkling planet of civic laboratories
comes into view. According to Living Labs Global, a Barcelona-based think tank
that tracks the international trade in smart-city innovations, there are over
557,000 local governments worldwide. As they begin to experiment with smart
technology, each faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities with a
different pool of resources. Much as there are mobile apps for every purpose we
can imagine, smart cities are being crafted in every imaginable configuration.
Local is the perfect scale for smart-technology innovation for the same reasons
it’s been good for policy innovation—it’s much easier to engage citizens and
identify problems, and the impact of new solutions can be seen immediately.
Each of these civic laboratories is an opportunity to invent.
But each local invention is also an opportunity to share
with other communities. For the last few decades, as the pace of globalization
accelerated, multinational corporations were the primary means by which
technological innovation spread from place to place. Industry would love to
play the role of Johnny Appleseed again with smart-city technology. But cities
have become highly adept at sharing and copying new innovations on their own,
as evidenced in an accelerating diffusion of good ideas. Bus rapid transit, a
scheme for improving the capacity of bus lines with dedicated lanes and other
clever tweaks, has taken forty years to spread from its birthplace in Curitiba,
Brazil, in 1974 to over 120 cities all over the world. Public bike sharing,
which surged onto the global stage with the launch of Paris’ Vélib' system in
2007, has reached a similar footprint in just a few years. Today, there is a
bustling trade not just in case studies and best practices of smart-city
innovations but actual working technology: code, computer models, data and
hardware designs. These digital solutions can spread quite literally overnight.
The spectacular array of local innovations being cooked up
in the world’s civic laboratories will challenge our assumptions about both
technology and cities, and how they should shape each other. Technologists
often want to cut to the chase, find the killer app and corner the market—this
dynamic is already at work in corporate plans for cookie-cutter smart cities.
But if we want to get the design of smart cities right, we need to take into
account local quirks and involve citizens in their creation. Over time, we’ll
surely extract the essence of what’s reusable and share it widely. But building
smart cities is going to take time. It will by necessity be a long, messy,
incremental process.
Crash
Every city contains the DNA of its own destruction—some
existing fissure that, under pressure, can erupt into conflict or cascade into
collapse.
Smart technologies are already fueling conflict between
factions in divided cities. The extent of the role played by social media in
the 2011 urban uprisings of the Arab Spring has been hotly debated. But
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were a mere sideshow to the torrent of text
messages that turned angry crowds into smart mobs, as they have done numerous
times since 2001, when they summoned some 700,000 Filipinos to protests against
corrupt President Joseph Estrada. These wireless channels, which provide what
is for all intents and purposes a rudimentary form of telepathic communication,
were so important that at the height of the Egyptian uprising authorities
lobotomized Cairo by ordering a shutdown of the nation’s cellular networks.
While this act didn’t stop the revolution (and probably hastened the flow of
remaining bystanders out into the streets), blacking out cities’ wireless
networks is becoming a disturbingly appealing option for security officials in
the West as well—in August 2011 transit police jammed cellular signals during
antipolice protests in San Francisco. The same week officials in the United
Kingdom discussed blocking the BlackBerry Messenger mobile messaging service
and other social media being used to coordinate widespread urban rioting.
Smart cities may also amplify a more commonplace kind of
violence—that inflicted by poverty—by worsening gaps between haves and
have-nots. This may happen by design, when sensors and surveillance are used to
harden borders and wall off the poor from private gated communities. Or it may
simply be an unintended consequence of poorly thought-through interventions.
In 2001, the government of India’s Karnataka state set out
to reform the way it tracked land ownership, ostensibly to root out
village-level corruption. Bhoomi, as the new digital recording system was
called, was funded by the World Bank as a model for e-government reforms
throughout the developing world. But it had the opposite impact. The
village-level officials who had administered the old system had always taken
bribes, but in return, they interpreted documents for the illiterate and
provided advice on how to navigate complex legal procedures. Bhoomi certainly
curbed village level corruption—the number of persons reporting paying bribes
fell from 66 percent to 3 percent. But centralizing records merely centralized
corruption. Wealthy speculators with deep pockets simply targeted officials at
higher levels, allowing them to rapidly appropriate land in the expansion path
of the region’s fast-growing capital, Bangalore. As one development scholar has
noted, “While in theory, the initiative was intended to democratize access to
information, in practice the result was to empower the empowered.” As similar
digitization efforts transform government everywhere, the stakes for the poor
are enormous. In this new computational arms race, poor communities will be at
the mercy of those who can measure and control them from a distance.
Even if there is peace and equality, the smart city may come
crashing down under its own weight because it is already buggy, brittle and
bugged, and will only become more so. Smart cities are almost guaranteed to be
chock full of bugs, from smart toilets and faucets that won’t operate to public
screens sporting Microsoft’s ominous Blue Screen of Death. But even when their
code is clean, the innards of smart cities will be so complex that so-called
normal accidents will be inevitable. The only questions will be when smart
cities fail, and how much damage they cause when they crash. Layered atop the
fragile power grid, already prone to overload during crises and open to
sabotage, the communications networks that patch the smart city together are as
brittle an infrastructure as we’ve ever had.
Before it ever comes close to collapse, we might tear down
the walls of the smart city ourselves, for they will be the ultimate setup for
surveillance. Will smart cities become the digital analogue of the Panopticon,
Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 prison design, where the presence of an unseen watcher
kept order more effectively than the strongest bars? In the 1990s, the
Surveillance Camera Players staged sidewalk performances at camera locations in
New York City to protest the rapid spread of video monitoring in public spaces.
As we install countless new devices that record, recognize, influence and
control our movements and behaviors, this whimsical dissent will seem quaint in
retrospection. For as the true value of these technologies for governments and
corporations to spy on citizens and consumers alike becomes apparent, the seeds
of distrust will bloom. In 2012, concerned about the risks of face-recognition
technology, U.S. Senator Al Franken said, “You can change your password, and
you can get a new credit card, but you can’t change your fingerprint, you can’t
change your face—unless, I guess, you go through a great deal of trouble.” But
devious countermeasures are already spreading. In the place of protest, more
pragmatic responses are popping up, like Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle. A
face-painting scheme based on World War I antisubmarine camouflage, CV Dazzle
is designed to confuse face-recognition algorithms.
A New Civics
If the history of city building in the last century tells us
anything, it is that the unintended consequences of new technologies often
dwarf their intended design. Motorization promised to save city dwellers from
the piles of horse manure that clogged nineteenth-century streets and deliver
us from a shroud of factory smoke back to nature. Instead, it scarred the
countryside with sprawl and rendered us sedentary and obese. If we don’t think
critically now about the technology we put in place for the next century of
cities, we can only look forward to all the unpleasant surprises they hold in
store for us.
But that’s only if we continue doing business as usual. We
can stack the deck and improve the odds, but we need to completely rethink our
approach to the opportunities and challenges of building smart cities. We need
to question the confidence of tech-industry giants, and organize the local
innovation that’s blossoming at the grassroots into a truly global movement. We
need to push our civic leaders to think more about long-term survival and less
about short-term gain, more about cooperation than competition. Most
importantly, we need to take the wheel back from the engineers and let people
and communities decide where we should steer.
People often ask me, “What is a smart city?” It’s a hard
question to answer. ‘Smart’ is a problematic word that has come to mean a
million things. Soon, it may take its place alongside the handful of
international cognates—vaguely evocative terms like ‘sustainability’ and
‘globalization’—that no one bothers to translate because there’s no consensus
about what they actually mean. When people talk about smart cities, they often
cast a wide net that pulls in every new public-service innovation from bike
sharing to pop-up parks. The broad view is important, since cities must be
viewed holistically. Simply installing some new technology, no matter how
elegant or powerful, cannot solve a city’s problems in isolation. But there
really is something going on here—information technology is clearly going to be
a big part of the solution. It deserves treatment on its own. I take a more
focused view and define smart cities as places where information technology is
combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects and even our
bodies to address social, economic and environmental problems.
I think the more important and interesting question is,
“What do you want a smart city to be?” We need to focus on how we shape the
technology we employ in future cities. There are many different visions of what
the opportunity is. Ask an IBM engineer and he will tell you about the
potential for efficiency and optimization. Ask an app developer and she will
paint a vision of novel social interactions and experiences in public places.
Ask a mayor and it’s all about participation and democracy. In truth, smart
cities should strive for all of these things.
There are trade-offs between these competing goals for smart
cities. The urgent challenge is weaving together solutions that integrate these
aims and mitigate conflicts. Smart cities need to be efficient but also
preserve opportunities for spontaneity, serendipity and sociability. If we
program all of the randomness out, we’ll have turned them from rich, living
organisms into dull mechanical automatons. They need to be secure, but not at
the risk of becoming surveillance chambers. They need to be open and
participatory, but provide enough support structure for those who lack the
resources to self-organize. More than anything else, they need to be inclusive.
In her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the
acclaimed urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that, “Cities have the capability of
providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are
created by everybody.” Yet, over fifty years later, as we set out to create the
smart cities of the twenty-first century, we seem to have again forgotten this
hard-learned truth.
But there is hope that a new civic order will arise in smart
cities and pull every last one of us into the effort to make them better
places. Cities used to be full of strangers and chance encounters. Today we can
mine the social graph in an instant by simply taking a photo. Algorithms churn
in the cloud, telling the little things in our pocket where we should eat and
whom we should date. It’s a jarring transformation. But even as old norms fade
into the past, we’re learning new ways to thrive on mass connectedness. A
sharing economy has mushroomed overnight, as people swap everything from spare
bedrooms to cars, in a synergistic exploitation of new technology and more
earth-friendly consumption. Online social networks are leaking back into the
thriving urban habitats where they were born in countless promising ways.
These developments are our first baby steps in fashioning a
new civics for smart cities.
Where You Live
For the last fifteen years, I’ve watched the struggle over
how to build smart cities evolve from the trenches. I’ve studied and critiqued
these efforts, designed parts of them myself and cheered others along. I’ve
written forecasts for big companies as they sized up the market, worked with
start-ups and civic hackers toiling away at the grassroots, and advised
politicians and policy wonks trying to push reluctant governments into a new
era. I understand and share much of their agendas.
But I’ve also seen my share of gaps, shortfalls and
misguided assumptions in the visions and initiatives that have been carried
forth under the banner of smart cities. And so I’m going to play the roles of
myth buster, whistleblower and skeptic in one. New technologies inspire us to
dream up new ways of living. The promise of technological fixes to complex
social, economic and environmental problems is seductive. I get nervous when I
hear people talk about how technology is going to change the world. I have been
around technology enough to know its vast potential, but also its severe
limitations. When coarsely applied to complex problems, technology often fails.
What’s much more interesting is how we are going to change
our technology to create the kinds of places we want to live in. I believe
that’s going to happen at the roots, and I hope my vision of the tremendous
resilience and potential for innovation in every city will carry through the
darker moments. I think there is an important role for industry, but my
objective is to put an end to the domination of corporate visions in these
early conversations about the future of cities.
Above all, I’m an advocate for cities and the people that
live in them. Technology pundits can preach from behind a screen, but cities
can’t be understood only by looking inside City Hall or a boardroom. You have
to connect the schemes of the rich and powerful with the life of the street.
That means taking a broad historical and global view of the landscape. To
understand the choices we have ahead of us and the unintended consequences, and
articulate a set of principles that can better guide our plans and designs
moving forward, we need to reexamine how cities and information and
communications technologies have shaped each other in the past. The smart city
is a work in progress.
Still, the struggle will remain. The technology industry is
asking us to rebuild the world around its vision of efficient, safe, convenient
living. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us to pay
for it. But we’ve seen this movie before. As essayist Walter Lippmann wrote of
the 1939 World’s Fair, “General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince
the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private
enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its
highways by public enterprise.” Today the computer guys are singing the same
song.
I believe there is a better way to build smart cities than
to simply call in the engineers. We need to lift up the civic leaders who would
show us a different way. We need to empower ourselves to build future cities
organically, from the bottom up, and do it in time to save ourselves from
climate change. It can be done, one street corner at a time. If that seems an
insurmountable goal, don’t forget that at the end of the day the smartest city
in the world is the one you live in. If that’s not worth fighting for, I don’t
know what is.
Excerpted from Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and
the Quest for a New Utopia, by Anthony M. Townsend. Copyright © 2013 by Anthony
M. Townsend. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Anthony M. Townsend is research director of the Technology
Horizons Program at the Institute for the Future. He is also a senior research
fellow at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and
Management. He is the author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.