Digital Cities: An Introduction to a New Civic Layer
The following series of posts are excerpts from my graduate research at Cornell University; each has been adapted for the purposes of this format. To read the full report, in all its technical glory, please visit my website.
As an urban planner, it’s easy to sit back and pontificate the impact a city’s physical, cultural, and social structure can have on a local, regional, and global scale. According to the United Nations, every hour of every day +8,000 people are either born in, or migrate to, an urban center of the world (United Nations. 2015. World Urbanization Prospects). Imagine emptying a sold out Yankee Stadium into New York City every six hours, it’s a depiction not too far off for many cities (specifically in emerging markets).
While this expansion and proliferation of dynamic cultures interacting within the urban landscape is cause for celebration, we must remain vigilant of the immense strain these new populations will place on our existing urban infrastructure and governance capacity. Constrained by fiscal budgets, exhausting procurement processes, and an increasingly lean staff, city officials find themselves at an inflection point in providing services to a populace they are beginning to no longer recognize. To lessen the technical pain of scaling city governance to meet the increasingly customized needs of the citizenry the smart cities movement accelerated to bring the power of “big data” to the humanistic experiment we call urban civilization.
Forecasted to surpass $1.5 trillion in market-size by 2020, smart city initiatives represent a substantial economic opportunity — it’s no wonder seemingly every technological, industrial, and utility enterprise is clamoring for their portion of the pie (Dave Kennedy et al. 2015. Smart Cities, Big Data). However, in this shuffle of interests the very understanding of what makes a city smart has begun to blur: is it an intelligent energy grid powered by Siemens, city surveillance and measurement courtesy of IBM, or a technological utopia brought to you by Cisco? Of course this fails to encompass the larger question of who these top-down implementations are truly for — citizens, their civic officials, or a bastardized marketing ploy by companies flexing their own technological prowess?
By no means am I suggesting pessimism about the value these omnipresent technological systems provide; in fact, they will serve as the structural backbone in accelerating the quality of daily urban life in the future. Rather, I believe it necessary to question their priority relative to citizen needs, especially given their technocratic development and structural rigidity in solving modern wicked problems. Perhaps the very term “smart city” has outlived its purpose as the diversity of market actors has continued to grow — much in the same way being a “technology” company today is a generic moniker for incorporating data and dev ops into fundamental business operations.
As a layered nexus of social, technological, and physical dimensions, a city is a far richer marketplace for innovation than previously understood. As civil engineers retool the backend infrastructure of physical civic operations, there exists a diverse network of urbanist, computer scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders redefining what it means to be civically engaged. Their work represents a reciprocal-feedback arc connecting every aspect of the modern urban experience, with the potential to co-create the city of tomorrow alongside the citizens of today. If managed successfully, the digital manifestation of these collective efforts will transform our current city-as-a-service model to one of the city-as-a-platform, establishing a ubiquitous feedback loop between citizens, their environment, civic officials, and city services.
Citizen participation is fundamental to such digital initiatives, a fact civic leaders must recognize; therefore, the design, outreach, and deployment of such systems should adopt the Agile, citizen-centered, methods of technology development to rapidly evolve functionality along with their populations. Within the realm of the digital city, denizens of a truly smart city are constantly expanding, exploring, and communicating much the way a school of fish responds to the subtlest social cues from their surroundings in determining a collective path forward. The smart city of tomorrow is a platform whose tools will enable the built environment to be shaped in ways prescribed by the social interactions of its citizens, while at the same time remaining adaptive to future technologies and new forms of engagement.
End of Excerpt
Next Topic: Principles of Social Networking Theory
The ensuing entries to this series will explore the establishment of a civic layer for digital interaction within a city — a layer that integrates the bits and atoms of today’s interaction methodology and transitions the current weak model of citizen engagement into a powerful, seamless, real-time feedback loop of daily urban life. Analysis of the viability of such a layer requires we explore network theory (specifically relational decay and cascade modeling), hybrid placemaking, and a portfolio of case studies I’ve gathered from my travels speaking to city officials/operators/residents. Taken together we can begin to conceptualize the deployment of civic networks within urban environments; including, for whom, what kind, and how.
I welcome your feedback; keep in mind this is only a part of a series in which we’ll fully vet the concepts proposed here. Opinions are my own.
