OMNY, 15-minute groceries, and facial recognition: How an urbanist views the current state of NYC’s tech.
Dr. Anthony Townsend says NYC is poised to become the next Silicon Valley, but remote work may be threatening its potential.
Science fiction has long imagined what cities of the future could look like. Flying cars whizz across the sky, moving sidewalks send pedestrians speeding towards their destination, and skyscrapers decorated with lush greenery stretch into the sky. However, the reality of urban technology is a little less glamorous.
It’s Dr. Anthony Townsend’s job to envision the true future of cities. An MIT grad with a doctorate in urban and regional planning, Dr. Townsend uses his expertise to advise policymakers from coast to coast on how they can use technology to better their cities and improve life for their constituents. Currently, Dr. Townsend is the Urbanist in Residence at the Jacobs Institute at NYC’s Cornell Tech, where he informs the next generation of tech-focused urbanists. His workplace is housed in Cornell’s Urban Tech Hub on Roosevelt Island, an urban planning feat in itself.
Long a leader in city planning, New York City continues to make small but important strides in urban tech, one of the most recent being a tap-to-pay public transit system. In the last couple of years, COVID-19 has both spurred and slowed the city’s tech advancements. On one hand, the pandemic has served as a trial run for innovations like rentable mopeds, 15-minute grocery deliveries, and, controversially, NYPD facial recognition tech. On the other hand, COVID has slowed NYC’s transformation into a second Silicon Valley, with tech workers fleeing their Manhattan offices for suburban remote work.
The man behind the work still has a vital passion for urban planning despite his lengthy career. As one of the leading figures in his field, Dr. Townsend has given countless numbers of interviews, yet is more than willing to give time to a student journalist. He sends me a link to his self-proclaimed “big data algorithm scheduler,” and in just a day, appears in his Cornell Zoom meeting room to inform just a little bit more of the world about his vision for the city of the future.
Why did you choose New York as your workplace?
New York has always been a leader in technology. Sometimes it’s hard to see because the city is so big and complicated. And there are so many old parts and so many parts that don’t work so well, but the city government has really been one of a handful of global leaders in implementing new technologies, and the tech industry itself now is established in New York City in a way that it competes almost as an equal with Silicon Valley. So we’re really on the map in terms of tech.
How has COVID affected the urban tech landscape in New York?
Because New York City’s got a lot of problems, it’s a great place to solve problems. We have the talent, infrastructure, and data. And we have investors that are willing to take risks. The problem that we’re finding is that we’re not sure that a lot of these urban tech companies are still operating in New York City.
So, with the dispersal of the workforce, from work from home remote work, people that have moved to the countryside, to Vermont, to the Hudson Valley to Long Island, wherever, that’s affecting every business in New York City. And it’s affecting every tech business. I don’t think that the business community and the city leadership have really gotten their heads around the fact that people might not come back.
For urban tech, it’s especially alarming. Because you know, at least the theory, you need to be in the city to do urban tech. And if these companies aren’t coming back, they’re not having events. They’re not forming industry associations. They’re not coming and giving lectures at universities and hiring students for internships and stuff, and it’s going to really slow down those gears. And I think it’s going to undermine the energy that’s been built up.
A massive part of urban tech in NYC seems to be led by companies like Uber, Con Edison, etc. What kind of role do you think private companies have or should have in urban tech?
Urban tech requires people to pay for it. One of the ways we talked about this at Cornell is like, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the difference is between smart cities and urban tech. When you talk about smart cities, it’s more selling to the government, or selling to big, publicly regulated utilities, and those companies, customers, and government agencies are super important. They use the technology they buy to provide services and operate infrastructure that benefits the city very broadly, and everybody that lives, works and does business here.
When you get over to urban tech, it is a different set of companies to serve to matter. So companies like Google and Apple and Amazon, that actually sell stuff, and Uber, that sell stuff to consumers, to people that live in cities. And they have a whole different way of doing business. And they’re producing a different set of innovations.
I think what’s going to happen over time is we’re going to see those two things come together. So it’s important for New York to have both sets of players here in the city so that we can really cover the whole space, and not have to look elsewhere to California or to Europe for the kinds of technologies that we need.
The NYPD has come under fire recently for using surveillance technology to police the city. What is your take on the controversy?
The NYPD has been an aggressive and often excessive user of technology doing its work. And this goes back a good 30 years. The CompStat program that Eric Adams praises often is one that has been widely documented as having created some really perverse incentives for precinct commanders for beat cops to do what they call “juke the stats.” So because they were held so accountable to the numbers coming out of the system, they would release people before booking the crimes, they would do things to make their numbers lower, because that was what they lived and died by.
And so it’s very jarring, you know, as an expert on this to hear Eric Adams, talk about how wonderful CompStat is and how he wants to take that approach and spread it citywide essentially, when there’s a real long history of the tremendous injustices and corruption and mismanagement that has come from those approaches.
I think those approaches can be fixed. That doesn’t mean we should not collect any data about policing or crime, and never try to use that. But we need to think about it with a modern set of filters that reflect the changing expectations about the role of law enforcement in delivering public safety, and ask what the trade offs are between focusing force and protecting people’s civil rights.
It’s super controversial. It’s the place where Eric Adams probably has the greatest risk of making a colossal, colossal mistake with technology in the next four years.
I’m going to shoot a few urban planning related ideas for New York City at you. Give me what you think about them in one sentence. Barriers between subway tracks and the platform.
Long overdue. In 2004, I was [in Seoul] on a Fulbright scholarship. And that’s when they were installing them in some of the stations and so on. It was just like, I remember seeing that and being like, oh my God, why don’t we have this in New York?
Jason Barr’s New Manahatta.
This is a reversal of 50 years of coastal management policy in the United States, and will never happen.
The Queens-Brooklyn interborough subway line.
This is a great idea that has been on the drawing board for at least 25 years, and long overdue. But also, easy and important.
