A Summary of Townsend’s Book, SMART CITIES.
In academia, there is this self-defeating, and sometimes pernicious, protection of “my work,” “my ideas,” and “my writing,” all of which I find to be nonsense. Such defenses are debilitating towards effecting real change in our world. So, in the spirit of bucking that trend of selfish self-aggrandizement, I wish to begin sharing the fruits of my research.
Whenever I do serious research, I write a 1–2 page review of whatever I just looked at closely, whether it be an article, a book, a video, an interview, a site, whatever. One of the more important books I’ve read thus far in my research on smart cities is Townsend’s recent monograph. It’s visionary; it’s cautionary; and it’s enthralling. Few people take the time to imagine where humanity could be in 50, 100, 150 years. But doing so is absolutely vital to the decisions we make now. Not to do so is to commit ourselves to the dangerous path of simply stumbling along, making due with whatever arises in the moment. Like Townsend, may we keep our eyes peeled on what’s ahead, so that we may make the right (albeit harder) decisions now.
Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Summary
An ambitious book that catalogues the infiltration of big data and technology into the fabric of our cities, noting its benefits, its faults, and its potentialities. The digitalization of our cities, and their transformation into “smart cities,” appears to be inevitable, with some “50 billion networked objects” connected to the Internet by 2020 (3). Townsend does not shy away from this inevitability, though. He sees it as a challenge to which we must decide how we will respond. Citing Patrick Geddes throughout the book, he calls for a few things to guide smart cities’ development around the globe: 1) good governance that serves the people and that avoids blind infatuation with the glistening toys of smart cities; 2) an open-source approach to smart cities that solicits the creative intelligence of the people who actually live there, instead of the wholesale standardization of smart cities through the global sales teams of a few corporations; and 3) a balancing of smart city tech with an interdisciplinary, “soft” urban planning intelligence that is more of an art than a science.
Why do we need this softer touch? Townsend likes to draw parallels to the standardization of urban areas in the early 20th century, especially in regards to the personal automobile. That standardization, and the vast infrastructure eventually built to accommodate the car, seemed logical, reasonable, and rationale at the time, but it is a huge problem that we now wrestle with. As he says, “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” (14). Also, there is a great moment when Townsend contrasts IBM’s rigid modeling software of Rio de Janeiro with the Projecto Morrinho, Favela boys’ LEGO and trash replica of the area, built upon an “enriching oral history” (91). IBM’s computers may “tell us what is happening, but the boys’ tell us why” (91). This is why Townsend references Geddes (see 283) and Jacobs so often — he legitimately fears that tech will literally program spontaneity and on-the-ground, individual-driven networks of exploration out of existence. With Foursquare, for instance, he wonders if it will just “guide us down a predetermined path based on what we might buy?” (152).
I especially enjoyed the early analysis of the smart grid, given its predominance here in Japan. Indeed, Townsend mentions the Fukushima disaster, and how it just about crippled Japanese society because of the loss of electricity. He reminds us that “electricity, even more than the digital data it conveys, will be the lifeblood of smart cities” (35). Representing $1 trillion of public/private investment, the USA power grid has never really been updated (35). While ¾ of American electric meters will be smart meters by 2016 (38), the grid itself still needs a major overhaul. What makes our current grid inefficient is the split between base load plants and peak plants; a smart grid, through load shifting and load shedding, might allow us to focus entirely on developing clean base-load plants (39). Together, loading shifting and shedding could reduce electricity needs by 10% (40).
Big data will transform urban planning and city halls. Quoting John Tolva (Chicago’s CTO), governing and policy making will now be based on what “vital signs” are telling us, and not anecdote (211). And then powerful operating systems of our handheld devices — our iPhones, for example — will revolutionize citizen-driven urban development and networking. Indeed, Townsend, as seen in his other interviews, is enamored by the power of the smartphone, a device that has 10X the computational power of the 1976 supercomputer built at Los Alamos (introduction). He argues that smartphones hail from the “situated software” movement, which privileges local needs as informed by a group of users (234). This speaks against the corporate likes of Cisco and IBM, who think that smart city initiatives are scalable to any other city.
We must be wise in our rollout of smart city designs. The stakes are very high. The choices we are making today will be with us for years and years to come. Indeed, at the end of this century, “with as much as 80 percent of the world’s population already living in urban areas, there will be few cities left to build” (284). Quoting economist Paul Romer, we are building the cities that humanity will live in forever (284). Part of being smart means giving the reigns of control to cities; just as it makes sense to have municipal-owned grids, so too does Townsend argue that cities should be allowed to build their own broadband infrastructure, something currently illegal in many US states (287). Ultimately, what’s the smartest city? The one you live in, Townsend says. Imagining some utopian smart design is what is partly preventing us from tackling the problems of our own, existing cities, which aren’t going anywhere (320).
Quotes
Townsend defines “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” (15).
“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” (15). Maybe Songdo? (28).
“Today, cities are the most pragmatic and effective level of government. In an era of gridlock at the national level, as Parag Khanna and David Skilling, who both serve as foreign policy advisors to the nation-sate of Singapore, have argued in their essay ‘Big Ideas from Small Places,’ ‘cities and provinces around the world are assuming a more important leadership role on global policy issues.’ Even as they grow larger, cities maintain a sense of shared destiny that mobilizes people to work together” (224).
“By living together in our cities, tweaking their basic design to meet our changing realities and forging social bonds with our neighbors, we make them uniquely ours. That’s why urban design is as much an art as it is science. It has to respond to countless local variables and idiosyncrasies” (231).
Inspired by Patrick Geddes quote about individual uniqueness collectively begetting city uniqueness, Townsend argues that “the same urge that drives communities to differentiate themselves through physical design, regulation, and social norms will shape the way smart technologies are used to retrofit them. It’s a mistake to assume that everything could or should be copied from city to city, however commercially attractive that may be. There are economies of scale, but there are also big benefits to doing it your own way” (235–36).
“Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to tailor a bespoke set of smart technologies for every city. Many are growing much too rapidly for that organic process to play out, while others slip speedily into decline. … If we are to realize the opportunity smart technologies present, global industry has to play a role” (248).
“We have but to borrow from our ancestors, and many problems can be adequately addressed simply by conventional design. Instead, however, we are creating technological bandages to fix flaws in the poor designs of mass-produced cities” (285).
Look Further
Townsend covers a lot of exciting apps developed by civic-leaders and –engagers. Some interesting ones? Dontflush.me, which asks people not to flush during storm surges (139). Another cool app is Foursquare, which “senses the meaningful bits of urban life around me” (144). Check out DIYcity.org, an online community where “civic hackers” contribute to SC development (155). Check out Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), which sought to bring the power of ICT to those who needed it most: the poor and disenfranchised (175). An important lesson learned from this movement, though, was that, in addition to supplying tech, people needed to be trained in tech. The tools themselves were not enough to solve socially systemic problems (190). Look into Zaragoza, Spain’s “citizen card,” which allows access to many city and private services (221). CityMart, an “Amazon for cities” (246). Check out Christopher Alexander’s book A Pattern Language, which describes over 200 architectural tropes around the world, tropes that can be used to better design our cities (285). Geddes and Andres Duany conceptually designed an urban planning “transect,” and Townsend notes that we need one for smart cities, too (302) (a possible intervention by me).
