Part two of a three-part series where Benjie and Gabe of www.cityfi.co talk about how smart city technologies can focus more on people.
Part 2: It’s the people, stupid.
What is the city but the people? — William Shakespeare
Benjie: If we’ve learned anything from Jane Jacob’s observation of the sidewalk ballet in her foundational book, Death and Life of Great American Cities or from Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings, it is that the most important thing about cities is people.
No, not in a client or customer sense of “we value you, people” but rather that the very building blocks and the dynamics that drive cities is — people.
What people do. How they connect. What they choose to do (or not do) together shapes the fabric of our cities. The local culture that humans create when they come together also defines the identity and the quirkiness that makes for memorable communities and cities.
A city’s capital assets, including buildings and infrastructure, are expressions and containers for the social capital and social networks that power the city.
Consequently, interventions in cities that don’t put people first — say, by prioritizing vehicle movement over pedestrians, or by not understanding how real people use public space — creates the kinds of mismatches that have made our cities so unlivable.
That is the challenge we have to pose to the concept of “smart cities.” How does all this technology actually help us to understand people? How does it help us understand how people are connecting with each other? How are they using the object that is the city to build the web of connections and relationships that is the city?
So far, most of the technology on the table — even the sensors that focus on pedestrians — are just better ways of measuring things. We measure how many times something is used. How fast something moves. We monitor the environmental conditions around a particular place or thing.
Don’t get me wrong. These kinds of metrics can help us make our systems more efficient and are likely the building blocks for something greater. They can help us mitigate traffic congestion or better distribute power loads. But, at best, they can only indirectly show how people are connecting by showing where they move and what they spend time on. They won’t help us measure how much social capital and how strong the social networks are IRL.
What gets measured gets changed. What gets measured matters. — Our cities in their current incarnations display these truisms so well.
The biggest data set for most cities is traffic data. We fastidiously measure the volume, movement and speed of motorized vehicles so we keep trying to solve traffic congestion by trying to make traffic flow smoother. In so doing, we’ve created urban environments that are hostile and dangerous to people who are not inside an enclosed, motorized vehicle.
If our cities are truly going to be smart, then we need the technology that helps us to understand people and the relationships and connections they make with each other. Not just the mechanical connections, but also the emotional and social connections. (And, in this day and age, where those connections and networks break and divide.)
There are, of course, going to be privacy concerns but those are the right problems to solve. We have to stop hiding them and assuming buy-in from the public with “accept” buttons at the end of 10 pages of legalese. Bringing them to the fore will also help us to avoid the kind of shenanigans that create connected TVs that watch the watchers.
Plus there is the question of what should we measure?
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — William Bruce Cameron
There is leading work we can build on.
Alex Pentland of MIT has used cell phone data, data from wearables and travel data to map “how ideas spread” in organizations. (Pentland’s book is “Social Physics.”)
Clio Andris at the Friendly Cities Lab in Penn State is piloting a Census of Connectivity that will answer question such as: “How many people in this census tract have friends or family who live in the next census tract?” or “How many people in this neighborhood read the same information sources as the next neighborhood?”
Keith Hampton at Michigan State has reprised William H. Whyte’s study of the social life of small urban spaces but looked at how technology was hindering or enabling social connectivity.
Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, physicists from the Santa Fe Institute, have pioneered the idea of “urban metabolism” and posited that cities are social reactors. Cities grow (and so, too, their economies) as they allow more people to connect with other people. These connections also drive innovation.
Understanding these connections also helps us understand the flipside: social isolation along with the rest of the urban discontents. And if we do, maybe we can stop just trying to build for efficiency — tuning the machine — but we start building for interactivity and well-being.
(Up next: Part 3. Measure the things we love.)
