Wicked Habitat! Where are the urban scientists?
By 2030 about 900 million people or one-fifth of then global urban population is projected to be living in ‘slums’ according to estimates cited in the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations (UN).
Global community is assembling for the Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador on October 17 to formalize the framework that will guide nations and cities towards an equitable and sustainable urbanization. This accord lacks the glamour and media frenzy that other UN endeavors like the climate deal or the sustainable development goals recently got. But the Habitat III is touted to have mega implications on how the cities develop especially in the global south. And that is why it is not to be ignored.
Urban poverty and equitable access to city resources for all sit at the core of the Habitat III agenda. These are quintessential fit to C. West Churchman’s ‘wicked problems’ matrix (too complex to be resolved), something which is seen as pure policy domain though civic analytics and urban intelligence researchers have just started digging their nails in it.
Timon McPhearson and his colleagues at the New School (New York) argue in their article published in nature.com that “the urban research being disparate and marginalized has been ill-prepared to interact effectively with global policy.”
Logically (or illogically) the UN bureaucrats decided to leave out the scientific community from the Habitat III drafting board. This is unlike the climate science community which has been at the core of all the climate accords. And it is not just the scientist community but also the technologists that are at a lost on this urban policy frontier.
The question that stares the left out urban scientist community especially the digital innovators in the face is how to push their revolutions into the second generation where it starts answering the questions being raised at Quito.
Rohit T. Aggarwala, Chief Policy Officer at New York based urban innovation start-up Sidewalk Labs, reflects in his blog that “we now can hail a cab in many different ways and tourists can find a room more easily, but we don’t have tech-enabled solutions for delivering clean drinking water more cheaply or constructing buildings more reliably.”
Slums are growing as stated in the opening of this blog, can there be any digital solution that can improve the living quarters of almost a billion humans?
In my opinion slums can’t be wished away by government or private sector. They are an organic response to the collective failure of the society to integrate and provide for the new city aspirants. As wicked as this problem is, we know one thing that no one wants to live in hazardous conditions if given a choice.
Today poor communities are minimally served by construction professionals and are prone to bad financial planning and construction management often leading to poor use of their limited financial resources and technical mistakes during construction. Almost always reducing a potentially honest attempt to make a safe home to a slum shanty.
Supply and usage of urban lands is highly limited and regulated across the globe choking any solution that comes from within the system. Therefore, I’m asking can there be a disruptive Uberish solution to this?
Can technology help informal households get access to professional design and engineering services affordably? Can data science help ease planning restrictions to allow more diverse urban expression incrementally funded by the urban aspirants?
MicroHome Solution (mHS) City Lab, a New Delhi based social venture, in partnership with Facebook’s Internet.org among others is attempting to develop this digital tool that provides professional construction services to slum dwellers. Pilots are already being tested in slums of Delhi and Ahmedabad in India.
I’m not sure if the application being developed by mHS City Lab will become the next Uber but there certainly is a dire need of more such attempts. (Comment below if you know of more such initiatives)
Ceremonies at Quito will conclude on October 20 hopefully with a historic accord. Though it won’t contain any quantifiable inputs from the urban scientists and tech community but it surely will shout-out for their assistance. Now it is onto them to rise to the challenge to better map and model these wicked problems to inform planning, management and policy-making to help cities and people realize whatever the new urban vision is agreed upon at the Habitat III.
Note: All references are hyperlinked to the text being quoted.
