Adventure City
Favoring Risk & Individual Sovereignty Over Efficiency
A common trope the tech community has embraced is that having more data absolutely implies we will have better machine learning models. On the web, highly refined datasets are used to put more segmented, optimized, personalized, targeted, and allegedly more accurate information in front of the right person, at the right time. However, as we have learned, while this may be a highly efficient strategy for optimizing corporate revenue, it does not necessarily improve people’s lives or support liberal democratic principles, and furthermore may propagate data biases in unexpected ways. This can create filter bubbles with unintended consequences.
As our data gathering capabilities increase, turning cities into robust data factories, there exists a danger that our collective quest for “efficiency from data” also comes at the expense of happiness.
At Inovia, we care deeply about ‘People First’ companies and businesses and thus try to step back and think about potential unintended consequences of increased data collection and its use. We think of a People First city as one that is both a smart and happy city; one that fosters unmatched opportunities for education, social interactions, income, physical wellness, and ultimately, personal fulfillment. Beyond making existing systems more efficient (which is often the primary focus of smart city initiatives), crafting a People First city forces us to rethink how the system itself is put together.
An example of an unintended consequence in this quest for efficiency is smart parking meters and smart parking spots. These new services make it much easier for a driver to find, reserve, and pay for a parking location. However, creating efficiency around parking may actually motivate more people to drive, resulting in further increases in traffic and congestion. Perhaps a better long-term decision would be to make parking harder and more expensive — which would encourage more people to walk, bike, scoot, or take public transit. There are similar discussions around the impact of self-driving cars. If the goal of a People First city is to improve quality for everyone, then solutions that actually reduce driving and traffic may be more meaningful and long-lasting than those that simply make existing modes more efficient.
Interestingly, there is a microcosm of a city that we can look to for considerations of urban planning and how tech founders can evaluate how their ideas may play out in the long term. This simple use case? Playgrounds. Though typically just for kids, they are in fact small ‘cities’. So how are they evolving?
Adventure Playgrounds
There are two ends of the spectrum for how playgrounds can be designed (see this Vox segment). On one end of the spectrum are “adventure playgrounds” which provide kids with open, flexible environments, within which they build their own adventures. These playgrounds are unstructured and filled with random materials such as nails, wood, hammers, tires, dirt, and so forth.
On the other end are fully “designed” playgrounds, where prefabricated, highly calibrated systems are plugged together in standard (and safe) configurations. Slides have been carefully designed, all metal components are covered with plastic coatings, and even the ground is soft and forgiving; some of these playgrounds may not even have sand, let alone dirt.
Intuitively, it’s clear that an adventure playground, with its infinite possibilities and dalliances with risk, is a lot more fun. It requires kids to innovate, communicate, negotiate, plan, and execute. Although it seems counterintuitive, adventure playgrounds may also be safer; kids learn to be responsible, protect others, and to take safety precautions.
For kids, adventure playgrounds represent “happy cities”, whereas designed playgrounds are “smart cities”. Both can benefit from data monitoring, design, and ongoing improvements, but one could easily argue that adventure playgrounds lead to better experiences and more fulfillment than the carefully manicured ones. In many ways, a designed playground is a good proxy for a ‘filter bubble’: it is a highly curated experience, imposed by third parties whose singular focus on one benefit may directly create more objectionable outcomes. Kids using a designed playground may be completely unaware that all of those decisions have been made on their behalf, and may not even be aware that there are alternatives.
The playground example is compelling — but sadly, we all grow up and the pattern continues. The same types of unintended consequences have manifested in other areas of cities; those populated by adults as well as kids. As thought leaders have opined for decades, people enjoy spaces that are messy and complex, which allow for serendipity, and outright people watching.
Happy Less Happy
And yet, as big box retailers move into downtown cores, chasing efficiency as they install long glass storefronts (or worse yet, long straight concrete walls for parking structures) — they are making cities less happy. Cities that embrace tightly scripted, austere urban design are not serving their citizens — they are not demonstrating awareness of all potential outcomes.
Messy and complex does not need to imply less efficient. In fact, this is where advanced software can be brought to bear, and where the potential for ‘designed messiness’ will be more manageable than it is today.
Will City Data drive City Bubbles?
Online, we now play in the digital equivalent of “designed” playgrounds. Data is used with near surgical precision — to put the most relevant (as determined by someone else) information in front of the right person, at just the right time. These carefully crafted spaces are limiting serendipity and impacting us in ways we don’t yet fully understand. As cities are digitized — every intersection, every vehicle, every person’s movement — there is a real danger that we focus on ‘safety and efficiency’ or ‘maximizing returns’ and actually end up making our environments less happy, less fulfilling, and less challenging. The standard vision of self-driving cars in perfect formation, driving through a perfect grid layout, with well demarcated bike lanes, may not be the right vision at all.
Viewed this way, there are actually many more opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors to look at for smart cities. What data is collected, how it is aggregated, and what algorithms it is run through — these are just some of the factors that will have a dramatic impact on the resulting physical spaces. Instead of thinking of this as ‘digitizing’ existing systems to make them more efficient, larger opportunities will come from thinking outside the box, and building systems that are different than the ones we live in now.
What the adventure playground gets right is that kids have more control over their environment; it gives them more personal sovereignty, which is a key to personal fulfillment. Fully designing a static urban environment takes away choice and innovation; allowing cities to be shaped by the people who live there is a much better strategy. This can be as simple as allowing for flexible use of sidewalks by shops (and, perhaps, wider sidewalks to facilitate that), to as complex as replacing as much top-down static infrastructure with bottoms-up dynamic alternatives. It may also mean redesigning how we interact with city governance in a mobile, software-centric world. As entrepreneurs and investors look at products for cities, we should at least try to think through the unintended consequences and make our proposals less fragile.
Crafting happy cities will be a challenge for civic leaders; they are complex entities with multiple stakeholders and complex governance structures. Cities have many entrenched interests and may often not be able to make long-term bets that, on the surface, appear counterintuitive. The more that civic leaders can push for open data platforms, the measurement of fulfillment as well as efficiency, and facilitate more rapid A/B testing of new systems with appropriate feedback loops, the better. Entrepreneurs who figure out how to align themselves with cities and their citizens, to remap our relationship to notions of risk and feelings of safety and community — and who do more than just make existing structures more efficient, will do exceptionally well. With any luck, we’ll all end up living in happier, adventure cities.
