THIS spring New York City is rolling out its much-ballyhooed
bike-sharing program, which relies on a sophisticated set of smartphone apps
and other digital tools to manage it.
The city isn’t alone: across the country, municipalities are buying ever more complicated technological “solutions” for urban life.
The city isn’t alone: across the country, municipalities are buying ever more complicated technological “solutions” for urban life.
But higher tech is not always essential tech. Cities could
instead be making savvier investments in cheaper technology that may work
better to stoke civic involvement than the more complicated, expensive products
being peddled by information-technology developers.
Of course, you’d never hear such an idea from the likes of
I.B.M., which has plastered airports with ads about how its consultants help
municipalities cut costs with its “Smarter Cities” analytics platform, or
Cisco, which has teamed with Toyota and other companies to sponsor annual
conferences about how to automate cars and gather information on urban activity
through streetlight-mounted sensors. For these companies, the more complicated
the technology, the more cities can save — aside, of course, from the
eye-popping price tags of the technology itself.
To be sure, big tech can zap some city weaknesses. According
to I.B.M., its predictive-analysis technology, which examines historical data
to estimate the next crime hot spots, has helped Memphis lower its violent
crime rate by 30 percent.
But many problems require a decidedly different approach.
Take the seven-acre site in Lower Manhattan called the Seward Park Urban
Renewal Area, where 1,000 mixed-income apartments are set to rise. A
working-class neighborhood that fell to bulldozers in 1969, it stayed bare as
co-ops nearby filled with affluent families, including my own.
In 2010, with the city ready to invite developers to bid for
the site, long-simmering tensions between nearby public-housing tenants and
wealthier dwellers like me turned suddenly — well, civil.
What changed? Was it some multimillion-dollar “open
democracy” platform from Cisco, or a Big Data program to suss out the
community’s real priorities? Nope. According to Dominic Pisciotta Berg, then
the chairman of the local community board, it was plain old e-mail, and the
dialogue it facilitated. “We simply set up an e-mail box dedicated to receiving
e-mail comments” on the renewal project, and organizers would then “pull them
together by comment type and then consolidate them for display during the
meetings,” he said. “So those who couldn’t be there had their voices considered
and those who were there could see them up on a screen and adopted, modified or
rejected.”
Through e-mail conversations, neighbors articulated
priorities — permanently affordable homes, a movie theater, protections for
small merchants — that even a supercomputer wouldn’t necessarily have
identified in the data.
The point is not that software is useless. But like anything
else in a city, it’s only as useful as its ability to facilitate the messy
clash of real human beings and their myriad interests and opinions. And often,
it’s the simpler software, the technology that merely puts people in contact
and steps out of the way, that works best.
Even San Francisco, one of the most technophilic towns in
America, understands the limits of “smart city” technology. It has a chief
information officer, Jay Nath, and sponsors “hackathons” to develop software
to, say, bring more fresh produce to the underserved Central Market area. But
Mr. Nath talks proudly of how San Franciscans helped retool taxi-dispatch
systems by meeting in person. “We decided to do an ‘unhackathon,’ ” he told me.
“And we had about 100 people from our community” at the meeting.
“Technology doesn’t walk into a room and take over
everything,” San Francisco’s mayor, Edwin M. Lee, said last year. “It has to be
combined with a spirit that people from all skill sets can solve problems that
government over the years has kind of done in silos.”
Indeed, some high-tech solutions being offered to cities run
roughshod over urban values. Cisco is marketing cafe-like spaces in residential
neighborhoods where creative workers can telecommute to their offices, using
powerful communications technologies unavailable to the average home. Take that
logic to its limit, and only low-wage workers whose employers can’t afford the
jazzed-up satellite sites will actually show up, physically, for work.
That’s because the answers that make cities run more smoothly
only inadvertently end up being the ones that make cities run more equitably.
Deep data can learn and display policy cues that used to flow from guesswork.
What it can do less reliably is reflect democratic action.
For that,
you need more people discussing issues with more equal information and
franchise. And that can most easily come from decidedly low-tech, but
widely accessible, technologies like Facebook pages and e-mail chains. After
all, cities don’t have to buy “smart” software to get smarter.
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