Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

  • Anthony M. Townsend
W. W. Norton: 2013. 9780393082876 | ISBN: 978-0-3930-8287-6

Some 3.5 billion people — half of humanity — now live in cities. Cities magnify human endeavours: they account for much more than half of humanity's pollution, energy consumption, crime and disease spread, while also incubating the lion's share of innovations, technology, art and entertainment. A sustainable, equitable future on our crowded planet will require fundamental changes in how cities operate. In Smart Cities, Anthony Townsend examines how information technology is shaping the development of 'smart' cities.

The operations centre that IBM designed for Rio de Janeiro in Brazil helps to coordinate the city's activities. Credit: JÖRG MÜLLER/FOCUS/EYEVINE

What makes them smart? Accessible and efficient services, transportation and infrastructure are essential to the mix. Bike-share programmes, for example, exemplify smart urban problem-solving by reducing traffic and pollution, encouraging exercise and providing cheap transport. Information technology makes it possible to adapt bike placement to the variable flow of riders, who use smart phones to find them. And smart cities need not reinvent the wheel: bike-share programmes have spread rapidly since the first large-scale launch in Paris in 2007, with now hundreds of thousands of bikes in cities from Beijing to Stockholm. Each scheme has evolved to meet local needs, leading to the emergence of solar-powered bike stations, stationless bike exchanges and new car-sharing schemes. Pricing, funding and management also evolve in partnerships between non-profit organizations, governments and, increasingly, corporations. (It's no secret who funds New York's Citi Bike.)

Cities will need to be smarter than the sum of their parts.

But corporate involvement is a mixed blessing. Uproar greeted the recent revelation that the US National Security Agency has been monitoring communications across the globe, but Townsend cautions that city halls and their corporate partners may be intruding on your privacy at a more intimate scale. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, IBM's Intelligent Operations Center, which was originally designed for disaster management, has become a “mission control center for mayors” with “people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” in order to reduce urban crime and ensure that buses run on time. South Korea has teamed up with Cisco Systems and invested US$35 billion in Songdo, a model city for energy conservation through ubiquitous computing. Millions of sensors are embedded in roads and power grids to track and predict people's movements. Townsend argues that a relentless focus on efficiency has been “engineering serendipity out of the urban equation”, damping the creative spark that makes cities dynamic and adaptable.

Townsend contrasts top-down, corporate urban management with bottom-up action by civic hackers and engaged citizens who provide creative, but not always scalable, technologies to empower people. Among his compelling examples is Access Together, a crowdsourced online mapping tool that provides information on accessibility for disabled New Yorkers. Another example is from Nairobi, where in 2009 activists literally put the Kibera slum on the map by walking the streets with Global Positioning System receivers. The lives of a quarter of a million people suddenly became visible; before Google Maps had shown just a forest. Such crowdsourced cartography is a first step in demanding water, sanitation and other government services. This is real inclusivity, Townsend notes, whereas many smart solutions deemed successes are developed by, and largely for, the privileged. Bike shares are great for young commuters, but they don't do much for the elderly, disabled or struggling families with young children.

With such caveats, Townsend conveys a cautious optimism that information technology might make cities smarter. But the book only nibbles at the edges of fundamental shifts in how data-driven cities might operate in future. Top-down versus bottom-up approaches to urban development are discussed anecdotally, neglecting a deeper analysis of cities that exemplify an organic “organized complexity”, as social critic Jane Jacobs described decades ago.

Perhaps the history of failed top-down urban planning models has left Townsend sceptical of systematic and quantitative scientific analyses of cities. However, we need a scientific understanding of what makes cities adaptive, resilient and prosperous, as we create ever more, and ever larger, urban environments.

In The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013), urban planner Michael Batty proposes a new approach based on models grounded in volumes of data that reveal fine details of how individuals behave in urban environments. Equally important is a growing understanding of cities as dynamic systems driven by top-down and bottom-up processes. The macroscopic analysis of cities led by Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico reveals regularities in how cities are distributed and grow, and common patterns in how transportation, the pace of innovation and economic activity vary across cities of different sizes. This work, and my own, suggests that urban energy and information flow are governed by basic physical principles, even given cities' different histories, politics and cultures. To understand cities, we need not just the abundant data that sensored cities will produce, but also a new framework to understand how individual stories are woven into vibrant urban systems.

On a rapidly urbanizing planet, smart cities will dominate the human cultural landscape and affect how we live, consume resources and manage the environment. Cities will need to be smarter than the sum of their parts and founded on more than routers, protocols and social networking apps. Townsend begins a conversation, but we owe it to ourselves to develop a quantitative, integrated science of cities to guide our vision of how we will grow, govern, live and work in tomorrow's smart cities.