Some Thoughts on the Question of a Smart City

from my hotel in Madrid

Without going into too much detail, I had a very interesting and rather enlightening time in Madrid this week, discussing what it might mean to create or engage a smart city, what we can do with the data generated and collected in that city, and how what we learn from it can affect how we live.

At the end of a two-day workshop, BBVA's Innovation Center hosted a public event featuring talks on "Beyond the Smart City"* by Adam Greenfield, Nicolas Nova, and Kevin Slavin. What they shared was a sense that autonomous technological infrastructure alone cannot and does not make a city smart and that such a definition of the "smart city" not only excludes people, but that it may in fact be dangerous for them. Where they differed, of course, is the slight variation on how such danger may be mitigated while taking advantage of what these organized technologies have to offer.

What got me thinking, however, did not come directly from the three, but from the final audience question of the evening. A gentleman stood and asked, "Who will win, Man or Machine?," and I realized what was missing from the evening's discussion. (To be fair, the point was implied a couple times and perhaps nodded toward another couple times...and, really, I realized what it was that I would write about here.)

The thing is that there are no purely autonomous machines, infrastructures, mechanisms, nor algorithms. The automated algorithms driving our financial systems discussed by Slavin, just as the highly efficient automated systems meant to run the city of the future, are indeed inhumane but are in every way human-driven. These things are designed and exist by design. Their purposes, products, and processes are not only man-made and human-determined but exist in service to mankind(ish). It is not a question of whether Man or Machine will ultimately prevail, but a question of whether those humans with access to the technology, the funders of those machines, the creators of those algorithms, will win over those who have no such access, no such resources, and no such funds.

The responses (excluding Adam's entirely warranted non-response) spoke of the need for cities to cooperate with the information they produce, but did not directly discuss the need for citizens to cooperate with each other (again, there was a nod but nothing so explicit as what I'm about to launch into). Adam ended his talk with one of my all-time favorite and oft-cited thoughts from Lefebvre's Production of Space: that "social space is a social product." Whatever it is that we make of our cities is something we will have to make together. Sadly, I fear, the concentration of wealth -- and thus the concentration of access to information, the concentration of the control of its use, the concentration of the resources to understand it, the concentration of the ability to deploy products and systems predicated on its interpretation, and the concentration of the technology to even engage or participate in those systems -- is making that collaborative effort more and more difficult.

In a nutshell, Great Cities are great because of the quality of life they offer, with manifestations of that quality ranging from the economic opportunities present for those who seek them to the availability of a delighful Saturday afternoon. By my personal definition, Great Cities are Just Cities -- not necessarily utopias of pure equality of all kinds, but places of equity at a minimum. Further, it matters not how smart a city claims itself to be if the benefits of that intelligence are not accessible to all of its citizens. A Great City can house and feed its population and addresses additional needs through multiple means, not just those available to the users of smart phones and Twitter.

Of course, I make my living off of the information produced by cities. I feed myself based on the dual facts that data proliferates in urban environments and that I have (borrowed lots and lots of money for) the privilege to work with that data. I also teach at a graduate school of social work, because I thoroughly believe that every dataset I crunch, every conclusion drawn from that information, and every map I draw is an opportunity for intervention, an act of advocacy, and an instigation toward change. I agree that in many ways our cities are already smart, but I know that they are not just. They are not smart enough to make their intelligence transparent, nor are they smart enough to fully share the opportunities presented by that intelligence.

In the terms of economics, information is a semi-public good: It is not consumable, but undeniably excludable. It if is the use of our information that will make our cities smart, then it is the control of that information that may or may not make our cities just.

[*Just for fun: If you follow that link, you'll see a slide of maps I had fun making a couple months ago.]

Some Thoughts from Spain about Home

leaving Madrid, from the sky

A few years ago, in the development of a project called This is Later with Aaron Davis, I became rather obsessively interested in the smaller towns of rural Spain. As a late-industrializing nation, certain policies of the first half of the twentieth century pulled young people out of these regoins toward the city as necessary labor in new factories. Disinvestment in agriculture created a condition without incentive for them to ever return. Today, these towns are quickly becoming ghost towns -- depopulated and decaying ruins of the twentieth century. They represent the flipside of an urbanizing world. They represent the forgotten despite having thrived for centuries before the last hundred years. Further, they represent a fate ready to befall so many regions worldwide, as populations migrate to cities and the replacement rate in rural areas is simply not being met.

Cleveland (left) & Soria (right) : image credits linked in text

My last few days in Spain spurred a conversation that at once reminded me of these ghost towns and reminded me of the soon-to-be-ghost-town suburbs resulting from the American foreclosure crisis. (The above photos represent "Foreclosuretown" (i.e. Cleveland, OH) and Soria, Spain.) Despite the history and ocean that separates them, they share both an apparent future and interconnected economic causes.

Given my research on The Buell Hypothesis and the upcoming Foreclosed show based on that research, I had been necessarily focused on the phenomenon of suburbs failing for having been built on speculation and supported by an unsustainable building industry boom and the financial structures that enabled it.  What I hadn't yet considered is the global extent of the same phenomenon. And now I have learned that while long-standing towns of Spain are quickly disappearing (in population only, of course), so too are brand new satellite suburbs ringing around Spain's major cities. The global financial crisis seems to have similar manifestations in the built environment despite the differences in structure and place.

I feel new comparative research emerging.

some thoughts on recently charted waters

So they tell me that the end of the year is a time for reflection. Reflecting on my four months of work thusfar at Urbanscale, I’m struck by the number of times I’ve rethought the sort of work I’ve been doing for years. Of course, it’s GIS and cartography, but not exactly what I would call That To Which I’ve Grown Accustomed.

work in progress (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Format
The most obvious (so we’ll get it out of the way quickly) difference between what I’ve done and what I’m doing is its ultimate format. These are not static cartographic images. These are not even the sort of dynamic, but limited, animated maps I’ve done on occasion before. While they are culled, curated, and designed, these are geographic information systems in their own right. Users are not just able to interact with the map; they must be able to query, analyze, and make use of the data (plural). The conceptual and methodological implications of this directive for my work flow, approach, and techniques really can’t be overstated. 

Because I’m designing more than my own investigation, because I’m designing for others’ investigations, there is no room for the messiness of artistic license or the idiosyncrasies of personal design processes. (By “artistic license” I am talking about the things we all do with our datasets, the analysis shortcuts that we’ve developed and that lead to solid results but may not constitute the sort of rigor that enables easy replicability.) For my component of Urbanscale’s projects, “interactivity” means that I’m designing more than a map interface, more than the ability to pan and zoom, more than the representation of information. It means that I am spending most of my energy designing Frankenstein datasets, stitched together from disparate sources, into something instrumental, something spatial that can functionally interact -- with users, with the city, and while enabling further interaction between the two. (Forgive me if I sound like an architect.)

meetingish (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Collaboration
Clearly, I can’t do this alone. While I collaborate on most, if not all, of my projects, there has always been a pretty clear-cut understanding of what portions of a project were my responsibility. Further, my results were always required to be “finished” before they went to someone else. These days, there is a daily (sometimes three or four times per day) need for handing off mid-process material. The back-and-forth between myself and JD (Urbanscale’s CTO and Developer Extraordinaire) has become a two-way street of datasets, databases, and geometries. Over the past several weeks, we’ve grown to identify where the fuzzy line between our skillsets might lie. Still that line remains fuzzy and for good reason: we enjoy an interesting overlap of capability wherein we can accomplish some of the same tasks through decidedly different avenues. The trick in our constant negotiation (toward a better product) is the process by which we are learning whose tools create cleaner, more elegant, methods. At the risk of sounding like even more of a data dork than usual, I have to admit that it’s insanely fun.

What I didn’t see coming with this collaboration is the need to flex more GIS-related muscle than I have in years. Because more is possible, more data changes hands than I could’ve predicted. More geometric analysis is needed on my part than in any set of previous work in order to enable his programming, as we realize that spatial questions he could crunch in code are more easily solved with GIS. In return, his ability to program more often creates that Aha! moment when we realize we can now give users access to even more useful data about their city. And so on.

queried -- work in progress. (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Storytelling
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? As we work toward giving users access to their city through its information, the format and collaboration become absolutely necessary because, for once, it isn’t my story (as geographer, analyst, or cartographer) to tell. It’s the city’s story. It’s the user’s Choose Your Own Adventure story to decide.

Most of my maps have been narrative and/or argumentative. At best, I hope they tell stories -- stories of research methods and conclusions, stories of city systems, stories of situations past and present. Some are expository. Some advocate. Some try to work toward intervention. Still, they are stories of my determination, decision, and design. Their data are analyzed by me toward a story I hope to tell. Their graphics are based on the communication of that story.

The most challenging and rewarding part of this learning curve has been adjusting my thinking away from a story I might want to tell. My want to editorialize through cartography must be shushed in favor of examining what cartography might do to democratize urban information, in favor of interpreting a dataset for any and all of its uses rather than my immediate use, in favor of showing the situation on the ground so that it might be inhabited, and in favor of creating a tool that enhances the experience of urban space rather than replacing it.

In this way, what I’m doing and learning at Urbanscale is not a step away from argument or advocacy through mapping. Far from it, in fact. My work, now more than ever, is advocating for a mutually beneficial and more transparent relationship between cities and their citizens. And I’m reconfirming, in light of current events and in light of my own learning, that considering the means toward mediating and enabling that relationship -- whether those means are tools or processes or spaces -- might just be what it is to consider living together, living in cities. In addition to the development of a citizenry and the development of a city, we must consider the development of their interaction. We’re responsible for all three elements, before we can rely on each other and say, “Here. Here is your city. Do with it what you will.”

A Little Late

Not exactly in what most would call a "timely manner," I've started going through the 2010 Census results. First up, some poster-sized standards for Manhattan. 

2010 Housing Variables : Dot Density by block

2010 Population and Housing Variables by block

Some Thoughts on Occupation & an Unsung Statistic

photo: DoctorTongs via Flickr (click image for source)

Upfront Disclaimer: This is not a short post.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I (like more or less everyone else) have had the Occupy Everywhere movement on my mind. I’m grateful for the courage many members of the ninety-nine percent have shown in their willingness to share what we so often don’t talk about in public. I am encouraged by the members of the one percent who understand that by and large their circumstances are the result of some work but also a great deal of luck. I am inspired that a movement can still emerge in this country without partisan politics and without hierarchical leadership. I am proud to witness concerned and concerted action when so many feel they lack agency and recourse as individuals. I am appalled when nonviolent assembly against real and significant economic injustice can be met with the organized deterrence of a (pseudo?-)police state. I am (somewhat selfishly) reinvigorated by the implications of a movement reliant and predicated on the availability and appropriation of space. I am hopeful the occupiers and those of us who stand with them will be heard.

While there is much that I could sit here and rant about w/r/t the Occupy movement, it seems like a perfect opportunity for two specific and related topics: (1) the continuation of my ongoing discussion of the degradation on a crucial freedom in this country and (2) the repetition of what many who have worked with me have heard about the utility of measures of distribution.

On the first: In the United States, we have nominal and cliche rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems ridiculous to explain how the last in that trifecta is today just a bait-and-switch April Fool’s prank played on most Americans. The so-called pursuit of happiness (and the American Dream it embodies) is a farce these days as structural barriers to entry can and do prevent its attainment from birth for many. As a means toward understanding that prank, we can focus on the concept of liberty. "Freedom" in its many incarnations is the ultimate American trope and rallying cry. Concepts of freedom and liberty allow for American individualism, American capitalism, and the American Bill of Rights. But today -- in a time when corporations are afforded the rights and freedoms of citizens, in a time when financialization structures are often impenetrable and opaque so as to prevent their oversight and use by average citizens, in a time when the freedom to lobby is more recognized than the rights of constituents for legitimately representative representation, in a time when the opportunities presented by the best education are only available to those who already have access to those opportunities as indicated by their ability to afford tuition -- today, one of the most impactful freedoms in the United States is financial freedom.

Even with a household income well over national or area medians, the costs incurred to reach that level are often insurmountable, and the promises made by banks that could not fail regarding markets that could collapse have left too many without the financial freedom to choose the life they want, to define their happiness, or even to stay afloat above their debt. Financial freedom is that which allows a meaningful life, beyond mere survival, in this country. And therein lies both the problem and the reason why the Occupy movement is absolutely a fully “American” (down to the core clichés implied by words like “American”) act. The Occupiers are acting to protect against the outright, systemic, and structural infringement on not only a fundamental functioning freedom but on their right toward the attainment of that freedom.

Figure 1: Gini Index in the United States, 1967-2005 (data source: US Census Bureau)

On the second: We see the effects of degraded financial freedoms in this country in each of the testimonials from the 99 percent. And that they are named "the 99 percent" is no accident. American wealth is concentrated. Full stop. Further, to pretend it is not and/or to pretend that it is the result of a functioning first-world economy and society are both beyond naive but rather willfully mistaken. To pretend that the United States is economically and equitably thriving and to pretend that we might maintain some position as a global exemplar of the social and economic equity that comes with our brand of capitalist democracy are beyond mistaken but rather willful denial.

The Gini Index is a measure of income inequality determined, briefly, by the difference between the actual distribution of income and a theoretically equal distribution of income within a given place at a given time.  In a nutshell, it works like this: If everyone has the same income, the coefficient (index score) is zero. If, instead, one person has all income and everyone else has none, then the coefficient is one. In essence, the larger the Gini Index score for a given place, the more income is concentrated or unevenly distributed.

When we talk about income in quantified terms, we tend to discuss things like Median Household Income, Per Capita Income, the Poverty Rate, the Percentage of Families Living in Poverty, the Percentage of Children Living in Poverty, Area Median Income (AMI) adjusted for family size, Eighty Percent of AMI, Sixty Percent of AMI, Adjusted Gross Income, and Wages Earned versus Salary Income. When characterizing the income level of a given population, the median averages and summary percentages only begin to tell the story. As is the case with all descriptive statistics, it's generally understood that those values alone are insufficient to describe a dataset. We need distribution information (e.g., minimum value, maximum value, and standard deviation) to contextualize that average. Toward that end, the Gini Index is one of many useful statistics calculated and reported by different agencies using different measures of income (maybemore on that at a later date). To be clear, a Gini score does not offer information about total wealth -- only how the income portion of that wealth is distributed throughout a population. An evenly poor country will have the same score as a comparably evenly wealthy country.

I'd like to posit that the Occupy movement can be summarized in both the actuality of Figure 1 (above) and its effects. The US Gini Index has been steadily rising over the last several decades (since the US Census Bureau began calculating it) and seems not to be stopping any time soon. It is in no way a coincidence that over those decades we've watched wealth concentrate and the middle class disappear. The sentiment that "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" can be, more or less, quantified in a Gini score.

Slightly more than 0.45 doesn't seem awful, right? Perhaps not, but for a little context and comparison, I offer this:

Figure 2: Gini Index of Various Countries during different years. (data source: US CIA World Fact Book)

This comparison includes all the countries for which the CIA offers Gini data between 0.40 and 0.50. That's it. The only other G8 country within this range is Russia. Where are the other G8s? Answering questions like that means things will start to get embarrassing: Americans must begin to realize that our national wealth and financial system along with the quality of life they imply are not globally up to par.

The G8 Nations and their Gini Scores, according to the CIA: 

• Canada: 0.321 (2005)
• France: 0.327 (2008)
• Germany: 0.270 (2006)
• Italy: 0.320 (2006)
• Japan: 0.376 (2008)
• Russia: 0.422 (2009)
• United Kingdom: 0.340 (2005)
• United States of America: 0.450 (2007)

According to the US Census Bureau, the US's Gini index score in 2010 was 0.469, which puts us squarely even with Equador. In fact, only three other G20 nations (Russia, Argentina, and China) have a Gini score within the range shown on Figure 2.

What am I getting at? While I admit the dangerously broad-brush language I'm about to use here, those among us who let blind national pride obscur our perception of the effects of our policies on our way of life may soon need to accept the notion that this Home of the Free is not the freest place on the planet. The American Dream is largely founded on the promise of financial freedom. Today, opportunity comes at a cost that most of us can't afford, and that problem can be inferred from the Gini Index. The condition wherein the already wealthy continue to accumulate wealth while the have-nots slip into having even less is not only characterized by this statistic, but exacerbated by the reality it describes. The thing is not that the have-nots lack access to opportunity; it is that access is offered with an interest rate, and Americans will purchase their opportunity on credit in the hopes of chasing that Dream unaware that they'll be shackled with debt they will not be able to repay.

We watch our population grow, our gross domestic product, our stock markets. For decades we've watched these numbers grow and felt confident in our prosperity in global comparison. Sadly, we've neglected several other indicators -- those that have been steadily aligning the US with much of the developing world. And in a year when citizens around the world have protested for their freedoms, it is no wonder that protest has come here.