Here's a newsflash: (Dramatic pause.......) Using computers and the internet increases efficiency! Of basically everything! Even cities!
Blistering cynicism aside, let's face it, BigGov missed the boat big-time on this one. Shouldn't they have delivered on the "Smart City ®" a long time ago? I mean, it's 2011. People are building their own flying drones out of cell phones and Arduinos. People are consolidating all the world's information onto Wikipedia. People are using Twitter to stage national revolts.
And BigGov is busy connecting garbage cans.
Just like the M2M dinosaurs are on the brink of extinction in the commercial world, BigGov has become irrelevant in the public sector, eclipsed by someone with a supercomputer in their pocket, open source hardware and software at their fingertips, and a global community of like-minded geniuses at their beck and call: YOU.
YOU are the Smart City.
While BigGov is bickering over what datasets it might want to release for the use of developers and entrepreneurs, people like Leif Percifield are climbing down into the sewers and getting data that BigGov doesn't have. A massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami causes one of the worst nuclear disasters in history to occur on his home soil, so Shigeru Kobayashi leads an effort to crowdsource radiation data that BigGov wasn't providing publicly. Jeff Starin has jumbo jets flying over his house at low altitude all day long, so he starts publishing ambient noise data that BigGov doesn't even want to see, let alone make available themselves.
These are people who are building their own collective understanding of what's going on around them. They're establishing their own standards and questioning the standards of others. These people are special, certainly, but only because they've grasped at what is actually available to all of us (your kids in high school are learning these skills, building software, and conducting similar types of experiments). Some might write them off as hackers, DIY'ers, or some such, but they are in fact the same as you and me. So if there is any smartness to be found in the city, it's found in people like this, filled with inspiration, hustle, and a little bit of means.
As far as BigGov goes, the future that is defined by Pervasive Computing / Internet of Things / Smart City is not simply silicon all over the place connected to a pretty application you access. It's not a box you pay money to climb into to live within programmed bounds. What happens outside that box is what really matters, and what's going on out there thrives on sharing, openness, and collaboration.
So, if what you are being given doesn't have sharing, openness, and collaboration at its foundation, you'd better damn well raise hell. Those things are what will make cities smart and those are your rights.
One of our good friends here at Pachube is Adam Greenfield founder of Urbanscale, a design firm focused on "networked cities and citizens." He is a thought leader in this space and this conversation would be incomplete without his input.
Adam, we need better verbiage here. What do we call this "citizen of the Smart City" and how we make sure there are a whole lot more of them?
- @edborden
We call them "citizens," Ed. : . ) I'll get to the reason why in a moment, but first I want to emphasize that all your points are well-taken. We believe every technology inevitably has a politics inscribed in it, and the politics we bring to the design of the things we build has a great deal to do with the things you're talking about. The whole interest of these systems as far as we're concerned is to enhance both the ordinary citizen's agency — and equally importantly, their sense of their own agency — over the places they live.
But I don't want to suggest that government doesn't have a role to play here. It's taken a bit of getting used to for an old anarchist like me, but I'd suggest that there's an important role for government to play in terms of mandating compliance with common frameworks, open standards, structured-data formats and so on. How much easier would it be for the Pachube community, for example, if a municipality made it a requirement of commercial licensure that businesses publish all their data through an appropriately-defined API?
Furthermore, there are some things that can only be accomplished at scale — I think, particularly, of the kind of heavy infrastructural investments that underwrite robust, equal, society-wide access to connectivity. And for better or worse, governments are among the few actors capable of operating at the necessary scale to accomplish things like that; they're certainly the only ones that are, even in principle, fully democratically accountable. So I'd never want to write them off, especially since that access to connectivity is a precondition for the kind of inspired, inspiring bottom-up activism you're talking about.
Having said that, we exist in a historical moment in which, for a variety of economic and ideological reasons, the state is retreating from the provision of services that have traditionally been its responsibility — we see this worldwide. Whether you think of it as an opportunistic offloading of that responsibility, as reorienting the state to focus on its core competencies, or as simply facing up to an unpalatable but nonnegotiable financial reality, it's just a fact we now need to account for. So we need that particular genius you're talking about more than ever: that just-do-it spirit that binds together curiosity, the belief that we have the right to know and understand the circumstances that condition our life chances, the instinct to share one's findings and the determination to act on them.
If you'll forgive a momentary lapse into jargon, ultimately our project at Urbanscale is to alter the subjectivity of contemporary citizenship. We want to use networks and sensing and computation and visualization to help people understand the power they already have over the circumstances of their lives, and to enhance that power. That's at pretty significant variance from the model of "the smart city" inscribed in, say, Cisco's promotional material — which treats these technologies as tools for city managers, and ordinary people as, at best, individual data points — and has a lot more to do with what you're up to at Pachube.
We hear a lot of rhetoric, a lot of lip-service paid to the ostensible wisdom of crowds, and how that wisdom might generate the ideas that magically resolve the contemporary urban crisis. But truth be told, that notion strikes me as really offensive. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously an abdication of professional responsibility, an admission that one has run out of insight, and an insult to what people are actually capable of. Jake Barton of Local Projects makes the point that crowdsourcing — the solicitation of clever ideas from people, ideas that would then be acted upon by overarching civic institutions acting in their interest — is precisely the wrong idea. But giving people the tools to act on and actualize those clever ideas themselves? That's much closer to the mark. That strikes me as what you're interested in, what your community is actually doing, and what we aim to support in any way and on any level we can.
-@agpublic
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