Urbpocalypse now

A piece I wrote for last month’s Wired UK, a mag you should totally be reading if you aren’t already.

Near the beginning of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 District 9, the camera swoops low over the film’s eponymous setting: a refugee camp for a population of chitinous extraterrestrials, marooned on earth these last twenty-eight years. Denied participation in the human community surrounding them, the aliens eke out a kind of existence — what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” — in a fenced-off wasteland shoehorned into the sprawling slums of Johannesburg.

Blomkamp isn’t particularly subtle in his portrayal of this desolate zone and the possibilities of life there. The streets of District 9 are little more than dusty tracks lined with tumbledown shacks of corrugated aluminum, garlanded with the infinite tangles of pirate infrastructure; shreds of rotted-out plastic bags waft in the slightest breeze, the air itself laced with filth from the sooty fires that burn the day through.

A few derelict shipping containers and the rusted hulks of overturned cars make a market square, where the hapless aliens queue up to haggle with the juked-up (human) gangsters who control access to everything that matters. To the extent that there’s anything resembling governance at all, it’s that imposed from without, public order having been outsourced to the paramilitary arm of a multinational. Blomkamp’s point couldn’t possibly be clearer: District 9 is the Worst Place In The World.

Unless, that is, you think that title ought rather belong to Bexhill.

The Bexhill Refugee Camp, to give it its full name: in the 2027 of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the green & pleasant land itself totters on its last legs, while the poky seaside resort town has been cordoned off, pressed into service as nothing less than a concentration city. Inside its perimeter, a babel of ethnic factions huddle up against the damp misery of a Kentish winter, squabbling over the pitiful few scraps left in the wake of total ecosocial collapse. The physical landscape is a by-now-familiar scatter of corrugated shanties, oil-drum fires and improvised chicken coops of shattered breeze-block.

We’re told these scenes are transpiring in some time yet to come: in both cases, the corruption we see is the ostensible outcome of some unspecified but clearly long-drawn-out embaddening process, by way of which the world we know has been laid to wrack and ruin. But while it’s great fun to titillate ourselves with this kind of worst-case scenario while ensconced in a plush theater seat (or alternately, sprawled on the sofa, iPad propped up on our knees), there’s one thing we might want to bear in mind: for a great many people on Planet Earth, what’s up on the screen isn’t the future at all.

These — like other familiar science-fictional depictions of urban collapse and chaos, from Soylent Green and Blade Runner to Minority Report — are reasonably accurate portrayals of present, real-world conditions for a billion or more human beings living in the favelas, slums and informal settlements of the Global South, from El Monton to Klong Toey.

I point this out not by way of guilt-tripping anyone, but rather, in an attempt to backstop another set of extrapolations about the urban next, those peddled by technology think tanks, consultancies and corporate research labs. As someone who spends much of my time thinking about the future of cities, it strikes me as being somewhat useful to first reckon with the circumstances under which an awful lot of citydwellers actually lead their lives.

So how do people get by when their everyday reality looks like the darkest science fiction? Ingenuity and adaptability — that hard-to-define quality that Americans call “hustle.” Mutuality, though there’s more than enough exploitation at the so-called bottom of the pyramid to demolish any sentimental notion of inherent human solidarity. Above all, the ability to endure the worst ruptures and reversals uncomplainingly, an attribute which is very often the product of profound religious faith.

These human qualities strike me as key to understanding the cities of the future we’re actually going to get. Along with the Maslovian fundamentals and the sad certainties of discrimination and abuse, they’re the ultimate bounding context in which any emerging technology will take its effect.

If, as the cliché has it, the supposedly futurist visions of science fiction are really just funhouse reflections of the present, films like District 9 and Children of Men are an aperture through which an awareness we’ve otherwise managed to suppress leaks into our lives. The urban chaos and squalor they depict is both an inescapable reality for many and, if certain less felicitous scenarios come to pass, a way of life more of us will be getting used to. Maybe we ought to be paying particularly close attention.

• Further reading:
- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
- State of Exception
- Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
- Daniela Fabricius, “Resisting Representation: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.”
- Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
- Andreas Seibert, From Somewhere to Nowhere: China’s Internal Migrants

Neopanoptical

We’re all familiar with the Panopticon, right? The notional prison devised by the eighteenth-century English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham?

No? OK, let me gloss it for you, and people for whom this is a familiar story will forgive me and, I’m sure, point out my mistakes of fact, emphasis or interpretation.

Bentham imagined a prison built in the form of a gigantic ring, with cells by their hundreds disposed around its inner wall. In the very middle of the structure’s central void stood the prison’s sole watchtower, atop which he placed a guard shack with 360-degree visibility.

How to maintain control over the prisoners with but a single tower and a relatively small cadre of guards? For all its formal ingenuity, Bentham’s real innovation was this: the cells lining the periphery were to be brightly illuminated at all times, while the guard tower itself was never lit. The guards were therefore free to observe activity in any cell, at any moment…while the contrast between their brightly-lit cells and the watchtower’s mute windows meant prisoners could never be certain if the guards were observing them, someone else or no one at all. (In principle, the prison administration could go a step further and achieve the same docilizing results without even staffing the tower. How would the inmates even know? After all, they were, and would remain, literally in the dark.)

And there was one final visibility-related wrinkle. The prison would be sited on a hill just outside of town, always there as a vivid reminder that any trespass of the social order would come at a price.

Bentham called his device the Panopticon, and the twentieth-century philosopher of power Michel Foucault famously used it as a jumping-off point for his own dissection of the ways surveillance, visibility and discipline work in contemporary society. One of Foucault’s arguments was that over time, this internalization becomes an entirely unconscious process, that we carry disciplinarity into the ways we move, speak, act and hold our bodies.

We can see this at work on the most literal level in the way we react to the presence of surveillance cameras. An ordinary CCTV camera’s gaze is directional. It sees you, but you see it seeing you. And should you be interested in evading its gaze, you’re free to tailor your actions accordingly.

As Anna Minton notes, though, in last year’s invaluable Ground Control, the simplest possible material intervention — housing the selfsame camera under an opaque polycarbonate dome, costing at the very most a few tens of dollars — achieves precisely the same innovation as that Bentham placed at the heart of Panopticon. Once the mechanism itself is screened by the dome, anything you do in the 360-degree field around it is potentially in its field of vision. You’re no longer quite certain whether you’re actually under surveillance at any given moment — in fact, there needn’t even be a functioning camera under the dome at all — but are in the interests of prudence forced to assume that you are. You’re compelled to internalize the sense that you’re being watched.

Domes are cheaper than cameras, but of course signs are that much cheaper still; I often suspect that the big yellow notice warning me that I’m under CCTV surveillance is unaccompanied by any actual gear to speak of. What could possibly be a more effective deterrent than the watcher that can’t be seen at all?

What’s the harm in all of this neopanopticism? While there have been cases in which this latent apparatus of control has proved decisive in bringing criminals to justice, or at the very least provided us with a few moments of lulzy fun, longer-term statistical analysis paints a different picture. London’s Metropolitan Police admits that CCTV imagery was used in the resolution of less than four out of every hundred crimes. All that watchfulness may be having some effect on behavior, but it sure isn’t buying the public any particular increment of personal safety.

Minton points out that long-cherished civil liberties may not be the only thing being damaged by the presence of CCTV. She compares Britain with CCTV-free Denmark, and from her review of the available data concludes that pervasive surveillance is actually counterproductive. (The conjectured causative mechanism: because people feel that the implicit presence of supervisory authority makes someone else responsible for dealing with crime, they tune out the incidents they witness, or otherwise choose not to intervene.)

In practice, technologies like CCTV surveillance are always exceedingly difficult to weigh in the balance, the more so when technical developments like doming change the envelope of affordances and constraints in which they operate. The complications are redoubled when those of us who are concerned with public space can only wield dry abstractions like “civil liberties” against hot-button appeals and the human reality of victimization. In this light, it’s not unreasonable to argue that some loss of anonymity is acceptable if it meant the capture and punishment of muggers and rapists and hit-and-run drivers. (I wouldn’t happen to agree with you, personally, but it’s not an outright ridiculous belief to hold.)

But we should be very clear that that’s the trade-off we’re being offered. Furthermore, proponents of technologies like CCTV should also be conversant with — and forthright about — the potential for mission creep inherent in them. Systems already deployed are turned toward unforeseen uses; frameworks we already recognize (and therefore, we reckon, understand sufficiently well) are endowed with entirely new potential as easily as you’d blow new firmware into your phone or digital camera. And this happens every day: when we were in Wellington, for example, we were told that the surveillance cameras that voters approved to help manage traffic congestion had been repurposed for crime prevention, without a corresponding degree of public consultation.

Let the image stream coming off of them be provided with a facial-recognition algorithm, and you’ve got an entirely different kind of system on your hands, with entirely different potentials and vastly expanded implications. Yet the cameras, domed or otherwise, look no different from one day to the next. How are people supposed to inform themselves, or avail themselves of their existing prerogatives, under such circumstances?

And all of this is still confining our discussion to the visual realm! Yet the real relevance of this neopanoptical drift will only become obvious to most of us as more data is gathered passively in public space, through location-aware devices, embedded sensors and machine inference built on them. It’s these developments which will, as I’ve argued elsewhere, “permanently redefin[e] surveillance,” and it’s these that I’m more worried about than any simple plastic dome. If we don’t get a collective handle on what disciplinary observation means for our polities and places now, we’ll be in genuine trouble when that observation gets infinitely more distributed and harder to see.

Recap for the week ending 25th April 2010

Another fast-moving week on Speedbird, making it all too easy for any reader as overscheduled and distractable as I am to get lost in the churn. Here’s what you might have missed:

- We considered the notion of carfree cities as a step toward more pragmatic directions in future urban mobility;
- asked if any of the things Harvey Milk learned about building a community and helping it discover its voice in the San Francisco of the 1970s are relevant to us here in the network age;
- spent a little more time describing our ambitions for Do projects;
- were discomfited by the leakage of game-derived incentive mechanics into everyday life; and
- proposed a dashboard for cities and developed the idea further as a platform for robust read/write urbanism.

We’ll dig deeper into this lattermost set of ideas over the next week, asking what relevance (if any) they have for the cities of the developing world and all the people who live in them.

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness, enhanced: Toward a read/write urbanism

We’ve been talking a little bit about what we might gain if we begin to conceive of cities, for some limited purposes anyway, as software under active development. So far, we’ve largely positioned such tools as a backstop against the inevitable defaults, breakdowns and ruptures that municipal services are heir to: a way to ensure that when failures arise, they’ll get identified as quickly as possible, assessed as to severity, brought to the attention of the relevant agencies, and flagged for follow-up.

And as useful, and even inspiring, as this might be, to my mind it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s essentially the lamination together of some entirely conventional systems, provisions and practices — something that already exists in its component pieces, something, as Bruce points out here, that’s “not even impossible.”

But what if we did take a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.

Provided that, we can treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.

And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there’s no reason to leave this all up to automation. The interface would have to be thoughtfully and carefully designed to account for the inevitable bored teenagers, drunks, and randomly questing fingers of four-year-olds, but what I have in mind is something like, “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter.”

In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I’ve often described as making them “addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.” What does this mean?

- Addressability. In order to bring urban environments fully into the networked fold, we would first need to endow each of the discrete things we’ve defined as public objects with its own unique identifier, or address. It’s an ideal application for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, which I described in Everyware as opening up truly abyssal reaches of address space. Despite the necessity of reserving nigh-endless blocks of potentially valid addresses for housekeeping, IPv6 still offers us a ludicrous freedom in this regard; we could quite literally assign every cobblestone, traffic light and street sign on the planet a few million addresses.

It’s true that this is overkill if all you need is a unique identifier. If all you’re looking to do is specify the east-facing traffic signal at the northeast corner of 34th Street and Lexington Avenue, you can do that right now, with barcodes or RFID tags or what-have-you. You only need to resort to IPv6 addressability if your intention is to turn such objects into active network nodes. But as I’ve argued in other contexts, the cost of doing this is so low that any potential future ROI whatsoever justifies the effort.

- Queryability. Once you’ve got some method of reliably identifying things and distinguishing them from others, a sensitively-designed API allows us to pull information off of them in a meaningful, structured way, either making use of that information ourselves or passing it on to other systems and services.

We’ve so far confined our discussion to things in the public domain, but by defining open interoperability standards (and mandating the creation of a critical mass of compliant objects), the hope is that people will add resources they own and control to the network, too. This would offer incredibly finely-grained, near-realtime reads on the state of a city and the events unfolding there. Not merely, in other words, to report that this restaurant is open, but which seats at which tables are occupied, and for how long this has been the case; not merely where a private vehicle charging station is, but how long the current waits are.

Mark my words: given only the proper tools, and especially a well-designed software development kit, people will build the most incredible ecology of bespoke services on data like this. If you’re impressed by the sudden blossoming of iPhone apps, wait until you see what people come up with when they can query stadium parking lots and weather stations and bike racks and reservoir levels and wait times at the TKTS stand. You get the idea. (Some of these tools already exist: take a look at Pachube, for example.)

- And finally scriptability, by which I mean the ability to push instructions back to connected resources. This is obviously a delicate matter: depending on the object in question, it’s not always going to be appropriate or desirable to offer open scriptability. You probably want to give emergency-services vehicles the ability to override traffic signals, in other words, but not the spotty kid in the riced-out WRX. It’s also undeniable that connecting pieces of critical infrastructure to an open network increases the system’s overall vulnerability — what hackers call its “attack surface” — many, many times. If every exit is an entrance somewhere else, every aperture through which the network speaks itself is also a way in.

We should all be very clear, right up front, that this is a nontrivial risk. I’ll make it explicit: any such scheme as the one sketched out here presents the specter of warfare by cybersabotage, stealthy infrastructure attrition or subversion, and the depredations of random Saturday-night griefers. It’s also true that connected systems are vulnerable to cascading failures in ways non-coupled systems cannot ever be. Yes, yes and yes. It’s my argument that over anything but the very shortest term, the advantages to be derived from so doing will outweigh the drawbacks and occasional catastrophes — even fatal ones. But as my architect friends say, this is above all something that must be “verified in field,” validated empirically and held up to the most rigorous standards.

What do we get in return for embracing this nontrivial risk? We get a supple, adaptive interface to the urban fabric itself, something that allows us not just to nail down problems, but to identify and exploit opportunities. Armed with that, I can see no upward limit on how creative, vibrant, imaginative and productive twenty-first century urban life can be, even under the horrendous constraints I believe we’re going to face, and are perhaps already beginning to get a taste of.

Stolidly useful, “sustainable,” justifiable on the most gimlet-eyed considerations of ROI, environmental benefit and TCO? Sure. But I think we should be buckling ourselves in, because first and foremost, read/write urbanism is going to be a blast.

Of lucky cats, lameness and game-like logics

So of course Russell’s spot-on here, about the terrible things that await us as poorly-considered game-like logics are superimposed over everyday life. He never comes right out and says it, but I assume he’s reacting to Jesse Schell‘s recent epiphany about networked life, gaming tropes and the motivational mechanics they afford when brought together, and maybe the recent popularity of Foursquare, with its badges and mayorships.

Schell’s argument (or one of them, anyway) is that the everyday environment is now sufficiently instrumented and internetworked that the psychological triggers and incentives developed by game designers to motivate in-game behavior can be deployed in real life. A poster on MetaFilter puts it in a nutshell: “points for brushing your teeth, doing your homework, eating your cornflakes. Gain levels for riding the bus instead of driving. Net-integrated sensors in every device to keep track of your score and upload them to Facebook or wherever. Tax incentives if you get a good enough score on your kid’s report card or read the right books.”

And this is more than passing scary, because these motivators work. Just as food designers have figured out how to short-circuit our wetware with precisely calibrated doses of fat, salt and sugar, game developers trip the dopamine trigger with internally-consistent, but generally otherwise worthless, symbolic reward systems. That they’ve (knowingly or otherwise) learned how to play this primordial pathway like a piano is attested to by the untold gigahours gamers worldwide spend voluntarily looping out the most arbitrary actions, when most of them presumably have a choice of other pretty swell things they could be doing. Like, y’know, their partners.

What happens when incentive mechanics like this leak out of gamespace and into the world? In the long run it may be for the best that ad agencies remain so densely provisioned with the manifestly unclued, because this way of doing things would be nothing short of terrifying in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. The short term picture, though, is clearly less reassuring; as Russell puts it, “we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us.”

You think he’s jumping the gun, assuming the worst, maybe being a little hyperbolic? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A.

But fortunately, there are other games to be played, much cleverer and more interesting ones. Bruce Sterling offered a lovely vision of networked rewards in the real world in his 1998 short story “Maneki Neko.” The story has dated badly in some ways — in a precise inversion of what came to pass, it’s amusing to see the story’s Japanese wield sleek, protean “pokkekons” while their clunky American counterparts suffer with clunkier Silicon Valley PDAs — but in other ways it’s clear that Bruce had the notion sussed.

His depiction of a sweetly networked gift economy, in particular, makes the Schellian universe look tawdry. “Maneki Neko” would seem to argue that you don’t need “points” and meaningless achievements unlocked to motivate behavior, when enlightened self-interest and the joys of participating in reciprocal agalmics are sufficient.

I think we could all see it coming the moment Schell’s DICE2010 talk went up on the technology blogs. “See”? You could practically smell the agency nation bruising its collective index finger on the mouse key as it raced to scrub through the half-hour video in search of bullet-pointable content for the next morning’s PowerPoint. Russell’s probably being too generous by half: I think we’re in for a Laird Hamilton-sized wave of pointlessness, as too many not-bright-enough parties fall all over themselves trying to enact and deploy incompatible, mutually incoherent Schell-style solutions.

In some ways, it really is too bad. Given that vice is generally its own reward, that they need to be incentivized at all suggests to me that there’s nothing inherently wrong with most of the behaviors such structures are designed to motivate. For that matter, I tend to be favorably inclined toward any incentive system that begins, however tentatively, to jimmy our lives from the grip of the money economy. I just wish fewer people had described Schell’s video enthusiastically, as “the most mindblowing thing I’ve seen all year,” and more as “something potentially troubling, that we need to think carefully about.”

Because the dopaminergic system can be an inhumanly powerful force, beside which all our notions of “will” are laughable, and where it can take a person is not at all pretty. I just don’t like thinking of it as a tool available to someone bent on designing my life for me. And with all due respect, especially not to a community dedicated to the proposition that “reality is broken [and] game designers can fix it.“

That’s a heavy place to wind up, and here I’d intended this post to be both briefer and lighter. But maybe some of these notions could do with a bit of taking seriously.

Learning by Doing, redux

I know I posted a brief piece about it when we first launched, but I’ve been meaning to get back to a fuller account of my work with Nurri on Do projects — what it is, what we want to achieve with it, where we want to take it, and what’s in it for you.

We first conceived of Do as a publishing platform, an attempt to reckon with what passionate-amateur production of visual and textual materials looks like in an age when such amateurs have access to professional-grade tools and distribution networks. Our desire to get our hands dirty grows out two parallel sets of frustrations: Nurri’s with the art world, and my own with publishing.

Hers is rooted in a fundamental problem with the notion of art object (and aesthetic experience) as commodity, and her longstanding desire to do something about the practical and social barriers that keep art an elite activity. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to put words in her mouth.

Mine has to do with my utter (and perhaps somewhat naïve) shock at how little my former publishers New Riders cared about my book as an object, from typography and graphic design to paper stock, and how little effort they were prepared to dedicate to marketing the book once published.

I’ve told this story before, of course. But even that piece doesn’t express fully how galling it was for me to give up control of the thing I’d created to an organization less competent, in the final analysis, than I was my untrained self. That Nurri and I, in our own clumsy and untutored way, could come up with something more appealing than the design I was essentially paying my publisher to execute on my behalf was a real wake-up call.

And that got us thinking about the space between. We’d seen what commercial publication all too often resulted in. At the other end of the spectrum, we knew people like Meejin Yoon and Craig Mod: genuinely talented, possessed of the right kind of eye, confident with materials and capable of producing gorgeous printed objects. We were acutely aware that we lacked these qualities, but we also had a certain faith that even our own limited talents could result in worthwhile results — and never once doubted that the content we were thinking of deserved aesthetically pleasant physical instantiation. Was there room for maneuver in between these two poles?

Do is how we intend to find out. As we explained it when we launched in December, some of our ambitions are to:

- develop words and images that make the people who encounter them re-see themselves and the world around them;
- find the most appropriate containers for our ideas;
- craft the kind of books that please their readers in the details of their conception, design and construction as much as in the things they say;
- and figure out what “do-it-yourself” might mean in an age when new production technologies, informational and logistical networks give the independent amateur producer unprecedented power to reach out and make things happen.

With Tokyo Blues, our very first release, we feel like we’ve already travelled some way toward answering those questions; true to our beliefs (and as will be the case with every Do project), in addition to offering the physical book for sale, we’ve made a full PDF version available for free download. As I’ve said before, you buy the book if you want the object; the ideas are free.

And that book itself? It’s as good as we currently know how to make it, the best quality we could practically achieve while still offering it at a reasonable, accessible price. The unexpected gift is that we’ve been able to use the momentum built up in seeing Tokyo Blues through from concept to shipped product to drive other efforts. As I’ve frequently had cause to say these last few months, there’s a reason they call it “fulfillment.”

We’re also beginning to feel our way toward using Do as a platform for other things, a vehicle for collective efforts beyond publishing. Some of these things will be events, like the Systems/Layers “walkshops” we kicked off in Wellington, and had such a blast doing; others may involve the creation of objects or spaces.

Whatever we wind up creating, though, will be inherently networked, in a deep sense of that word. Organizationally and practically, we’ve tried to imagine Do as a weave tight enough to enable effective execution, yet open enough to capture unexpected influences and energies beyond those we generate ourselves. There’s a block of copy we’ve been using in the datasheet we include with every release that speaks to this: “For the realization of this project, Do consisted of…”. Another way of saying this is that beyond the core of Nurri and I, the organization itself grows and shrinks with every new project, trying to find the size and shape most appropriate to the challenge presented by each particular undertaking.

And that means that as we imagine it, anyone reading this is a potential Do member/co-conspirator. We have a roster of things already planned for the balance of 2010 — a project called Emergency Maps, my own long-delayed book — but beyond that we want to hear from our friends as to what kinds of things they’d like to see us doing, including your own project proposals. At the heart of our conception of Do is the idea that the “company” exists to facilitate extension, inspiration and execution, and gets more capable as it makes new connections. Think of it as something to plug into, and let’s see what we can do together.

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness

In the past, I’ve often enough described cities as being “all about difficulty“:

They’re about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. They’re about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and noisy neighbors. They’re about the unavoidable physical and psychic proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool of resources….about the fear of crime, and its actuality.

If this is so, and I continue to believe that it is, are we compelled to accept it? Or is there anything that can be done about it? And especially, might the constellation of tools we’re just starting to wrap our collective heads around offer us any recourse in our struggle against this tangled welter of hassles and frustrations we call life in the big city?

Well. Some measure of friction is unavoidable in urban life — both endemic to any physical system anywhere near as complex as this and, truth be told, not such a bad thing. But there’s no reason why we can’t use our new capabilities to get on top of the roil, see what’s going on, and maybe even keep the less felicitous contingencies from solidifying.

Prior art

Two services that I’m familiar with address this set of concerns, each representing a slightly different way of framing the problem: New York City’s 311 gateway to non-emergency services and, in the UK, mySociety‘s awesome FixMyStreet. There are others — many, many others — as well as roughly congruent resources facing other domains, but as far as municipal services are concerned these two are the best-known, arguably the most successful, and the most faithfully representative of their respective approaches.

As an official utility of the City of New York, 311′s stated mission is to:

- Provide the public with quick, easy access to all New York City government services and information while maintaining the highest possible level of customer service;
- Help agencies improve service delivery by allowing them to focus on their core missions and manage their workload efficiently;
- Provide insight into ways to improve City government through accurate, consistent measurement and analysis of service delivery Citywide.

…while FixMyStreet’s proposition is a little simpler: it allows its users to “report, view or discuss local problems.”

Despite the clear differences in aim and ambit, I think of both as frameworks for citizen responsiveness. Their essence is that some issue arises — a pothole, a fallen branch, an open fire hydrant or a wandering elder — is identified by a member of the public, and is then raised to the attention of whatever municipal authority is empowered to respond to it. (We’ll get to the weakness of this last link in the chain in a bit.)

While it does provide an online point of entry, 311 is in my experience predominantly something you engage over the phone. It’s an easy number to remember, the city’s representatives have repeated the mantra “911 for emergencies, 311 for everything else” until it ought to be second nature and, nicety of niceties in this IVR age, your calls are answered by a human being. Every time I’ve ever had cause to engage it, my calls have been answered in seconds, not minutes.

In fact, this is the nicest aspect of 311. There’s a certain deep satisfaction in venting your frustrations to someone listening with (at the very least a convincing simulacrum of) empathy, and I’d imagine this has practical consequences, too — that a decent swath of incoming complaints are prevented from escalating via the simple expedient of hearing the caller out.

When navigating a beast like municipal government, though, even the best and most sensitive operator is unlikely to have all the answers at his or her fingertips. So 311 operators are coupled to a reasonably good search database, and from what I’ve seen they’re usually able to point you at the proper resource or department in short order, whether your problem is a registering a noise complaint, a shattered bus shelter, or tracking down the taxi driver who drove off with your briefcase.

But that’s where 311′s utility largely ends. Once this connection is made, the caller is deposited right back into the universal thicket of big-city bureaucracy. Worse, the categories into which the catching department will sort your issue are likely to be brittle, and there tends to be little provision for following up on the status of an issue — or for that matter, identifying the single team or individual responsible for resolving the complaint.

Similar things are true of FixMyStreet, which collects issues on its users’ behalf and then forwards them to the relevant department of government. Despite offering users a range of tools that 311 lacks, and which ought by now to be table stakes in the domain, like the ability to pinpoint issues on a map, or document them with pictures, you get nothing in the way of confirmation or response other than a terse notification that the complaint was “Sent to Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council 1 minute” after its entry.

Seeing the city as software

So how would you close the loop? How would you arrange things so that the originator, other members of the public, the city bureaucracy itself and other interested parties are all notified that the issue has been identified and is being dealt with? How might we identify the specific individuals or teams tasked with responding to the issue, allow people to track the status of issues they’re reported, and ensure that observed best practices and lessons learned are gathered in a resolution database?

In a talk I heard him give a few months back, technology entrepreneur Jyri Engeström suggested stealing a page from the practice of software development as a way of addressing shared problem spaces more generally. He pointed out that, during his time at Google, employees turned the tools developed to track open issues in software under development toward other domains of common experience, like the shuttle buses the company provides to haul them back and forth between San Francisco and Mountain View.

When hassles arose with the bus service, employees treated them just like they would known issues in some application they were working on: they entered their complaints into an existing bug tracker, which provided each case with a unique identifier, a space to characterize it more fully…and perhaps most importantly, the name of a party responsible for closing out the ticket.

The general insight Jyri derived from his experience got me to thinking. An issue-tracking board for cities? Something visual and Web-friendly, that’s simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing? Heck, that begins to sound like a pretty neat way to address the problems with systems like 311 and FixMyStreet.

You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:

(a) Scale. How many people are affected by the issue? Does this concern just me, me and my immediate neighbors, our whole block, the neighborhood, or the entire city?
(b) Severity. How serious is the issue? In descending order, will it result in imminent loss of life, injury or the destruction of property? Is this, rather, an aesthetic hazard, or even simply a suggestion for improvement?
(c) Urgency. How long has the tag been open?

Because a great many urban issues are going to crop up repeatedly, routinely, perennially, perhaps you offer the kinds of tools content-management software for discussion sites has had to evolve over the years: ways to moderate tickets up or down, or mark their resolution as particularly impactful.

You assign tickets to specified agents.

Then, of course, you apply the usual variety of visualizations to the live data, allowing patterns to jump right out. Which city department has the best record for closing out tickets most quickly, and with the highest approval rating? What kind of issues generally take longest to address to everyone’s satisfaction?

So. To reiterate. As I see it, a contemporary framework for citizen responsiveness suited for big cities would offer most if not all of the following features:

- Two aspects of 311, an easy-to-memorize universal point of entry and a catching mechanism of empowered human operators lying just behind it;
- A useful spread of other points of access, including desktop and mobile applications;
- The kind of location-specific overview provided by services like Everyblock, with maps as one obvious and logical way in;
- An appropriate prioritization algorithm;
- Moderation tools;
- The accountability, transparency and ticking clock-to-resolution offered by an open-ticket system;
- A persistent archive of resolved issues;
- Top-notch graphic design, capable of holding its own with best contemporary Web practice; and
- A layer of data analytics and visualization.

Beyond trouble tickets

As is well-known, I tend to be skeptical when the replacement of human systems, however clumsy, with novel and untested technical frameworks is contemplated. I’m also acutely aware that the purpose of a system is what it does, and there may well be occult reasons why urban systems that appear intractably broken are allowed to remain that way, i.e. they’re actually functioning just fine in support of some agenda.

No issue-tracking system, even the best-designed and most cleverly devised, is going to quash the frustrations of city life completely. I believe, though, that the system I sketch out here would give cities a supple and relatively low-cost way to close the loop between Jacobian “eyes on the street,” and the agencies that serve and are fully empowered to respond to them. What I’ve described here is, if nothing else, a way to harness the experience and rich local expertise of ordinary citizens.

I’ve always taught my students that if you scratch a New Yorker, you’ll find a committed urbanist — someone with intense and deeply-held opinions about the kind of trees that ought to be planted along the sidewalks, or the right way to organize bike parking, or ways to reconcile the conflicting needs of dogwalkers and parents with children in city parks. And the same thing, of course, is true of Mancunians, Singaporeans and Cariocas.

The point isn’t that all of their notions are going to be fair, practical, practicable or even remotely sensible, but that an immense body of pragmatic insight and — more importantly, in my view — passion for the city is going untapped. Pundits, bobbins and bureaucrats talk constantly about improving the efficiency of municipal services, but if improved information is a driver of that efficiency, why aren’t we even trying to gather all the incredibly rich data that’s just lying there, more or less literally begging us to use it? We have the tools, we have the models, we know what they’re good for and where they fall down. It’s past time to build on this experience and bring its lessons to bear on the places we live.

Harvey Milk, community development and the digital balance sheet

For a very long time now, I’ve been inspired by the story of Harvey Milk, his serial failed campaigns for public office and his final, triumphant election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. (If you’re my age, or you’ve seen Jeff Spicoli’s wonderful portrayal of him in the eponymous feature film, you know what happens next: I refuse to use the word “tragedy” because of its implication that hubris called down what happened, and not a hate-driven murderer.)

What’s always been most impressive to me is the way Harvey nurtured a community through successive stages of self-consciousness, collective awareness, and conscious agency. It wasn’t just a matter of coming along (or out) in the right place, at the right time, though few of us will ever be lucky enough to have skills and potentials so ideally suited to our historical moment. It was sweat equity.

He built his constituency painstakingly, one engagement at a time. The late Randy Shilts, in his detailed history The Mayor of Castro Street, emphasizes that the eventual electoral success was built on a foundation of coalition-building maneuvers, like the early collaboration with the Teamsters on a strike against Coors Beer (thus securing the allegiance of ethnic and blue-collar voters who would not naturally have considered voting for an openly gay man) and the organization of the first Castro Street Fair (1974).

It’s always been clear to me that these engagements themselves grew out of Harvey’s situation — his sitedness — in the Castro. Harvey’s storefront base of operations, Castro Camera, served the community as drop-in center, political clubhouse and all-purpose social hub, which made it the nexus and catchment basin of multiple social networks. He made himself into a local character, turning nod-line encounters into conversations, and conversations into opportunities to press his case, epitomizing Jane Jacobs’ dictum that the “trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.” Together, man and site comprised a notably effective intelligence collection and influence network, founded on street-level interaction.

All of this, of course, led me to wonder how one might go about building a contemporary equivalent. Putting aside for a second — understanding full well that truly, it cannot be put aside, that it was the very crux of the matter — the sense of urgency and personal existential threat his community lived under, how would you develop a Milkian enmeshment in a given place and its affairs today?

You would have to start, I figure, by considering the technosocial balance sheet, all of the things that have changed since the mid-1970s in the way people use their tools to communicate, construct their sense of themselves and organize themselves into larger collectivities:

- In the liability column, the practical difficulty-verging-on-impossibility, given their immersion in a world of texts and earbuds, of communicating with anybody on the street anymore. The mutual paranoia, hostility, risk-aversiveness and sense of stranger-danger we seem to have nurtured in our public spaces. The splintered nature of attention, the shattering of the public sphere into ever-smaller clades.

- On the other side of the ledger, the undeniable smart-mobby power of texting, Facebook, Meetup, and Twitter, especially when instantiated on mobile devices, as demonstrated in the Green, Orange and People Power II revolutions, even to a lesser extent the US Presidential election of 2008. The sense crystallizing around Foursquare and Gowalla that social services in general won’t really come into their own until they reckon with real-world locations. (My own conviction is that even so, they won’t produce anything particularly interesting until they come up with some construction richer than “venues,” but the direction is clear.) Everyblock, which in a single service gives you an unbelievably useful dashboard to place.

There’s no question that you can rapidly develop and then maintain an impressive, even godlike awareness of the things going on in a given neighborhood using these tools, even in the absence of richly braided interpersonal contacts. You can keep a weather eye on tides of concern as they sweep over a place, infer issues of interest from fact patterns revealed by data analysis. What does this suggest for politicians specifically?

The conclusion I draw from datapoints like Andrew Rasiej’s brave, unsuccessful candidacy for New York City Public Advocate (2005) is that the latter set of tools aren’t likely to be decisive in and of themselves. Rasiej ran a quasi-guerrilla campaign, notable for its reliance on what are still comparatively cutting-edge techniques of audience building and message dissemination, and garnered a disappointing outcome. (Then again, Harvey ran for public office on three separate occasions before securing his seat on the Board of Supes; maybe Andrew’s got an election or two left in him.)

There’s also a lot of daylight between getting a single person elected, no matter how emblematic of their constituency they may feel themselves to be, and mobilizing an entire community in the name of its own ongoing empowerment. I would like to believe that this can be done affirmatively, in the absence of some perceived external threat, but history (and my recent observations of the Tea Party) suggest that nothing fuses a disparate assembly into a politically effective whole like fear of the other. Perhaps the Coffee Party can do better — but reflect that they, too, are founded in negation.

The only thing that’s relatively clear to me in all of this is that anyone wanting to catalyze a community and channel its aspirations in these days is going to have trouble doing it the way Harvey did: at retail, as it were, stacked up one investment at a time. By the same token, though, they’ll have a spread of one-to-many tools of awesome power available to them — and for free, too! As powerful as these may be, they can’t be used willy-nilly: spamming potential constituents isn’t going to get you anywhere, nor is anyone much going to sign on to a campaign just because it’s all high-tech and buzzword-compliant.

What’s more likely to be pivotal is the canny use of the latter to leverage the former: ensuring that every casual contact goes into a database, every issue raised by a constituent (or inferred from a pattern of facts on the ground) is captured and tracked, everything that shows up in the gillnet of your feeds is exploited for its propaganda or organizational value.

And I keep coming back to situatedness, something a whole lot of the people I know got to spend some time thinking about this last volcano weekend. What does it mean to be in place, to draw your identity from an investment in locale? I can’t imagine that this is anything but crucial; if every Castro needs a Harvey Milk, every Harvey Milk needs a Castro Camera. A robust fan page on Facebook goes a long way toward replicating the functions of such a base, and indeed does a whole lot of things it can’t. But from what I can see, it cannot function adequately as a substitute for that base. Showing up is still half the battle.

In the end, of course, none of what made Harvey who he was is at all replicable. Would-be students can certainly draw inspiration and energy from his struggle, even a few canny, practical lessons. Thus far, anyway, our era of networked digital communications seems to be awaiting his equivalent — or maybe the message is that we’re all his equivalent, waiting for the moment our ten thousand tweets and status updates are sintered into a coherent voice.

Carfree by choice

When I was up in Umeä last year for the Spring IxD Summit, I happened to spot a book called Carfree Cities lying on a drafting table in the school’s vehicle design program, which shares space with the interaction design faculty. Well, you know me: I ordered it from Amazon on the spot, and found it waiting for me at home in Helsinki a few days later. (I should note my delight at the fact that it was a vehicle design program where I encountered the book, lying there like the proudly-flaunted samizdat of a despised minority party. I’d, myself, be so much happier if the planet’s design faculties decided en masse to teach Mobility Design instead.)

It’s a dead giveaway from the title, but what I appreciate about Carfree Cities is that its author, JH Crawford, is willing to think about the relationship between mobility and urban quality of life in a deeper way than is generally the case, and propose proportionally more radical solutions. Having decided for ourselves that we’ll never own one again, I’m clearly already sympathetic to the idea that the car simply isn’t as necessary to getting around cities as we’ve come to believe it is.

Crawford spends the first part of his book marshaling the usual (but by no means unpersuasive) evidence against the automobile: the pollution, the injury and fatality figures, the waste. I was pleased to see someone putting empirical flesh on my gut take that where cities, at least, are concerned, the seriously inimical artifact isn’t the gasoline engine at all, but the private car built around it. Or, to put it another way, that as a society you could replace the stinking V8s with hybrids, electrics and hydrogen fuel-cells to whatever degree you wanted, but would be likely to find that the problems attendant upon the car haven’t evaporated quite so readily as the clouds of monoxide.

Having identified vehicular traffic as the cause of urban ills beyond number, though, Crawford proceeds to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. The title, again, rather says it all regarding the essential weakness of the solution he proposes, because I don’t in my heart believe that any city but the most self-consciously twee and tourist-oriented will ever manage to go completely carfree, and none at all above a certain size. And it’s a shame, because the second half of the book consists in large measure of self-evidently painstakingly worked-out schemas — you can see some of them here, here and here — that Crawford’s devised to provide cities with transit, logistics, supply and maintenance in the absence of cars and trucks.

They’re brilliant, and kind of demented: the kind of thing you might spy a shabby-looking guy sketching out on a stack of legal pads in an all-night donut place on San Pablo, and be genuinely unable to tell whether he’s the next Corb or simply Section 8. Either way, like most “solutions” that require the top-to-bottom reinvention of universal practice, they strike me as an awful lot of effort to go to for results that could probably be approximated in less burdensome ways — and, like the more heartbreakingly utopian passages in A Pattern Language, impossible to achieve in any event unless you were starting de novo.

If you want to cut down on the damage cars clearly cause, for my money the wiser approach — the one more likely to bear fruit for more people — has to be one of harm reduction, using Monderman and Gehl strategies to increase the total surface area available for pedestrians, bicyclists and other uses. But this is already orthodoxy, and properly so; if New York City’s Street Design Manual embraces your way of thinking, you can be sure you’ve left the realm of the radical.

Carfree Cities is a useful text, then, if for no other reason that by espousing an ultra position, it moves the Overton window that much further along the continuum. But as with any stance built around the suffix “-free,” its adherents run the risk of trying to build a coherent way of doing things on a framework of essentially negatory tactics, and this strikes me as a hard uphill slog and a harder sell. What affirmative vision can we mine from Crawford’s text?

We can start by examining just what he thinks is going to happen in a landscape freed of cars. Where I myself would tend not to be quite so determinist, Crawford has no compunction at all about drawing a causal chain tying together transport, topography and affect. Here’s his thesis, directly stated:

Because city form greatly influences the nature of social life in public spaces, the prevailing transport technology exerts a strong influence on the congeniality of every city.

Are we tracking, here? To Crawford, the mode of transportation that dominates in a given place shapes its physical development, which in turn becomes the terrain on which all potential human interactions turn. I’m willing to entertain the notion that here he’s not entirely wrong, though I continue to believe this privileges transportation just a little bit too much.

Los Angeles is probably the example par excellence: it would be foolish to deny that this place above all has been shaped by the internal combustion engine, and its maximum expression in the form of the individual private automobile. Nor would anyone in their right mind be particularly likely to argue that huge swathes of the LA basin — from the Valley down to Orange County and the ocean straight out to San Bernardino — aren’t in fact constrained in the possibilities for social engagement they’re able to offer because of the way the landscape has evolved to support automobility.

Or we could look at Tokyo, more than any other in my experience a city of trains, their elevated rights-of-way and grade crossings. (What captures that city better than the melancholy mechanical gonging of the train approach warning? I can hear it in my mind right now.) Tokyo has unquestionably coevolved with the train: the city’s first subway stations were laid down to mesh with the grand dowager department stores of Ginza, while the commercial development of districts like Shibuya blossoms from railheads established in the 1960s, like some hypertrophic mutant offshoot of the railway towns that went before them. Beyond that, and more to Crawford’s point, rail-driven modes of thinking and doing absolutely condition the city’s social contours, from planning an evening out so it deposits revelers neatly on the last train, right up to the way in which people choose to take their own lives.

So the claim here obviously isn’t completely wrong. But is Venice — the original Venice, that is, not the one lying to the south of Santa Monica — is it really shaped by its reliance on vaporetti? Is the social space of Venice framed in any meaningful way by this transportation choice? Wouldn’t it be more sensible by far to say that here the physical terrain has constrained the choice of transportation mode?

I ask because, while this is surely an edge case among conurbations, it is specifically Venice that Crawford has chosen to use as a template for his project:

We should build more carfree cities. Venice, the largest existing example, is loved by almost everyone and is an oasis of peace despite being one of the densest urban areas on earth.

So there are the affirmative criteria: our aim ought to be the design of cities that are “loved by almost everyone,” that are capable of remaining “oases of peace.” Never mind for a second that Venice’s enjoyment of these qualities is thoroughly overdetermined by its history; Crawford is going to tell you that it’s primarily down to the locally dominant mode of transportation.

The book is not unrelievedly Eurocentric: Carfree does at least glance for inspiration at other places where the car is a de facto impossibility, like the medinas of Morocco. Throughout, though, Crawford clearly situates the grandeur in a recognizably European mode of urban structuration. We recognize the cobblestoned laneways and four-storey blocks not from demassifying Detroit, nor the boomtowns of the Pearl River Delta, but from practice in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, with maybe just a touch of nostalgia for the Mediterranean paseo.

And there’s nothing particularly wrong with the easygoing, café-centric, light-rail-and courtyard urbanism Crawford wants to bring into being. Anybody nurtured on Rudofsky and Alexander and Gehl will find it immediately and intimately familiar (if achingly far from realization in most of the world); I wouldn’t mind living in a place like the ones he’s imagined my ownself, for at least part of the time. But the specific layouts he’s plotted wind up bringing him perilously close to certain long-discredited Corbusianisms; with their vertically-segregated traffic and islands of housing amidst sprawling expanses of green, they remind me of nothing so much as a latterday, clean-tech gloss on GM’s original Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Finally, though, my biggest beef with the carfree conurbation Crawford proposes is that for all its radicalism, it’s in its essence a profoundly conservative vision — typical of its ilk in that it ignores fifty years’ worth of technosocial development. Much of the harm done by the car, I believe, has already been addressed by various conceptions of the shared street, and much of the rest will be undone when the selfsame physical object is reconceived of as a network resource, fused with taxis, shared bikes and public transit in integrated mobility services and coherent journeys.

If good design begins with constraint, and I believe it does, then the realist act of accepting the presence of cars in our cities is probably the right kind of boundary condition you need to produce truly insightful solutions. Do I believe in doing everything possible to discourage, disincentivize, undermine and displace the century-long hegemony of the private car? I think you can already tell that I do, for all the reasons JH Crawford enumerates and my own besides. But while there’s a lot of energy, passion and clever thinking to be found in Carfree Cities, I’m afraid I find its spinal thesis ultimately untenable for most of our places. I’m glad it exists, but mostly as an outer marker of a certain style of thought, to which we can occasionally turn for tactical insight and the infectious inspiration of the profoundly convinced.

Recap for the week ending 18th April 2010

It’s certainly been a densepacked week on Speedbird. Just in case you missed any of it, we…

- gleaned lessons from an unbuilt 1975 housing project for the Philippines;
- asked what it might mean to live through a revolution in cartography;
- celebrated the final triumph of Mark Weiser’s vision of a post-PC era;
- extended the hope that a new generation of mobile applications could help rediscover urban serendipity;
- took the connected notions of “creative” classes, cities and industries to task; and finally
- examined how changes in the structure and culture of work may be driving changes in the shape of cities.

Keep an eye peeled over the next week for thoughts about Harvey Milk and the meaning of mayoralty, Do projects, and carfree cities. Until then!