Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -47
Escaping the blank page
Here’s a good thing that’s happening in 2020: the University of Michigan is launching a new undergraduate degree program: Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology. The program will combine urbanism, technology, and design, and—this is the part I’m most excited about—it’s housed at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Our first students will begin their studies in summer of 2021.
Hi, I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology program, and this newsletter tracks the development and launch of that initiative. It’s a place for us to think out loud. Thanks for reading!
🔭 Searching for a Definition of Urban Technology
If your reaction is “urban-whatnow?” you are not alone. “Urban Technology” is a neologism that seems explanatory—it is surely referring to technology in or for cities, right?—but going beyond the headline takes more work. Is a smartphone urban technology? Is electricity? Is Signage? Who exactly are we talking about when we say “cities?” Is that government, everyday people, both? And what does an urban technologist do?
Ride hail services like Uber and Lyft provide a useful example. Powered by consumer apps and driver apps that connect to each other via an online service, ride hail is literally technological in nature, requiring a smartphone with GPS and internet connectivity. And ride hail apps are clearly used in cities. So far, so easy. The popularity and quick growth of these apps created new patterns of movement, leading to further ‘knock-on’ changes such as alterations to the physical reality and experience of cities. For instance, some places have instituted ride hail pickup zones instead of letting people get picked up anywhere. That’s a small change, but it’s telling.
The sum of these new patterns of movement has also led to policy change, such as the congestion charges instituted by New York, which are road tolls to access busy downtown areas, as well as widespread reconsideration of taxi medallions and franchises, which were once very static indeed. Perhaps even more importantly, ride hail apps augment, compete with, and even supplant other modes of transit like traditional taxis, transit, and even walking. This introduces new tradeoffs, which is a characteristic of all technology.
All of the convenience of Uber and Lyft is not evenly experienced. First, you have to be able to afford it and be in possession of a credit card. Even when meeting these requirements, ride hail apps have been shown to amplify existing racist bias in society and the companies building those apps have been slugging to respond. Cities like Austin and London have fought to force Uber into compliance with their sovereign way of doing things, but for every confident city there are many more who are afraid of being left out of the apps altogether and shy away from public confrontation, even when the changes sparked by ride hail apps are counter to their preferred way of doing things.
What does this tell us about urban technology? It means that…
Urban Technologies are technological (shocker!). Internet connectivity, computation, and digital hardware are primary in terms of contemporary applications, but electricity and concrete were also exciting new technologies in cities at one point in time.
Urban technologies impact more than just the direct user. Ride hail is ostensibly about making life easy for the ride hailer themselves but it has impacts that affect neighborhoods and whole cities. This is fundamentally different than something like a word processing app, which changes the writer’s process but not the reader’s.
Urban Technologies introduce new tradeoffs within society. When my use of a technology affects your experience of the city even when I am not (and maybe never will be) using the same tech, we collectively experience new tradeoffs. Imagine being on a bus lurching slowly to school through streets choked with thousands of ride hail vehicles. You probably would not be happy. Who benefits, who loses, and who’s in control of these tradeoffs become potential points of conflict and opportunity.
Urban technologies implicate new economies and policy. When they grow large enough—when they scale, in the parlance of the tech community—the tradeoffs implied by urban technologies push us to rethink governance. In the case of Uber, that rethinking was forced upon governments who were often stuck in the position of catching up rather than acting first. As cities become more familiar regulating such technologies, the balance of power is shifting.
🙅 What it is not
We’re getting closer, but this still feels abstract. Let’s try to define urban technology by describing what it is not. Urban technology is almost certainly not deeply concerned with the function of the human body like biotech or medtech, because that would negate point 2 above. Nor would a dating app be urban technology, because those also generally fail to have a larger impact beyond the immediate users. Urban Technology is not about just media and information, because the link between those analyses and broadcasts and the kinds of tradeoffs and policy implications described in point 3 are generally distant. Likewise, urban technology is definitely not a synonym for “computer science” because plenty of apps have little to do with cities (like FarmLogs) or blissfully implicate no one and nothing other than your own creativity and patience (like word processing).
It’s tempting to define urban technology as that which deals with things like construction, real estate, infrastructure or other more obvious features of city life, but these categories are limiting too. For one, those terms already carry with them the assumptions of the 20th century city, like the idea that buildings are constructed instead of grown or printed.
🕵️♂️ Getting Closer…
Though it may be imperfect, our working definition, still broad, is that urban technology is that which helps humans see, shape, or inhabit cities in new ways. Whether those new ways promote humanity, quality of life, sustainability, and justice or if they tend toward discrimination and abuse are decisions to be made, and not just in the grand sense but in every little detail of how technologies are conceptualized, designed, distributed, and promoted. These risks demand vigilance and care, and instilling that sense of care in our students and ourselves is paramount.
Insofar as we prepare students to engage in the creation of urban technology we explicitly seek to enable them to identify, prevent, and mitigate potential harms while pursuing outcomes that improve cities for all. Ethics are a cornerstone of good engineering and computer science offerings like the ones at Michigan, and that helps.
We have to go further than general questions of ethics to prepare students of Urban Technology to see and shape specifically urban tradeoffs, beginning with a unique understanding of scale that is comprehensive like an urban planner, efficient like a computer scientist, and creative like a designer. From my earliest work on the development of this degree, the mismatch between how different disciplines understand and leverage scale has emerged as an important point of difference to explore, and I’ll share more thoughts on the subject in coming weeks as well.
Finally, we do not limit “technology” to digital networking (the internet) or computation, even though these are naturally of high importance due to their potential and prevalence in contemporary society. As digital technology has become nearly ubiquitous in our lives some much older technologies, like democratic systems of governance, groan under extreme strain. We must not pretend that gizmos bolted onto an ailing democracy will fix things any more than we could realize institutional transformation on the order of the Green New Deal without the clever and conscientious use of digital tools and networks.
🤹♀️ What will Urban Technologists do?
In 1999 I was a college dropout (goodbye, sociology!) building a startup with four friends. We made tools that assisted you while you browse the web, and while I’d like to think we were each good at what we did, I was not trained to be a user interface designer for web apps, nor was my partner trained to code those apps. It was all simply too new for there to be degree programs that addressed the web in a serious way, so we figured things out on our own and hacked it together.
When I looked around to see who was doing the most interesting work on the web, I repeatedly found architects who had decided to abandon their work in traditional architecture to pursue information architecture and digital design instead. They comfortable in the liminal fog between computer science and design, and they had cool glasses. Eventually colleges built out degree programs that responded to digital design and the accordant questions of computer and information science.
Compared to that moment 20 years ago, something different is happening here. Urban technology is emerging as a transdisciplinary space, meaning that it’s not merely the combination of software, cities, and design, but a hybrid that blends those areas of knowledge and practice. Today it’s not uncommon to meet engineers who have deep historical knowledge of urban settlements or designers who are expert coders. The traditional disciplines in question will not diminish, rather they are being complemented and extended by areas like urban technology.
The program we’re building will equip students to see cities and technology with x-ray vision so that they are able to question, understand, analyze, and imagine new possibilities. Design is the third ingredient in this mix, and we’re building a studio sequence that weaves together interaction design, service design, and strategic design. Our students will depart the program as designers who care about craft and the consequences of their craft in equal measure. The curriculum is under development and this too is an area that we will be sharing in the future.
Since Taubman College’s Urban Technology program is emerging from within a school of architecture and urban planning, it will be in dialog with everything else that’s buzzing around the school like Detroit School perspectives on urban planning, graduate level urban informatics, healthy cities, and digital & material technologies, and the nearly endless creativity and vitality of the studio spaces. The rest of the University is there too, but we’ll save that for another time.
When I eventually went back to college to complete my degree I studied Interior Architecture (renovations and adaptive reuse) and continued to graduate school. It took me two degrees in architecture to realize that rather than caring for buildings and cities as such, I am interested in how buildings and cities help us humans care for each other. If that’s what you’re interested in, “architecture” and “urban planning” sound only like partial matches. One aspect of this new program that excites me is that we are building a path to participate in shaping the built environment that is more focused on the use, inhabitation, and life of cities than on their bricks and mortar.
🗓 Until Next Week
Forty eight weeks from now will be ‘week zero,’ when our inaugural cohort of students will begin their first semester. Our first semester, actually, since the program will be new for faculty, staff, and students alike. During the weeks to come we will be using this venue as a place to share more about the program, test out new ideas, and develop our own thinking as it continues to evolve.
Launching this program is beyond a team effort. From workshops to working groups, just about the whole College has been involved in some way and we are also partnering with colleagues across UM. That means we have lots of voices to pull into this newsletter as we go. We’ll also check in on friends and peers from faraway places so that we may learn from them too. But for now, it’s a Friday in July and that means it’s time to sign off.