Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -29
3 questions for Anthony Vanky
Welcome back after a week off, during which we spent time contemplating what we’re thankful for. One of the many things I’m thankful for is to have colleagues who are thoughtful and imaginative. This week we’ll kick off a running series of micro interviews with University of Michigan faculty members. Let’s begin by hearing from Anthony Vanky, one of the newest members of the Urban Planning faculty, who will take us to Boston, Barcelona, and beyond. As we discussed these wide ranging cities, we also discovered a funny characteristic of prior generations of urban planners... They seems to have been into extravagant hair. 🤔
Hello and welcome to our newsletter about cities, technology, and design. I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students next academic year. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading.
🎙 Three Questions for Anthony Vanky
Anthony teaches courses about spatial analysis, urban informatics, and how ideas are represented and communicated. He brings experience from MIT Sensible City Lab to Michigan, and that includes research on how digital data and pervasive sensing technologies are used to improve public health in urban environments. With wide ranging interests and a hungry mind, Anthony is just as likely to tell you about how natural language processing can be used to understand cities as he is to school you (politely) on lesser known urban histories.
Q. What’s your favorite city and why?
A. The beautiful thing about cities is the diversity of identities, landscapes, and cultures represented by each.
For me, my right answer is to do what my old advisor used to do and riff on the 20th century writer Georges Perec (editor’s note: Perec had impressive hair!). When asked to name the best place to live in Paris, he would reply that his ideal home would have the the kitchen would be facing the famed marketplace of Les Halles, the living room would look out onto the Parc Montsouris, and so on. To your question, my “favorite city” has the infrastructure of Singapore, the energy of New York City, the joie-de-vivre of New Orleans, the natural landscape of Vancouver, and the sustainability of Copenhagen.
Q. What does data have to do with urban planning?
A. At its most essential, urban planning is about solving problems and projecting futures of cities and their residents. From new bike lanes or sidewalks to creating community-centered pandemic relief, the decisions planners make must be informed. To do this appropriately, we must understand how conditions presently exist and evaluate how interventions will affect the public. The use of data and methods—be they qualitative or quantitative—is fundamental to understanding.
Of course, with the digitization of services and infrastructure, the volume and velocity of data are changing how the field uses data and availing new opportunities to understand and represent these communities. Researchers and policymakers are leveraging mobile phone and vehicle telematics data to reveal human mobility patterns with incredible detail that is helping cities better plan and manage infrastructure.
Sensors are revealing localized patterns with astonishing breadth and depth of detail. But the profession is also trying to balance opportunities and risks. For instance, while advocates in New York City are placing high-resolution sensors in public housing units to reveal how seniors are regularly facing dangerously high temperatures during the summer, the NYPD is rolling out facial recognition programs across the city. What is the right amount of invasiveness. Is there is a “right level?”
But I think we can also go beyond traditional data sources and think about the issues and qualities that matter in communities; we measure what we care about. I’m incredibly inspired by cities like Seattle, WA, Somerville, MA, and Bristol, UK who are looking at the happiness and optimism of residents through “happiness censuses”.
As Mayor Curtatone of Somerville, MA says, “a bond rating doesn’t tell us how people feel or why they want to raise a family here or relocate a business here,” which I think frames a useful way of thinking about the well-being of our communities.
Q. Is it just today’s urban planners that use data or do historical examples exist?
A. Planners have long used the “state of the art” of data and technology. In fact, many of the conversations planners are currently having around the so-called “smart city” mirror the conversations in the 1960s. Where cities have recently built out NASA Mission Control-like control rooms for cities, such as Rio de Janeiro or Boston, Stanford Beer helped create the real-time operations room for the Chilean economy as part of Project Cybersyn.
If we go back even further in time, we can find other examples. Baron Haussmann quantified the long times it took to get health and emergency services to neighborhoods in Paris to justify the “renovation” of the nineteenth-century city. In Barcelona, Ildefons Cerdà used an algorithm to generate the block sizes for the famous Eixample “expansion” of the city. (Editor’s note: what is it with urban planners and extravagant hair?) While now considered a masterful design, Barcelona's defining feature was generated by data and a formula!
Links
🎞 The Big Rethink is a video series by NewCities tackling the impact of COVID on city planning and citymaking around the world.
🏭 Speaking of COVID impacts, microfulfillment centers (teeny warehouses) are growing in popularity. Will they be the gas station of mid/late 21st century cities? Could they simply replace gas stations?
🔩 On the theme of micro, Arrival builds zero emissions vehicles buses and vans in microfactories that allow them to spin up (and spin down) factories where and when needed, and in theory should strengthen the ‘circularity’ of local economies.
✨ If these links challenge your idea of what factories or warehouses are like, try this missive on complexity and modern life: “I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible.”
🤝 What is Urban Tech? Definitions, Aims, and Tensions. A work in progress by Anthony Townsend, whose name probably sounds familiar because we’ve linked to his work before. Strong overall but especially like the framing of “tensions” here.
This week: A delightfully long phone call. Then good news in a very short email. Calls with Matt Webb and Gabriella Gomez-Mont, both enriching. Giving comments on a video project in development—dialing in color and music and all the small details. To cap the week off, an event with Indian high school students. Thanks, TNI Career Counseling! 🏃♂️