Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 243
"City as License" with Martijn de Waal and Tessa Steenkamp
Recently Martijn de Waal and Tessa Steenkamp dropped by the Urban Technology studio for a casual lecture and lunchtime discussion, while on their way to the American Association of Geographers conference in Detroit. Tessa and Martijn helped us wade into a discussion of digital technology’s effects on the way citizens experience the city—and whether the freedoms we enjoy are given or demanded.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words or this 90 second explainer video.
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Martijn de Waal started the discussion by invoking Scott McQuire who has written about the "city without qualities," which is how McQuire describes the modeling of an urban environment for decision-making purposes. Cybernetics, for instance, promised to give decision-makers a godlike view of the the city (or country) from which rational decisions could be made. To do so required making computer models of the economy and society. The city had "no qualities" because qualities don't fit into a database.
Such an ethos is largely the same one that fueled the smart cities movement early in the 21st century that was driven by large American consultancy companies such as IBM. It should not be surprising that if a company's business model is to sell answers to decision-makers, the solutions they promote are definitive. Buy this and your city will become efficient. Maybes and kindas don’t sell so well.
The smart city is one with a bigger CPU than its "non-smart" neighbor—and that bigger CPU is effectively the mayor enhanced, which is why smart cities as a commercial venture was sold into the mayor's office. This helps explain why the visual metaphors of smart cities invoke views from above and urban environments being served up on platters. When thinking about the city as a “one to many” (one-mayor-to-many-citizens relationship), it's perhaps understandable that the mayor would want efficiency management. Which mayor would not want some way to escape manage all those needs, complaints, and random pot shots?! Siri, please summarize this for me. But cities are the preeminent example of “many to many” relationships.
That smart cities as a "movement" largely fizzled is a testament to the pesky qualities of cities—that Helsinki smells of spruce and birch; that one should never order coffee with milk after noon in Rome; that jaywalking is simply not done in Tokyo and never not done in Bangalore. These are things that cannot be computed because they are not the "right" answer to anything, they're simply the answer that a group of people came to through a centuries-long process of cultural evolution. Smart cities, like cybernetics before it, was about control and making control more efficient. It was about a city of services efficiently offered to satisfied customers, and who doesn't want to be a satisfied customer?
But such a framing, according to Martijn, shifts the citizen into being a customer (of services) through rhetorical sleight of hand. This gets more intricate with urban technology. In a purely physical world, the status of one's subjectivity readily shifts with location: in the store I am a customer, in the plaza I am a citizen. But in a world where digital technology is part of the urban experience, we occupy multiple subjectivities in one physical space. My favorite example of this is that you can look up ratings of parks on Yelp. When doing so, are you a prospective “customer” of that park or an interested “citizen?”
Martijn describes the "city as license" as an alternative to a city focused on services. This shifts the focus from a passive mode of receiving services to an active question of what one is empowered to do. Such a shift creates new critical inroads to digital tools that shape spatial and public experiences. From a paper introducing the City as License in 2024: "we seek to understand the city as a complex arena of rights, access, and agencies." Important seeking!
To revisit the park as an example, decisions about parks are made through political and municipal processes with special attention to the physical layout and demographics of the city, but then the end result is delivered unto a digital world where privately owned digital systems such as Yelp's rating algorithm or Waze's routing algorithm inevitably shape the utilization of the park. Those digital layers invite or disinvite access and use, and they may also change perceptions of the park. Furthermore, different digital systems can change these things in different ways: your opinion of a potential visit to Clark Park informed by Google Maps may diverge from my view of the same park informed by Yelp. Or even more tricky: since algorithms are increasingly personalized and location-informed, what you glean from Google Maps may not be what I glean from Google Maps.
This is not to say that the sky is falling and the internet is definitely ruining your park. Maybe! Maybe not? We don't really know yet because new forms of critical thought are needed to grapple with these issues and new forms of governance are needed to deal with the potential harms (and new areas of opportunity) that are emerging. If that sounds familiar, it's because Greg Lindsay shared with us a similar perspective a couple weeks ago when he introduced the idea of using threat analysis to understanding AR in public spaces.
In terms of new perspectives and new governance, Martijn pointed out that there's a shift in politics "from desirable outcomes to desirable inputs." Controlling what data is used as an input to decision making—either deliberatively by a public or automatically by an algorithm—is important leverage. From the vantage of 2025 America it's hard to tell if this is because data has a heightened role in decision-making (which it does) or if this is a coping strategy for the post-truth hyper-fractured era of media we currently occupy.
If what you get out is what you put in, then Tessa Steenkamp's presentation was an inspiring example of putting a lot more humanity into technical systems. The projects she shared were related to "scan cars," which describes vehicles that cruise around cities scanning illegally parked cars and issuing tickets. The scanners on these vehicles are bundles of cameras and other sensors hidden inside of literal black boxes mounted to the roof of a car or bolted between the handlebars of a bike.
Theoretically the idea of parking enforcement is to maintain the equal rights of all to utilize the public right of way, but despite this reasonable purpose, the actual reception of scan cars and parking enforcement more broadly is somewhere on a spectrum from displeasure to rage. Perhaps because of all those qualities that the smart cities crowd tried to squeeze out of urban places mean that urban life is never as binary as the automated scan car system conceptualizes it to be?
As Tessa explained, parking is an urban use that is full of exceptions. People double park for a minute to unload a heavy object or pick up an elderly friend, and yet the cold eye of the scan car does not have a way to receive this kind of input. There is no column in the database powering the scan car for exceptions—for life. While it's tempting to revert back to the "old way" of sending people out on foot to enforce parking, it's also a false dichotomy to say that automated parking enforcement has to be bad and that we have to accept clunky digital systems that ignore the intricacies that make cities both lovable and distinct.
If anything, Tessa points out, digital systems like the software that powers the scan car are hyper flexible and can be developed in such a way that they respect local culture and customs. Want a parking enforcement to allow for three warnings before it issues a ticket? Code it that way! Want it to allow for three warnings specific to each infraction type? Sure. Want it to allow three warnings but only for pink cars? Possible.
Programmable public infrastructure can jumpstart an era of wild creativity in governance. The rules that have worked in a non-computational society, essentially based on whatever can be processed at the speed of paperwork, do not apply to us here in this time of widespread computation. That is, except for the fear that technological systems are opaque, and immutable. The creativity that could be enabled at the intersection of programmability and governance requires a foundation of trust which, at the moment, is sorely missing.
One response is to make algorithmic governance more knowable and also more locally specific. Tessa showed snapshots of co-design processes like a beautifully designed game where the user "plays" the role of the scan car and in doing so, learns a little about how the car works and also has a chance to voice thoughts about how it should perhaps work differently. This approach shares an interest with legibility that you can find in kindred efforts such as Digital Trust in the Public Realm but takes it further to also invite feedback.
Another example from Tessa's work is a scan bike review panel. In this project she was able to get the municipality to ride the bike past a group of assembled citizens in a controlled setting so that they could observe this curious device and then ask questions about it. Similar to the game, this opening up for questions inevitably pivots to "what if" scenarios that point at future ways of tweaking how the technology is utilized, such as asking the scan bike to only share GPS coordinates of an infraction instead of sending photos as well.
This raises a question about the role of expertise. Though the subject here is urban technology, the strategy of public involvement should sound very familiar to those who know the history of infrastructure in the 20th century. In the face of bullying interventions planned by experts and rammed through the approvals process by the likes of Robert Moses, community groups first developed robust activist responses to stop the destruction of cities they cared about, and then later developed robust co-design processes such as participatory planning workshops and community design centers that inject non-expert opinion into the process by design. Or, if you prefer, recognize the situated expertise of community members.
In the work of someone like Simon Weckert, who once dragged a cart of phones around Berlin to distort traffic data, we see an example from the activist end of the spectrum. Tessa's work is more "stuck in," in the British sense of the phrase. She's engaging with the community and the authorities both, and this effort exemplifies the process end of things. It demonstrates a practical way that citizens can be engaged with urban technology and set of practices that government and tech companies can support as well. The result, perhaps counterintuitively, is to make the technology of the scan cars mundane, and that’s an important point! Electricity and copy machines help civil servants execute the work of government more effectively, but we do not expect these older technologies to have agency that shapes policy or its enforcement. Why should code and algorithms have more autonomy?
With Martijn's conceptual framing and Tessa's projects I found the seeds of a practice that can and should be very normal in any community that wants to have trust in digital systems. If we say, it's 2025 so why wouldn't we use digital technology for parking enforcement? Then we can also say, it's 2025, why wouldn't we also use technology to help us gather more input, from more diverse members of the public, and use all that computational power to enhance local specificity?
The binary of expert perspective vs. public opinion is as stale as the dichotomy of automated or manual process. Co-creation processes can be designed to help communities grapple with the hard limits and tradeoffs identified by experts. Technology can and should be used to facilitate this. Whereas cybernetics and smart cities saw complexity and quality as things to eliminate for the sake of better management, the urban technology I’m excited about is that which Tessa and Martijn illustrated for us in the studio: a vision where self determination is the goal, where complexities and contradictions are navigated, not managed, and where computation is always local.
🌆 One question for Martijn and Tessa
Bryan: What’s your favorite city and why?
Martijn: The easy answer would be Amsterdam, where I have been living most of the time since the early 1990s. It’s big enough to be cosmopolitan and have a great offer of culture, arts, museums, and food culture. And it’s small enough to easily get around; 20-30 minutes on your bike will get you most everywhere. It has some nice parks and residential neighborhoods. But then it doesn’t have the vibrancy and archigram-esque awe of motion and inspiration that the true metropolises of the world have on offer. For that, my favorite city would probably be Hong Kong. For its sheer beauty and amazing harbor vistas, its mix of high high density urbanism with all its megalomanic architecture, frantic stimuli, the mobs of moving people, the smell of food stalls all over. And when all that becomes too much, it also has enjoyable more rural parts such as Lamma Island, or the laid-back urban beaches at Shek O. In which city can you get on such amazing hiking trails, and superb public transport too?
Tessa: I think it is Amsterdam! When I moved here from London, a friend told me this is a city you can live in when you’re in your 60s, it’s too chill to live here when you’re younger. But I’ve come to realize there’s nothing wrong with being chill. Actually, it’s quite amazing. I love that I can afford to live by the river, and actually swim in that river during summer. I love I can cycle everywhere and feel just as safe as when I walk. Yet it’s not boring either. There is a big underground culture, so much diversity, and a big enough scene to be doing cool new urban tech projects as well.
These weeks: Marketing and comms work, final review planning, admissions season. Full speed ahead. 🏃