Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 238
Surveying the Augmented City with Greg Lindsay
Despite many social media posts being geotagged and the cult following of apps like Foursquare, social media never really took over spatial experiences the way it fracked our attention spans and distorted time for the average American. Even as the peak of the social media era subsides, the apps are free only if you stay on the treadmill of distraction, allowing your viewing habits to calibrate hyper-targeted advertising. In the rising era of spatial computing and augmented reality, it’s our homes, streets, and neighborhoods that are at risk for unwelcome invasions of privacy, first by being mapped at the millimeter scale and then by being exploited as new canvases for display. It was one thing when junk ads trickled into your feed, but such uninvited content hits different when it’s resting on your pillow like a good night chocolate at a five star hotel. Or graffiti’d on the front steps of city hall, for that matter.
To give us some tools for thinking through the ups and downs of augmented urban experiences, we spoke with Greg Lindsay this week, who is a researcher studying the urban implications of AR and its hyper-charged cousin, artificially intelligent reality or “AIR.”
💬 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.
🥽 Is the Augmented City Friend or Foe?
If you’re going to call yourself an urbanist and futurist you better be multi-hypenate, which is exactly the right description of Greg Lindsay. Whenever I see Greg he has somehow already read everything I’m excited about, including the deep links I thought were the rarest of Pokemon. Greg uses his insatiable appetite for ideas to connect dots across continents and disciplines, sharing generously as he moves between milieus. As an Urban Tech Fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute 2022-2023, Greg led a study on the future of generative AI in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, as well as a larger project looking at the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale. The latter became The Augmented City, which we spoke with Greg about by Zoom from his home in Montreal.
BRYAN BOYER: What is the Augmented City?
GREG LINDSAY: The Augmented City is my capstone report for the Urban Tech Fellowship at Cornell Tech, alongside the work of other fellows such as Cara Eckholm, who wrote Pilot: NYC with NYCEDC and Paul Salama, who published How NYC Moves with the mayor’s office. The question I wanted to ask more broadly was, How can we explore techniques and strategies for helping public officials better anticipate disruptive technologies?
Having spent the 2010s watching cities like Los Angeles wrangle with ride-hailing and write their own software and standards in preparation for autonomous vehicles — and having worked with you and Anthony Townsend on multiple scenarios about AVs for National League of Cities and Bloomberg Philanthropies — I saw this as the next step. How do you create an alliance of cities that can proactively work together to mitigate the externalities of emerging urban tech? My idea was to assemble a cohort of current- and former public officials — many of whom had confronted these challenges before — and use foresight techniques to better understand what might be coming.
I chose augmented reality because Pokémon GO made a huge impact on me when it dropped in July 2016. It literally upended how people used urban environments overnight. I would argue it's one of the most successful pieces of urban tech of all time. And then it stopped — or at least subsided. But it was obvious to me that AR would eventually return, and in an even bigger way. So, I wanted to use AR as a test case: here's a new technology that upended cities for a moment, we saw its impacts, we were not ready for it, and then it went away. How should we prepare for its return?
It's like the Collingridge dilemma: If the technology is very nascent, it's not worth the time to regulate it. But by the time it's worth the effort to regulate it, it's grown out of your control. How can we identify the precise spot for an intervention?
BRYAN: The report includes a ranking of the top “threats” coming thanks to AR. What are they?
GREG: We have six findings. Three are threats. One is basically all the problems with social media and the internet today, but now extended into a spatialized dimension. For example, people living in filter bubbles are actually out in public space and literally seeing different levels of reality. The second is crime: people running scams, only now using AR or AI likenesses, and that are happening in public spaces or infiltrating institutions. And third is gentrification or digital redlining targeting marginalized communities, either for exploitation or denial of services.
Then there are three positive findings. Augmented reality technologies could result in a new UX for civic tech and urban tech. Another are new public roles – for instance, should we start thinking about a chief digital public realm officer?
The final one was about other communities taking this into their own hands. The Kinfolk Foundation in New York is a great example of activists using AR to propose new monuments in place of historical ones, like Toussaint Louverture in Columbus Circle instead of Christopher Columbus.
There's public safety too. People are going to be dropping potential hate speech into spatial environments or chasing Pikachu out into the street. How can cities keep a handle on what's happening invisibly in their cities?
These technologies have such power to change cultural norms and practices in public space literally overnight. When I was formulating the report, I started to wonder: what is the stop sign of augmented reality? And how do you ensure a base level of reality?
BRYAN: What is it about AR that makes it more threatening than, say, walking around the city listening to music? Our cultural geography colleagues might say, if I listen to one soundtrack and you listen to a different soundtrack, we're experiencing different cities.
GREG: It's funny you say that, because one current example of AR I think the city should pay attention to is BeeBot. BeeBot is an app that when you plug in your headphones, the Beebot DJ will tell you things about where you are in the city.
Another big chunk of what I'm talking about is persistence. You see Google doing this with its ARCore visual positioning system, or Niantic, which is using Pokémon GO data to build Lightship. So they're building their own proprietary maps of reality where content will live forever. We're also going to see this with artificially intelligent reality: a spatialized form of AI that uses machine vision models to map our public spaces in real time, as well as private space, and builds digital twins for all these companies that are going to have spatial intelligence to understand how this stuff works. They're going to capture all sorts of things inside of that and will build immensely valuable data troves that will affect behavior in cities. That goes beyond the classic notion of the Walkman or the iPod and just having a different personal experience.
It's actually the domain of cities that makes it interesting. It's not like the Internet. Cities and public officials have to pay attention to it because it's going to be spatially anchored in a way other stuff isn't.
BRYAN: Will this require new roles in city hall?
GREG: Well, yeah, and what is the internal hiring process for this? Should this be a new role inside of existing departments or is it an innovation role? One of the participants mentioned, you have to make sure it sits in a mayor's office or executive's office, so you have power. You don’t want a marginalized chief Metaverse person.
Do you have a young person or recent grad who's in a role where they're talking and learning and watching? Is it a centralized team who's in charge of this particular tech? But then, do you do that for every technology? These are all unresolved questions.
BRYAN: The thing that feels hard to contemplate is that at the end of the day, Uber is physical cars in your city that you can pull over, although they might be hard to identify. And in fact, some cities have effectively created sting operations to find people that were operating via Uber in places that had banned it.
GREG: This brings up the idea of enforcement. What does enforcement look like if there is AR zoning and you drop an object in the middle of Times Square? How would you enforce it?
In theory, you get some city staff with your actual apps and they could check to see that it's there and you could screenshot it. In fact, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin did pass an ordinance against these kinds of games and it was struck down as unconstitutional. You can't enjoin the game publishers to not make the software. You have to enforce the behavior at that level, which implies that you will need park staff to basically roam around and make sure that people are conforming to park ordinances when playing these games. Which in turn means you need a mechanism for seeing and understanding someone is playing a game there in the first place
BRYAN: Have you seen examples of a “special economic zone” approach in an area that welcomes AR overlays?
GREG: I haven't, but [I can imagine] cities designating certain areas for this. One of the recommendations is to create pilot zones the same way that Pilot: NYC did with the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Roosevelt Island. Times Square should probably be a free-for-all for AR. You should probably take big tourist areas where you want to generate foot traffic and make them pilots.
BRYAN: Are fears about the public realm and the potential damage of this inescapable AR overlay overblown because devices will always be a locus of control? There should be a dial or slider available to the user ranging from “Emergency overlays only” all the way up to “Destroy my eyeballs with photons, please!”
GREG: Obviously there's a level of personal control, but I think we know from past experience that you don't need 100% consumer adoption to lead to negative externalities in the public realm. It remains a locus of personal control, but you can definitely create unintended consequences out of this with people dialing up to maximum AR and like they're being led by their AI Pikachu or Taylor Swift in some other direction where they don't actually know who's motivating their AI agent that is routing them in one direction versus another. For example, if in the original browser plugin Starbucks is on your AR app and has an exclusive deal with Apple Vision, does it dim the other coffee shops? Do you just simply not see them when you call up your map overhead?
A lot of the problems that the report highlights are the ones we already have, it's just that they are now more spatial and more dominant. If this is a UX that eventually becomes more delightful and more powerful than just maps on a phone or screen, does it then lead to an exponential increase in those externalities?
Hyperreality by Keiichi Matsuda is the canonical visualization of why AR could be terrible for cities, individuals, and their collective sanity.
BRYAN: If you were to do another round of the report, how would you harness youthful voices and perspectives given that they have a strong take on these technologies?
GREG: I think the problem facing youth, and everybody, is: we're increasingly building the world towards pulling people away from public space and being together face-to-face to instead be in monetizable, virtual spaces. So to me the question is, what is the role of third places, or any kind of public place, which teenagers are most affected by?
It always shocks me when I see signage in malls like, “Teenagers can't go to malls.” I thought malls were designed for teenagers! So yeah, what role would AR play in this? Could it enhance the public realm? Could it make it more attractive to them to get away from an interior world to an exterior world? That would be the one thing I want from them.
BRYAN: What’s your favorite Pokémon?
GREG: Mewtwo.
BRYAN: What’s your favorite city and why?
GREG: Venice, Italy. As a hardcore urbanist, it's like being back in the womb. I love squeezing through little passageways and then emerging into a piazza with the most beautiful church you've ever seen. I love the hyper urbanity of Venice, despite it being a tourist trap and everything else. When I'm in Venice, I marvel that I’m in Venice. And whenever I'm not in Venice, I’m scheming to get back to Venice.
These weeks: Faculty search visits come to a close. Delft. UMCI brown bag lunch. Cities Intensive planning is in full swing. Studio acoustics. Hiring. And so much snow. 🏃