Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 213
What is urban technology? Mark IV
Back to campus and this is a big year for us: in April we will graduate our first class of urban technology students.
A year ago we celebrated the start of the academic year with a restatement of our purpose here in the degree program. That feels like a good habit, so let's make it an annual thing. "What is urban technology," you ask? We pick up that question below, as well as sharing an update on our summer efforts which included our first major adjustment to the curriculum.
💬 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.
🧐 What is Urban Technology?
Urban technology is the study of the digitization of the built environment: this includes computational analysis of the city and spatial outcomes, redesigning the processes of city-making, and using digital technologies to coordinate and utilize urban space in new ways. In other words: urban informatics; software and hardware for architects, engineers, and planners; and business or governance concepts that meet the needs of urban life with agility.
If you've noticed that publishing, journalism, media, office work, and so many other sectors have been digitized already it would be reasonable to assume that the cities and city-making were further ahead on the digitization curve. They're not. The smart cities movement largely fizzled and internet of things is an enabling factor more than a retooling of cities. Yet, digitization is happening, if slowly, and we believe that it’s important to the environmental, financial, and social sustainability of urban communities.
🌲 This work is urgent environmentally because the built environment accounts for 37% of global emissions, according to the UNEP. Digitization will aid the effort to reduce emissions from the built environment by providing ways to work more efficiently, use less material and reuse more, and to maintain and tweak the performance of urban systems toward lower carbon outcomes.
💸 This work is urgent financially because the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector represents 6% of global GDP, a staggering sum of money, and is notoriously inefficient. Here, digitization is more complicated than merely building apps. There's serious work to be done in shifting the literal hardware and software of the AEC sector, as well as the culture within these firms to work with greater agility. Those who do that work stand to gain considerably.
🤗 Finally, this work is urgent socially because the patterns of daily life when cyberspace and meat space collapse into the same thing are still being figured out. Digitization, in this regard, has given us heaps of anxiety and loneliness thanks to things like social media, and precarity thanks to the gig economy, but also new perspectives on sharing, commoning, and co-creation thanks to movements like open source software development. Work, neighborliness, and civic participation are all in flux right now.
To respond to these urgencies, we train students to understand how cities work as complex systems, to be comfortable working with data and code, and to use design as a process to find the right problems and invent better answers. So that's what we're up to with urban technology. This season in the newsletter we’ll be writing about this through the lens of what we’re teaching in the classroom to meet the challenges above, as well as what we’re inspired by in Michigan and beyond.
It's 9:19 a.m. at Newlab in Detroit. The building we're in was a shell just three years ago when I toured it with our first cohort of urban technology students. Today it's a hive of startups working at the intersection of mobility and society. This morning I'm thick in conversation with a visitor from New York City.
"Urban technology sounds great," she says and then asks, "Why here? Why Michigan?"
One thing that might separate urban technology from other fields of tech is that in the urban realm, innovation rarely is revolutionary or "disruptive." Change is more likely to happen a bit slower because it often involves changing the working culture (and skills!) of firms and departments traditionally responsible for city-making, or of the expectations of people on main street. In that sense, the human strengths of southeast Michigan are an asset.
This place has a strong manufacturing base, but I'm not talking about widgets, I'm talking about culture. Detroit is the home of Motown, and techno, and of marketing campaigns that convinced you to lust after a metal sculpture you can sit inside of. It's not enough to invent the best neighborhood-scale battery storage device; the work of urban technology is also to devise the ways in which such technologies become culturally situated within everyday life. By population, the Detroit metro area is not in the top 10 in America, but by cultural production we're in the top 10 in the world.
The civic heart of Detroit beats loudly. Unions are strong here, as are blockclubs and church groups. Detroit will protest your prototypes if you treat this ground as a "blank slate," but the same community groups that will mount resistance are also an engine of acceptance if you come correct. The patterns of community engagement—of listening and finding a middle ground—are useful patterns for anyone working on hard technologies. As a purple state, we will teach you.
And sure, we also know a thing or two about building stuff at massive scale, whether cars, clothes, or financial products. Automation is old news here, and that's a good thing. It means we can talk about scale, efficiency, edge cases, and maintenance—all the stuff that enables the new wow to become the new normal.
So that's what we're up to here.
📜 New Curriculum, New Season
This summer we spent time revisiting the curriculum now that we have three years of teaching under our collective belt. We used those experiences to understand what's working and what needs to be improved. The impetus for these revisions was, nominally, that we're also shifting to a traditional college schedule of having students begin their studies as first-year students in the fall, whereas to date our freshmen students have entered in January, a notoriously pleasant time to meet Michigan. So, yes, lots of changes in the works. Despite locking the team in a conference room for a week and tearing the curriculum down to shreds, the adjustments we're now narrowing in on are rather minor. We taped most of those shreds back together just as good as new.
From a content perspective the thing we've worked on the most is to dial in what we mean by "technology." One of our strengths is in urban informatics and this aligns with the "computational analysis of the city and spatial outcomes" description above, so that's clearly in. Then our design sequence, which includes interaction and service design, is our way of teaching product design. So when we say technology, we need to equip our students to do urban data science and we need to enable them to make technically-informed design decisions.
After some minor class swaps and a couple additions, this duality of informatics and product/service design is going to be enhanced. Our last winter-start cohort will join in January 2025 and our first fall start cohort will arrive in August 2025. Next year is going to be busy indeed.
🧑🏫 Hiring
With the growth of our degree program we have the privilege of growing our teaching faculty too. We currently have two parallel searches for tenure track and practice track professors of any rank to develop field-defining research and teaching in urban technology and design in our Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology program. We're looking for candidates with expertise in design, technology development, and urban and geospatial analytics. If that sounds like you, let's talk?
These weeks: Project Snowfall continues. Welcoming students back to AA, with seniors this time. Expanded studio space. Couple new faces. Launching a new course. Researching the future of the AECO sector. T-shirts! 🏃