Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -38
Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -38
"Smart cities," people, scooter chaos
How do you show something that doesn’t exist yet? By writing, of course! At the moment we’re deep into writing a briefing for an illustrator to make pictures to help us advertise the program. That first and most pesky question comes back, what exactly is urban technology? What should we draw?
I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan. This newsletter is about cities, technology, and design. While we launch the program, we’re detailing the process of working toward the day when we welcome our first students, now 38 weeks and counting. Have any questions? Reply to this message and we’ll be glad to hear from you.
Pair the words urban technology and they conjure buzzwords such as “smart cities” or “internet of things.” Those of us who have been working in this field for a while remember “ubiquitous computing” and “networked urbanism” and even ugly terms like “phygital” that we should all forget as soon as possible. None of these are satisfying. Internet of things, though evocative, could describe a warehouse as much as a city, and ubiquitous computing sounds like a bad dream involving too many excel spreadsheets.
At the root, urban technology describes a world in which nearly everything in the city is shaped in some way by code. Power is cheap, computers are small, and bandwidth is nearly everywhere. When these things happen, objects that used to be dull and rote can take on new complexities.
Add code and…
… Street lights that used to be on or off can adjust their color temperature and brightness to optimize for safety while reducing light pollution.
… Concrete that used to require regular inspections by humans to look for cracks and potential damage can have embedded sensors that send notifications when they need help.
… McDonalds’ Menus that used to be printed and static can be dynamic, allowing the company to test different menu designs until they find one that’s easiest to read for their “billions and billions served,” regardless of their reading abilities.
… Buses that used to require a human driver can now employ that same person to be the friendly face and helpful hand that public transit is too often missing.
Today the built environment is programmable and that programmability means that things that we used to take as static are now dynamic. Things that used to have on or off switches can now perform a wide range of different in-between states. Systems that used to require a human to specify when they turn on and off can now be programmed to make those assessments on their own, based on rules. Code that used to function completely on one device, before computers were connected by default, can now operate with input from across the internet.
The things that are all around us in the built environment can now respond to humans, taking action in response to our activity and needs. Put differently, we can interact with the stuff of the city in new ways. That sounds pretty good, right?
But we have to return to “smart cities” again to pummel this term a little more. Like personal computers, one of the first things that got people excited about smart cities in their early days was the ability to do things more efficiently. Smart cities promised places with less traffic congestion, more responsive police, and more efficient energy grids. What’s wrong with this? Let’s answer with a picture.
Rio de Janeiro Smart Cities control room built by IBM
Where are the people?! Yes, ok, there are humans in this image but they’re staring at screens and peering back at the city as if gods in lab coats. It’s telling that images of Rio de Janeiro as a smart city mostly show the control room rather jubilant streets. The image above shows a top-down view of the city and an attempt to “manage” it like a factory. There are some serious political and technological reasons why the idea of “smart cities” is a dead end, but without even getting to that morass we should step back and ask ourselves if there’s not a deeper failure.
Cities are not to be commanded or controlled, they are to be explored, nurtured, cultivated, danced across, overwhelmed by, and exhilarated within. Cities are cauldrons for human relationships and interactions of every kind, and they have been since the first settlements helped humans gain some independence from the natural cycle of growing seasons.
Yes, future cities will have solar panels, wind turbines, microgrids, autonomous shuttles, maintenance robots, food delivery drones, modular construction, upcycling, and space as a service. In fact, cities already have those things; they’re just not evenly distributed yet, to borrow from William Gibson. Those are all intriguing things and we will explore many if not all of them in our program at University of Michigan. But you know what else future cities will have, and in far greater numbers than even the most ubiquitous gizmo? People!
People have and always will be the heart of the city, so when we think about how to draw urban technology—and more importantly, how to think about urban technology—we begin with the kinds of human experiences that could and should be enabled. We dream of cities where it’s easier for intergenerational families to live together, where the barriers to starting a new business are lower; where music, art, clean water, and safety are equally easy to access; where decision-making is made among neighbors first, rather than shifting power to elected representatives by default; where learning experiences are diffuse and easy to find; where human life is intertwined and even tangled up with nature.
In a “smart city,” technology is an obsession at the expense of the people. Technology is the smart city’s answer no matter what the question is, but we don’t roll like that. Instead, we are concerned with human life in urban places and attentive to the reality that technology has always been part of that existence—even stairs are a form of technology, as our illustrator recently reminded me. Think about that for a second; think about the first people who built stairs. Imagine being dumbfounded by how useful steps are and how hard it was to be scrambling up a muddy hillsides all the time!
In 2020 we’re no longer amazed by stairs, but we do have a set of newish technologies like that are finally mature-enough and widespread-enough that we can imagine them as part of everyday life in cities. Sensors, computers, broadband connectivity, and algorithms are not ends, but means to a goal. So let the IBMs and CISCOs of the world have “smart cities” we’ll take cities full of thriving people that happen to have bricks and trees and stairs and sensors and a whole lot more.
Coming back to the question of the illustrations we’re commissioning, the pictures we need to draw are human experiences and interactions, and by doing so we draw cities into the future of people and not the other way around. So here’s the secret, urban technology is about the future of cities and the future of communities. What kind of community do you want to be part of? What kind of city do you want to call home? If we’re good at clarifying those, designing and building the technology is easy.
Check back in a couple weeks to see how things land with the illustrations. For more on the critique of smart cities, check out The Smart Enough City, a book by Ben Green who recently joined university of Michigan as a Postdoctoral scholar and hosted a talk in Rob Goodspeed’s lab at Taubman College earlier today. Everyone ends up in Michigan eventually!
👾 Postcard from Detroit
From a recent Friday night in downtown Detroit. Electric, on-demand scooters: probably a good idea. Making sidewalks hard to navigate: definitely a bad idea. One of the things that should be exciting to current and future college students is that today’s urban technologies are so clunky! No one would look at this image above and say “yeah, that system is working perfectly.” Someone needs to design a better way and that’s why our program exists. Maybe that someone will be you?
Bonus picture because this access cover was too nice to ignore. Can an access cover be happy? If so, I think it looks like this.
Links
🌃 Amazingly satisfying background art of cities and buildings in pixelated glory
📚 Cyd Harrell’s Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide should probably be a textbook for us.
🚔 This week Detroit city council voted to allow the police department to continue using facial recognition. Here’s a good play by play, a formal article, and here, because it’s a new and interesting thing we can do in 2020, is a screenshot of that meeting.
🌈 Allied Media Projects has a new website! If you’re not familiar with their work, pick a few projects and dive in. Cultivating design, technology, music and more for Liberation.
🏭 If you haven’t heard of “dark stores” yet, get ready to hear that term a lot. As delivery times get shorter, distributions centers will become an urban fixture again.
This week: Dropped in on urban design student reviews with McLain and later had a chat with Maria, director of the Master of Urban Design degree. First synchronous meeting of our faculty working group this semester and we’re off sprinting. Malcolm mused on obsolete buzzwords among other things (thank you). Couple calls with Jonathan to sort out longer term items. Admissions, Marketing, Budget. In a word: groundwork. 🏃♂️