Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -46
Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -46
Entrepreneurship, public sector, what does urban technology mean to you?
“What does urban technology mean to you,” I asked a photographer friend while standing in Hart Plaza, overlooking the Detroit River.
“Maybe social media, because ‘urban’ makes me think it’s about youth… e-scooters and things?” Around us a swirl of people were out enjoying the temperate weather, clusters of them cruising around on scooters.
This has become a favorite question to ask of people who are (probably) not studying, working on, or thinking about the subject. Sure, experts in the subject matter have lots of ideas, and that expertise is important, but questions of urban technology are ultimately about how we all live—and, more importantly, how we live together. Asking someone who’s not soaking in this stuff everyday can be instructive. What does urban technology mean to you?
It’s not all scooters and Pokemons out there. Hart Plaza is also home to a surprisingly profuse array of ominous and inscrutable surveillance devices. What do these things do? Who watches their feeds?
During the initial work on creating this program, one of the questions that we grappled with regularly was the idea of how the work gets applied. So you studied Urban Technology, then what? And in the early discussions we put a lot of effort into reflecting on the idea of entrepreneurship. The word “technology” sometimes feels almost synonymous with “entrepreneurship” here in the US. As in, if you’re working on something that could be called urban technology there are probably investors and a business model involved. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s also not the only way to think about technology.
Earlier this week we tuned into a quick lunchtime broadcast from Axios focusing on the ethnical questions related to the use of technologies like contact tracing to help respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the discussion, former US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, who is literally the person who coined the term “data scientist,” suggested that there are “lots of opportunity to take your skills as a technologist and work in government at all levels.” He should know, because he worked in the Obama Whitehouse.
As governments at the federal and state level struggle to keep up with the pandemic, Patil noted that there’s also a need at county and city levels to have a better capacity to handle data, to analyze it, and to be confident enough in the use of this data that it can be used to make reasoned decisions. He also suggested that discussions of technology get too caught up on the “sexy” technologies like machine learning and AI, and instead there’s more benefit today to be found by focusing on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of around things like food, clothing, water, and shelter. In this current moment, even the challenge of getting data from hospitals to authorities is proving challenging in a number of settings. You don’t need to a whiz in Tensor Flow to make a difference on a challenge like that. Within government and non-profit work, a fluency with even basic programming and use of data can be meaningful.
During the pandemic there are critical shortcomings that expose how un-digital much of government still is (and election season is likely to expose similar challenges all over again), but imagine what happens on the other side of the current public health crisis. During and after the crisis, technology will continue to flow into (and under and through) the public realm.
That means streets traversed by even more e-scooters and more likely to be host to vehicles with various levels of autonomy. It means public spaces more often developed using digital engagement tools to gather feedback from the public. It means parks and trails more likely to be accessed with the aid of apps and other digital services. And so in this context, it means more and more data that cities need to be able to manage. Which means data that cities need to know how to protect for both privacy and security. If we care about the future of cities, we need to think about how technology can help address some of yesterday’s challenges (like getting to work conveniently, or having access to education) while also thinking about tomorrow’s potential pitfalls (like algorithmic bias and errant automation). Cities that do that well and create equitable environments will be the ones that put technology in service of the people, not just some people.
As skepticism grows about tech companies ability to work the public interest, the importance of the public sector’s role is heightened, and so the Urban Technology program at university of Michigan cannot just be focused on private sector entrepreneurship. The future needs new companies started and run by whip-smart people, but it also needs government staffed with people of equal focus and knowledge. We need to expose students to private, public, and third sector ways of making a difference. We need to educate our students to think about business models and financial risks, but also about the power of community-based organizing and advocacy. We want them to understand the role of government (even if they don’t ever work there), but still be committed to pushing the boundaries. This is why a simple focus on “entrepreneurship” does not sit right.
We could add qualifiers to the word like “public sector entrepreneurship” or edit it a little to something like “intrapreneurship,” which is used to describe up-starts working within a large organization, but I think of it through a more basic rubric. Regardless of what our students do after graduating from the Urban Technology program—be it work in government, create a startup, organize with an NGO, or continue with further studies—we want them to be impatient. They must be biased toward action. What does urban technology mean to them? I would hope they say that it means we don’t let other people decide our future for us.
This week: Discussions with partners across the University to work on logistics. Student housing, admissions, marketing were all in the mix. Some time spent revising the website. A socially distant lunch in garden with Malcolm and Kit and a lovely phone call with Anca to learn from our sister program at Taubman College, the B.S. in Architecture.