Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -01
What are the ingredients of a platform + the Most Inclusive Mile
The past two weeks we've shared perspectives on platform urbanism without going too deep into what exactly "platform" means. It's a term loosely used and rarely defined, but we’re not afraid of that. "Place" is an equally ambiguous and important word, for instance. What is the difference between "place" and "space?" Don't ask that question of an architect or urban planner unless you want to set off a very long discussion.
Rounding out our dip into platform urbanism, this week we’re sharing some work that yours truly completed last summer during the initial phases of the COVID lockdown. In collaboration with Star City Group, I worked on a set of scenarios for the future of local logistics as a contribution to Minderoo Foundation's Future Says initiative. The Most Important Mile, as we called it, imagines how platforms could nurture social bonds, local opportunity, and community resilience if they were owned by the public or by community members. To clarify our thinking in the early stages of that effort we created a definition for platforms. This week we’re sharing that and a snippet of The Most Important Mile below.
Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan, written by faculty director Bryan Boyer, to explore the many issues and themes at the intersection of cities and technology. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction.
🍱 What are the Ingredients of a Platform?
When thinking about the platforms that are relevant to platform urbanism, we can think of them as having core technology including hardware and software that provide the critical functionality for which the platform is known, infrastructure that enables that functionality to act on/in the world, a business model that provides longevity (money in) and incentives for others to keep using the platform (money out), and a position on governance that includes attitude toward law/regulations as well as internal rules/terms intended to shape behavior of platform users.
Let's use a local example, the ramshackle parking lot kitchen that we've analyzed previously.
Core Technology: Customer facing ordering system that (presumably) ties into an employee facing ticket tracking system; payments; and analytics. For instance, they probably track the burn rate of ingredients in the kitchen and use that to inform purchase of supplies. Or they should. Without knowing the details of how NBRHD operates, its plausible that they are also using the camera on the exterior of their trailer and/or the built-in sensors on customers' phones to extend their ability to gather information about the world and predict demand. How many people and cars pass by? What's the conversion rate? Which part of town are orders coming from?
Infrastructure: Physical kitchens assembled as expeditiously as possible, including by eschewing buildings! Delivery devices such as e-bikes and cars. For urban technology, the question of infrastructure is critically important, not only because because it’s how the platform becomes literally urban, but because of the operational and financial considerations that come with having equipment on the balance sheet.
Business Model: Sell food to customers! More specifically, help popular restaurants expand beyond their limited geography by providing a network of kitchens that can supply beloved recipes regardless of geography. To do this, leverage cheap real estate (like parking lots) and expedient treatment of infrastructure to keep costs down. Presumably they have a theory of how they can provide a better customer experience/outcome than other delivery-only platforms. Freshness? And the proposition to restaurants is that they make it cheaper/easier to start and operate a food business (is that true?)
Governance: They are operating in a legal/regulatory grey area by deploying mobile infrastructure in parking lots in lieu of permanent buildings. Internally, there are questions of how the platform encourages behaviors that are good for longterm viability (leaving accurate reviews) and minimizes those which are bad (delivery drivers gaming the system).
That's an example of how a venture-backed company is doing things, but what if we fired up the platform imaginary, as Rob described a couple weeks ago?
📦 Inclusive Futures for Local Delivery
The Most Important Mile was motivated by examples of COVID-inspired resilience and adaptation as local people struggled to safely get the goods they need while staying at home under pandemic lockdown. Another important starting point was the basic observation that the API-ification of the web has made core technologies behind platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo (and skills needed to work with them) more accessible.
Whereas 10 years ago it would have taken (in fact, did take) a tech company full of well-paid engineers to build something like Uber, now a co-op can clone it with a fraction of the resources and none of the shady behavior. Here’s a snippet:
More sustainable, inclusive, homegrown approaches to the challenge of population-scale home delivery are taking root. Throughout Europe, agricultural co-operatives are running emergency home delivery services for locally-sourced products— and working together to keep supply chains short. In Toronto, restaurateurs are teaming up to build tools that take orders via Instagram and Facebook Messenger, avoiding app commissions that could otherwise tally as high as 35 percent for now, but still not freeing themselves from large tech platforms. And in India, a wave of new delivery startups has mobilized millions of small shops as big retailers struggle to meet surging demand.
These efforts show how the challenge of adapting to pandemic protocols provides an opportunity to rethink how technology connects local economies together, and to the world. This is not lopsided innovation, but consumers and local vendors both testing out new relationships and technologies, hand-in-hand. They highlight how governing local delivery will mean rewiring the connections between local commerce, communities, supply chains, and the information or data that makes them move.
Creating the decision-making structures to produce better outcomes won’t be easy. What do we expect in terms of work and economic security, a fair and level playing field for local enterprises, and the uses and abuses of sensitive information? What technologies need to be locally-provided and opened up, rather than controlled by global corporations, and which are better served by the reach of a global organization? What is the role of local governments, and what tools do they have to shape what happens?
From this prompt we created three scenarios, each presented as a short written narrative. First is a circular economy "farm to table to farm" consumer coop combines ugly fruits, dark stores, and new financial services. It’s the story of growing scales of influence all powered by a crowd working together to expand something like SirPlus in Germany into a platform for growing, distributing, and consuming food.
Etsytown is the name we gave to an imagined distributed network of local production spread across Brooklyn and Queens in the second scenario. Using a hive of small scale factories, a swarm of open source delivery bots, and the collaborative muscle of a diverse community, this scenario shows that while the city may not be a computer, the question of meeting basic needs can be met by a distributed “small pieces loosely joined” federation in place of centralized behemoths like Amazon. Or another way to think about that is, how would local logistics operate if efficiency were not the most important thing?
Finally, Postify is an exploration of how Australia's national postal service could convert itself into a platform. By giving up on physically carrying parcels, Postify can instead focus on providing the core technologies and marketplace to power thousands of logistics companies who move goods in unique and locally relevant ways. What if the post office were a database that knew the location of nearly everything even while it has physical possession of nearly nothing? What new capability would that give a country in times of need—such as the crisis moments from 2020 when PPE was scarce? Would the tradeoffs of privacy worth it?
If any of this sounds interesting, The Most Important Mile can be downloaded for free via this link.
Links
🏛 Think it sounds crazy to imagine the postal service building technically impressive platforms? The Tech States podcast might convince you otherwise.
🌈 Dimeji Onafuwa was not talking about platform urbanism when he said that “We have the opportunity to create the things that will make us into the people we want to be,” but that sounds like a good test for urban platforms.
🛴 Urban technology platforms often involve moving things around the city and that can be a costly and cumbersome endeavor. Spin scooters are trying to make it easier to ensure scooters are well-located by equipping them with remote operational capabilities. Ghost drivers. Detroit’s light bikes have no such fancy tech but the city’s light bike culture is the best.
🍪 Using a Macbook power brick to bake a cookie is not an example of platform urbanism.
📡 Neither is this: For internet, apply sprinkler?
This week: Organizing. Writing. Meeting. An energetic hour with Abhi Nemani. Finally got that document out. the. door. You know the one. The document that never seems to get done? It’s done now. 🏃