This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
There are certain qualities often presented as the benefits of a " smart" city. These include efficiency, convenience and security. Delivering these qualities, we are told, requires access to as much data as possible. With managers in control of the network, possessing a god-like view of everything that's going on and a capacity to make decisions on your behalf, you'll get to work on time, buy things seamlessly and arrive home without being accosted by anyone troublesome.
These aspirations for orderliness worryingly echo rationales of the 60s and 70s for building Pruitt-Igoe high-rises and Robert Moses highways, which in many cases we now regret because of their immense social and environmental costs. Overly planned "smart" cities, with their fetish for and dependence on data, are highly likely to have similar unplanned consequences. It has already started: Evgeny Morozov describes, in To Save Everything, Click Here, how publicly available crime statistics in certain areas led to a drop in property prices, and consequently a drop in crime reporting (and therefore "poorer" data).
The belief that data necessarily leads to information, which inevitably produces knowledge and generates wisdom (and by extension, desirable "behaviour change"), has its roots in the Enlightenment's claims for rationality. If we know the universe fully and can see Truth more clearly, we are told, we can understand it, explain it and control it. Data, they say, makes us make better decisions. Free from the constraints of ethics in making decisions, you can claim "it's not me, it's the data" -- and therein lies the seduction of impartiality: there's little need for agency, accountability or creativity. Ultimately, an automaton would make the same decisions.
One of the problems that arises is that this approach assumes the universe and cities built within it contain a finite set of knowable parameters and patterns. It suggests we simply need the appropriate equipment to reveal them all -- technology helps us do these things "better". Yet, cities are what Russell Ackoff might call a "mess". Every issue interrelates to and interacts with every other issue; there is no clear "solution"; there are no universal objective parameters; and sometimes those working on problems are actually the ones who are causing them.
Urban data isn't simply discovered, it is invented, manipulated and crafted.
The Enlightenment provides clues on how this might play out because, apart from giving rise to a "truly enlightened public", it also gave birth to Grub Street, a scrappy area of London where impoverished hacks, poets, pamphleteers and libellists lived and published. In irreverent and illegal texts, skeptical Grub Street hacks mocked the "enlightened" (nobility, monarchy, the Church and academies), and thereby helped foster the spirit that led directly to 1779's French Revolution and then England's Great Reform Act of 1832, which replaced authoritarianism with both representative government and civil rights.
In the smart-city equivalent -- <span class="s1">"Grub City" -- I see citizens mocking the homogenising of static urban data infrastructures and rejecting their bids to handle cities' "super wicked" messes through reductivist approaches to data. What we decide to measure, <span class="s1">how we decide to measure, and why we decide to measure -- these questions are vital <span class="s2">for Grub City citizens, who craft and perform data "badly" and "messily", because that enables invention unanticipated by planners.
Grub City citizens recognise it's through the activity of measurement, not passive interpreting of data, that we understand our environment; that we build up intuitions about how we affect it; and through which we develop our own standards of evidence. It's the ensuing heterogeneity of understandings, explanations and attempts to control (as well as the heterogeneity of goals implied) that is essential for any sustainable model of city-making. New technologies help us do this not "better" but "differently". We will see contradictions, for even collaboration does not need consensus. But no matter what attempts are made to impose order and predictability on cities of the near future, a messiness will inevitably arise.
Long live Grub City!
Usman Haque is an architect who designs urban interactive spectacles. He founded pachube.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
