Open-air computers

IN 1995 GEORGE GILDER, an American writer, declared that “cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era.” Electronic communications would become so easy and universal that people and businesses would have no need to be near one another. Humanity, Mr Gilder thought, was “headed for the death of cities”.

It hasn’t turned out that way. People are still flocking to cities, especially in developing countries. Cisco’s Mr Elfrink reckons that in the next decade 100 cities, mainly in Asia, will reach a population of more than 1m. In rich countries, to be sure, some cities are sad shadows of their old selves (Detroit, New Orleans), but plenty are thriving. In Silicon Valley and the newer tech hubs what Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, calls “the urban ability to create collaborative brilliance” is alive and well.

Cheap and easy electronic communication has probably helped rather than hindered this. First, connectivity is usually better in cities than in the countryside, because it is more lucrative to build telecoms networks for dense populations than for sparse ones. Second, electronic chatter may reinforce rather than replace the face-to-face kind. In his 2011 book, “Triumph of the City”, Mr Glaeser theorises that this may be an example of what economists call “Jevons’s paradox”. In the 19th century the invention of more efficient steam engines boosted rather than cut the consumption of coal, because they made energy cheaper across the board. In the same way, cheap electronic communication may have made modern economies more “relationship-intensive”, requiring more contact of all kinds.

Recent research by Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, suggests there is something to this. The study, based on the geographical pattern of 1m mobile-phone calls in Portugal, found that calls between phones far apart (a first contact, perhaps) are often followed by a flurry within a small area (just before a meeting).

Data deluge

A third factor is becoming increasingly important: the production of huge quantities of data by connected devices, including smartphones. These are densely concentrated in cities, because that is where the people, machines, buildings and infrastructures that carry and contain them are packed together. They are turning cities into vast data factories. “That kind of merger between physical and digital environments presents an opportunity for us to think about the city almost like a computer in the open air,” says Assaf Biderman of the SENSEable lab. As those data are collected and analysed, and the results are recycled into urban life, they may turn cities into even more productive and attractive places.

Some of these “open-air computers” are being designed from scratch, most of them in Asia. At Songdo, a South Korean city built on reclaimed land, Cisco has fitted every home and business with video screens and supplied clever systems to manage transport and the use of energy and water. But most cities are stuck with the infrastructure they have, at least in the short term. Exploiting the data they generate gives them a chance to upgrade it. Potholes in Boston, for instance, are reported automatically if the drivers of the cars that hit them have an app called Street Bump on their smartphones. And, particularly in poorer countries, places without a well-planned infrastructure have the chance of a leap forward. Researchers from the SENSEable lab have been working with informal waste-collecting co-operatives in São Paulo whose members sift the city’s rubbish for things to sell or recycle. By attaching tags to the trash, the researchers have been able to help the co-operatives work out the best routes through the city so they can raise more money and save time and expense.

Exploiting data may also mean fewer traffic jams. A few years ago Alexandre Bayen, of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues ran a project (with Nokia, then the leader of the mobile-phone world) to collect signals from participating drivers’ smartphones, showing where the busiest roads were, and feed the information back to the phones, with congested routes glowing red. These days this feature is common on smartphones. Mr Bayen’s group and IBM Research are now moving on to controlling traffic and thus easing jams rather than just telling drivers about them. Within the next three years the team is due to build a prototype traffic-management system for California’s Department of Transportation.

Cleverer cars should help, too, by communicating with each other and warning drivers of unexpected changes in road conditions. Eventually they may not even have drivers at all. And thanks to all those data they may be cleaner, too. At the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute in Berlin, Ilja Radusch and his colleagues show how hybrid cars can be automatically instructed to switch from petrol to electric power if local air quality is poor, say, or if they are going past a school.

Enforcing the law may also become easier. Andrew Hudson-Smith, director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, thinks that within five years or so police forces will be able to predict and prevent some crimes by watching Twitter and other social media. The thought may give civil libertarians the creeps, but some Londoners, recalling the part played by instant messaging in last year’s riots in their city, may wish the police already had such foresight.

More mundanely, existing data about crime can be analysed more systematically. “Law enforcement’s main problem is the fragmentation of information,” says Mark Cleverley of IBM. Local policemen may know that street robberies are likelier on certain days of the week; combining information like this with other data (such as weather, time of day and so forth) makes crimes easier to prevent. In Memphis predictive-analytics software helped to reduce serious crime by 30% and violent crime by 15% between 2006 and 2010.

However, the real prize, says John Day of IBM Research, lies not in single areas such as traffic or policing but in making whole cities better by drawing on data from multiple sources for multiple purposes. Smartphones and cameras, say, can track the flow of people as well as that of cars. A social-media flurry may show that more people than expected are going to turn up at a rock concert, suggesting that traffic should be redirected, more public transport laid on or more police deployed.

Even brilliant technology is not much use if cities are badly run or their politics are dysfunctional. Different departments or local authorities have to work together. In Rio de Janeiro’s “control centre”, officials from several departments watch screens side by side. When a thunderstorm strikes, the airport and schools can be closed and traffic redirected from this single centre. In newly built places institutions have to be designed along with the infrastructure. Simon Giles of Accenture, a consulting firm, explains that when his firm worked on a “creative digital city” in Guadalajara, Mexico, a structure of trusts was created to oversee the development and running of the place, helping to ensure that the benefits of development are shared equally within the community.

Another problem is how to pay for all the analytics and new infrastructure in cities. Private provision is one possibility. For example, German insurers are providing their customers with weather-warning systems developed at FOKUS, says Ulrich Meissen, head of the institute’s electronic-safety department. Cisco’s Mr Elfrink points out that cities themselves could charge for many smart services. Residents might pay a few dollars a month for online medical consultations, alerts that their children have reached school or internet access on the bus.

One project tracked 3,000 bits of rubbish from Seattle. Information like this may make people think about what they throw away

But quite a lot of things to make city life better can be done inexpensively by residents themselves. Many governments and cities are encouraging this by making public data available. The European Union is sponsoring a project called CitySDK, involving eight cities from Manchester to Istanbul, to give developers data and tools to create digital urban services. One pilot, in Helsinki, is meant to make it easier for citizens to report problems. Another, in Amsterdam, will use real-time traffic data to allow people to find the best way around town and avoid traffic jams. A third, in Lisbon, will guide tourists.

Mr Biderman says there is an even richer seam to be mined as people find and create their own data in real time. For example, air quality can be continually monitored by cyclists and cross-checked with time, place and weather. In fact, just about any object can tell a story. An earlier SENSEable project tracked 3,000 bits of rubbish from Seattle to nearby dumps, to Portland, via Chicago to Florida and California, and to landfills all over America. Information like this may make people think about what they throw away. Some may even do something about it.

Many ideas are brewing in the world’s cities, from grand projects to single apps. Some will be dead ends; others will rely on the enthusiasm of citizens, which will not always be in plentiful supply. But in lots of imperceptible ways, from better traffic management to bins that tweet when they are ready to be emptied, city life is getting better.

^{Source: The research on switching the modes of hybrid cars is a joint project of the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, the Hamilton Institute at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and the Technical University of Berlin. Further information can be found here.}