live in urban areas that's why right now cities across the world are experimenting with new technologies to solve all the problems like transportation and waste disposal i guess for tonight's conversations of the great minds anthony townsend a senior research fellow at n.y.u. has written center for transportation and has written a link about this phenomenon as well as its potential dangers in his new book smart city big data civic akers' and the quest for a new utopia and he joins us from our new york studios anthony walker. hi tom great to be here thanks for joining us let's start with you what what gets somebody so interested in animated about urban planning issues that they dig in and write a brilliant book like this. well i was recently graduated student from rutgers university back in one thousand nine hundred four and i had my degree in urban studies but my first job out of college actually was in the telecommunications industry i worked eighteen t. in south plainfield new jersey at the headquarters of there just launched an

internet service called world net and i got to see the internet basically spinning up first hand and sometimes i would work the overnight tech support shift and a friend of mine down the hall would bring me into the control room and they had this big map almost like the map from the movie war games or you know what you might imagine a nasa mission control kind of scene big screen showing the eighteen thousand national network and he would type in a few commands and reroute traffic from one city to another and i was just fascinated by that i was fascinated by cities and the idea that technology was going to become almost the new railroads you know fiber optic lines connecting cities to something that i really wanted to learn about and i basically spent the next twenty years studying and you've certainly done well. in your book is both. optimistic and cautionary and i'd like to explore both of those through. first of all the optimistic are you talk about the era of the new smart

cities there are. some the the while for example the plan it valley imports your goal the cons of techno city and kenya it's on go in south korea there's some actual people are actually creating or at least trying to create really genuinely smart cities low carbon footprint all these kind of tell me about those what are what is a smart city. well you know smart city at the most basic level is a city where new digital technologies are being used to address these timeless urban problems like traffic crime waste disposal in urban planning the term smart often gets bandied about to describe a whole bunch of progressive policies like bike lanes or growth controls but i really want to focus in on on the role of technology because i don't think technology is the silver bullet and some of these these digital utopias that you mention like song go in korea or master and i would be really do try to use

technologies the silver bullet that's going to solve all of our problems and it's almost a. false utopia that we can just simply install a piece of software and all these problems are going to go away in the real world is much more complicated than that and the truth is that even the biggest of those showcase projects will never be home to more than one hundred thousand people at the same time we're talking about a million people a week either being born in or migrating to cities around the world and so the scale of the problem is far beyond what the showcase projects are trying to accomplish so were we begin how do we know what's what. we have cities how do we make them smarter where do we begin. with what i really tried to do in the book was to almost. bank a lot of the hype that the idea of using information technology to tackle the problems of cities is a new thing we've been doing this since the ten thousand years. they go there first

day a nomad sat down and decided to plant the farm and then markets and government and religious sites grew up around that writing was the first information technology and it arose at the same time as the first human settlements if you look at our own industrialization and urban growth in the u.s. and europe in the late one nine hundred century you had technologies like the telegraph and the telephone punch card machines that could tabulate data very quickly those technologies were invented precisely to govern massive growing cities of unprecedented size and that's really what we're doing again now but i think where we need to start is with problems and not with solutions and you know we're about five or six years into the smart cities movement really started in two thousand and eight which was the year that the world became fifty percent urban for the first time it was also the year that there were more mobile broadband lines worldwide than fixed for the first time to the internet became untethered for the

first time there was also the year there were more things connected to the internet and people and we're really starting to understand now that it's not that technology is going to drive the solutions it's that we're going to identify the problems that technology can address and what are some of the most pressing problems that we can address with technology and how to do that. well we've certainly seen security as an area where there is a lot of interest in applying technology sometimes it's overdone as we've seen you know this year with all these revelations about kind of over over surveillance but security is a real issue in cities we've seen a lot of interesting applications of technology around resilience in trying to make cities. more able to withstand the shocks both manmade or natural disasters and energy and carbon emissions is the other one you know most of the infrastructure that we've inherited from the twentieth century is. tremendously

inefficient and wasteful and by putting sensors and remote controls into these networks we can we can manage them in much more much more efficient ways that allow us to go save energy as well as eliminate the need to build additional roads or additional power plants i've read that if you live and work in one that apparently that's the most observed city in the world that you are photographed or identified thirty some odd times in an average day. or something that would give george orwell you know he'd be running out of the room screaming. how do we know first of all as it has that measurably improve the security of of london and secondly how do we know where to draw the lines just to start with that security issue. between you know privacy and appropriate security. i mean if you could prove to me that walking around a city like london or new york or washington i'm only photographed thirty times

a day i'd actually treat that as good news in today's environment i suspect it's actually ten or a hundred times more than that and it's not just the government that's doing the photographing retailers now are using all kinds of sensing technologies to understand who's in their stores what are they looking at are they responding to advertising in the environment people are surveilling each other. you know we have all have very high resolution cameras in our pockets that we use quite often. you know we saw for instance after the boston marathon bombing that there's actually really valuable information that is captured on those cameras that people are carrying around you know in their pockets you know i think it's really up to any society to decide where it draws the line and i just spent a week in singapore which is a country has a very different view about the government's role in monitoring citizens' activities citizens have a very different view than we do. what the government should be allowed to do and

what the trade offs between invasion of privacy and public good are and i think it's something that we're going to see play out in very different ways around the world. and it's almost impossible to predict how it plays out there is a. news article about six months ago about a company in london actually that was tracking people as they moved around the financial district using the astray wireless signals that come off of your cell phone when it talks to the tower and there was an uproar about it and the government city government came in and basically shut that shut the company down and then you know a few months later there was a cover story in the wall street journal about a company that's doing the exact same thing in toronto and nobody bats an eyelash very similar societies with a shared culture movie and shared legal system even reacting totally differently to the same technological intervention and i find that. it shows

just how complicated these issues are and how difficult it is to anticipate how will react to them i was really surprised when google got outed when they were doing their street view stuff and it turned out that they were finding people's open wife and now works in some cases even password protected ones and basically going in and sucking down information from your home computer as they drove by and it didn't produce congressional hearings that there wasn't you know shock i mean do we have are we at a greater risk of loss of privacy from the private sector than the public sector i mean you know you compare that to contrast that to ed snowden's revelations about the n.s.a. . absolutely i mean the amount of data that governments are collecting is just a stupendous i came across a figure today some of my colleagues at n.y.u. have estimated that new york city's government collects a terabyte of data each day about what's happening in the city and what citizens are doing it's a bit of a bit of a thats it. it's it's

a lot of hard drive storage. and that's a fraction of what the private sector collects on a daily basis just in this city and it's i think this era of big data is really in a very risky period right now where the companies that are deploying these sensory mechanisms are. so enamored of the capabilities that they've created that you know the urge to collect first archive and then you know figure out what to do with it later and so it's almost like a land rush that's going to deploy these sensor networks to collect the data and then to basically you know unleashes much computing power as possible on it too to create value out of it so we have corporations trying to monetize our privacy we have cities trying to use this for security how how does this fit in with smart cities is how to how can cities use that information in

a way that the really is consistent with urban planning goals. it's really basically at the bottom line about managing government as effectively and as objective only as many businesses manage their own operations so that you know the idea of introducing performance indicators or quantitative measures of how government is doing is something that's actually quite new the other big area that people are really excited about is being able not just to react to problems that happen a city but to predict so predicting when a wheel on a subway car may fail based on all of your observations of how those wheels failed in the past looking at different data sets a meals on wheels delivery tax delinquencies and mashing that up and being able to identify senior citizens that might be at risk terry and. emergency word blizzard

these are the kinds of things that i think get people government very excited because it's not just about being more efficient or more transparent it's actually about transforming the way government works and innovating the way government deliver services and frankly citizens have come to expect the same level of innovation from government that they experience in the marketplace when they when they buy goods and services and it's really been a very difficult thing for local governments especially for cash strapped all over the world right now particularly in the u.s. so to keep up with those expectations more of tonight's conversations of great minds we. have to break.

i would rather as questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question. chances

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brought about conversations with great minds i'm speaking with anthony townsend senior research fellow at n.y.u. is ruben center for transportation and author of the new book smart cities big data civic backers and the quest for a new utopia anthony what is a civic hacker. civic hacker is someone who is using new digital technologies to try to reinvent government essentially or to try and reinvent their community and a lot of them are working with open data open government into which is a trend that's really taken hold in cities and nations around the world since roughly two thousand and eight two thousand and nine when it when it began in washington d.c. actually with the. c.t.o. of the city vivek kundra released a bunch of data sets that the city had previously had. add it all over the web or

not release it all and basically they're trying to use the state it to create services to create maps to create stories about what's happening in cities and that allows people to to to make change and to experience their city and more you know useful fashion now into this realm of this public civic realm we find a lot of for profit corporations stepping you talked about i.b.m.'s operation center in rio de janeiro and and. i don't want to characterize your characterization but it seemed like you were less than satisfied with the way that rio is portray itself as a smart city. you want to refine that a bit. yeah i mean the reason i wrote the book was you know i'm trained as it was an urban planner i know about cities i educated myself over many years about technology and how technology was getting into cities particularly the internet and

network technologies. and you know i really saw the technology in the service of cities not cities in the service of technology in two thousand and eight i b m really kind of open the floodgates as the fiscal crisis the financial crisis hit and their corporate customers stopped buying their technology and services they looked to governments which are ramping up stimulus spending and the launch of a very very aggressive marketing campaign that made some really bold and i think unfounded claims that they could fix all the problems of cities essentially by just installing a piece of software and there were other companies that came along like cisco systems that were promising you know visions of cities based around their products in much the same fashion that general motors sold us on a vision of you know a landscape a suburban landscape you know were going to stay around their products and i felt compelled to respond to that because they were peddling a kind of cracker barrel. ending of how cities work and how government works and i

felt the need to set the record straight back in the nineteen i think was the nineteen teens in general motors and i believe it was firestone it was one of the big tire companies went to los angeles and said we will to end los angeles that time had the best above ground and trolley system in the country best public transportation system the country said we'll run it for you you know privatized to us and they did and then the car company in the tire company ripped up all the tracks and and l.a. has been suffering ever since are you suggesting that. not necessarily i.b.m. specifically but some of these companies that are hopping into this mill you and saying hey we can solve these problems are doing the essentially the same thing that general motors and the tire company were convicted of fraud for in a trial in the one nine hundred twenty so. yeah i mean it's not it's clear cut but i think we're out of a very similar period to really kind of a post-war u.s.

period when you know we basically made a decision that we were going to divest in our cities and invest in motor is ation basically build a whole infrastructure and culture essentially around it. and you know a lot of what we're trying to do now with smart technology and smart cities is to undo the consequences of motivation. and so the way i feel is rather than rather than making a whole new set of mistakes on top of the ones we've already made we really need to look long term and think about what could go wrong with the deployment of all these technologies and some of the things we've covered around privacy i mean you know there's still time to put that genie back in the bottle i think but we have to we have to do it deliberately and we have to design our cities to not be surveillance chambers or panopticon i think resilience is another big issue where we may be digging ourselves into a ditch with some of these technologies if you look at things like amazon web services which powers thousands of apps and thousands of smart city solutions all around the world. really

a handful of buildings data centers you know that amazon runs if one of this goes offline. and that could seriously disrupt cities all over the world and you know the example i like to use is you know it's one thing if your netflix goes out or or an app stops working but what if what if the fingerprint authentication system that you used to get in your front door goes down but it was not for the whole neighborhood or the whole city that could be a huge problem the global positioning system the g.p.s. satellite network o.m.b. has gone on after the air force repeatedly for now maintain a system that at the level of reliability that it needs to be maintained and you know that the u.k. government issued a report that was basically saying you know we need to we need to stop depending upon the united states for the service because it's woven into our economy and so many ways that we don't even understand so there's a lot of these single points of failure in smart cities that i think are something that we really just we have to we have to assess the risks as we as we wade in and

we build these things so should if a city is looking at a localized basically if for example new york city were to say ok we're going to become more resilient and we're going to do that in part by not using silicon valley data centers to to run our city we're going to do all that here is a better to do it at the level of the city itself or at the level of the neighborhood should they say you know ok so who is going to have its own center and greenwich village will have its owner and else get you know that's. about it well there's a lot of factors to consider and you know i think the really difficult thing to navigate going forward these systems is that at the end of the day many that objective many of these systems is to make our cities as efficient as possible so that we can operate them more cheaply and you know with less energy use and less emissions but in a lot of times squeezing out the excess capacity actually makes you more vulnerable to a disruption or a crisis and we see this in the same. the telephone network and the cellular

telephone network is optimized for peak peacetime activity now for peak crisis activity and every time we have a disaster you know whether it's the boston marathon bombing or the sandy flood here in new york city we see the networks go down just from from over overutilization i think the neighborhood versus city question is really interesting and in the new york region there's a lot of activity going on trying to think about how we how we beef people the regions defense is up for another disaster and i think the most progressive thinking is actually saying that we need to have almost autonomy at the neighborhood level across all of the critical infrastructure systems water food energy telecommunications and i think that's something that we're going to we're going to start to see now whether that means that the city governments kind of routine services are going to be distributed throughout the city there's really powerful economic forces that say you kind of want to consolidate and centralize

some of that stuff so it's really going to depend on what system we're talking about and how much how critical it is in the event of a disaster that's fast i'd always thought of that in terms of economics or politics i wrote an op ed years ago called in praise of inefficiency you know we've got six banks that control assets equal to sixty five percent of the entire g.d.p. the united states they're very efficient they used to be over seven hundred banks now they're only six the seven hundred got condensed into but they're not very resilient you know in two thousand and eight we had to bail them all. so you're saying the same thing happens in the cities what about the suburban versus urban we've got these suburban areas that are not quite cities. and they're highly dependent on vehicles but what do we do with. well i mean this is the big question you know a lot of urban planners in the u.s. would like to reverse the trend toward suburbanization and there's there's a lot of demographic and economic factors that are. actually sort of makes suburbs

less attractive for lots of different groups for people who need health care and can't drive themselves as they age to young people who want to different lifestyle but i think a lot of these technologies are actually going to extend the viability of suburbs by making. surface transportation more efficient by helping manage traffic congestion there is even a study that i saw that came out of a european research group that was arguing that suburban density is actually the best land use pattern for. large scale distributed solar production because you have the surface area on the rooftops that you need to actually produce the power and so you know i think the suburbs aren't i wouldn't i wouldn't. write the obituary in the suburbs yet i think they have a lot of life left in them fast and that makes for example chattanooga with their gig in chattanooga has

a broadband system that is owned by the people that operated for the people by the city as opposed to having comcast horizon do it what's the result of that. you know they have world close class broadband now i spent some time in korea in two thousand and four it was there for about six months. you know chattanooga is catching up with where korea was in two thousand and four there are the united states is the decade behind that i was in singapore as i mentioned last week where the government has wired the entire country with gigabit speed broadband because in their view it was it was an excellent investment in the future you know we live in a country that's kind of unique among developed nations that doesn't see its telecommunications infrastructure as a key to its future sees as just another industry that you know can you know sort of regulate itself and it's clear that it's failing but we think that way about all of our infrastructures we think that way about our educational infrastructure you know with privatizing education with the. you know our intellectual infrastructure

we think that but don't get me started crowdsourcing is all the rage right now you talk about crowdsourcing and smart cities. well you know what's really interesting about a lot of the technologies that we've seen you know come come to the market in the last ten years that they're essentially about coordinating human activity in a lot of ways that's that's what cities are about cities are platforms for coordinating human activity whether it's commerce or culture or education and so particularly in an era of you know very severe fiscal strains at the local level and we've seen people come up some very clever ways to use these technologies of cooperation to you know augment worry even in some cases replace services that government used to provide them in the whole crowdfunding phenomenon. you know. kickstarter platforms like that that allow people to you know essentially pass the

hat around to support an artist or a technology project we're seeing that being applied to the civic space people are crowdfunding community gardens they're crowd funding other kinds of civic improvements and i think it's a fantastic way of thinking about how we can we can build our cities together in a very participatory that we have so they agree anthony townsend brilliant thank you so much for being with us thanks to see this in other conversations the great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. and that's the way it is tonight friday february twenty first two thousand and fourteen don't forget democracy begins when you get out there get active tag you're it.

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