MIT Technology Review 2021 05-06 v124i03

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02 From the editor C oncerts—remember those? Or maybe you miss Carlo Ratti point out that some 2 billion people currently live restaurants most, or plays, musicals, art galleries, in informal settlements and many of today’s most famed cities museums, nights out at the pub, the club, a ball began that way (p. 23 . Indeed, as Annalee Newitz writes, there is game ... ah, those were the days. much being discovered in the centuries-old histories of Angkor, The thrill of gathering, of being a part of Pompeii, New York, and elsewhere that challenges our received something, is the hallmark of the city. Cities wisdom about how great cities rose, and who built them (p. 68 . bring us together, inspire us, spur our creativity. At their best, they are monuments of human achievement that draw people The future, of course, is ours to shape. In many cities, aging from far and wide. They open our eyes to new ideas and cultures, infrastructure can threaten disaster in the face of growth. Andrew and become greater than the sum of streets and buildings and Zaleski writes that technology has a big role to play in helping crowded sidewalks. improve the way cities meet one of their most basic needs, the safe disposal of sewage (p. 48 . Gabrielle Merite points out that For the past year, cities have felt like perhaps the worst place where there is a pollution problem, there is an opportunity: the to be. Density has been the enemy; many people, if they could, world’s 100 most populous cities account for nearly one-fifth holed up at home or fled to someplace rural. Lockdowns were of global carbon emissions (p. 28 , and almost all are expected imposed; we sheltered in place. City life as we knew it ended, to grow enormously. In fact, the pace of urbanization shows no and felt as if it might never come back. signs of slowing; China, for example, plans to build five inter- connected “city clusters,” each of which might accommodate a This issue, conceived in the throes of the coronavirus pan- hundred million people, as Ling Xin details (p. 13 . The decisions demic, has come together when the future of cities looks more made by leaders of these metropolises will have an outsize impact uncertain than at any other time in recent memory. But the closer on the trajectory of global climate change. we looked, the more we found reason not just to maintain hope but to celebrate all that cities are, and all they could become. We still don’t know when we will be able to safely gather again and enjoy some of the sweeter fruits of urban life. But we Technology is and will be a huge part of that story. Whether will, and when we do, we can be assured of at least two things: or not that’s a good thing is ... complicated. On one hand, there cities will thrive again, and if we are careful we can build them are real technological systems that can help cities serve their into something even better. residents better. As John Surico’s profile of the transit-plan- ning company Remix attests (p. 42 , civic-minded software Michael Reilly is can be a powerful tool to improve people’s lives. Giving digital executive editor of address codes to residents of Indian slums has provided access MIT Technology Review to needed services and simple conveniences like pizza delivery, writes Shoma Abhyankar (p. 25 . Joseph Dana finds that cities PATRICK LEGER in South Africa are demanding the right to use newly available, cheap sources of renewable energy to avoid the blackouts that occur nearly every day there (p. 26 . But the needs of local governments and the people they serve are at odds with the inclinations of tech companies, which often prioritize scale and market share. As Jennifer Clark writes, that means we should proceed with extreme caution when tech titans promise to deliver the “city of the future” (p. 8 . The tension is starkly evident in Rowan Moore Gerety’s vivid reporting on police in Ogden, Utah (p. 30 , who’ve used an impressive array of surveillance cameras, license-plate readers, and drones to solve some terrible crimes—but also to keep tabs on the city’s most vulnerable inhabitants. The darker side of enormous companies’ takeover of urban life is similarly on display in Tim Maughan’s brooding piece of fiction, “Unpaired” (p. 82 . In cities this struggle, between the powerful and the disem- powered, is hard-coded into the very buildings, neighborhoods, and makeshift dwellings people call home, as Johnny Miller finds in his stunning aerial photographs of cities from Minneapolis to Mumbai (p. 58 . And though the word “city” might conjure an image of gleaming skyscrapers and twinkling skylines, the real- ity looks quite different. Fábio Duarte, Washington Fajardo, and

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04 Contents THE CITIES ISSUE Edited by Konstantin Kakaes and Amy Nordrum Introduction Features Report Reviews 8 30 13 75 Solving for the city Neighborhood watch Dispatches “A humming, smoking, ever-changing contraption” Technology can help Police departments want to A look into China’s policy of fix many problems know as much as they legally building out massive city clus- How three mid-20th-century that cities face today. can. But how much surveillance ters, each of which will be visitors saw Los Angeles So why hasn’t it? technology is too much? home to as many as a hundred as a machine. By Colin Marshall By Jennifer Clark By Rowan Moore Gerety million people. By Ling Xin 78 Fiction 42 17 Uncanny alleys 82 Back to the streets A bridge dictionary Science fiction is reimagin- Unpaired The pandemic upended public Subtle advances in construction ing cities in ways that feel both transit. Now city planners are techniques are making bridges familiar and strange. By Tim Maughan trying to map out what’s next. bigger, safer, and longer-lived. By Joanne McNeil By John Surico By Jon Allsop The back page 48 18 88 Rivers of dreams Game of thrones The city inside our heads How South Bend, Indiana, Cities try some high-tech came to lead the way in smart approaches to public restrooms. Cover illustration sewer control. By Andrew Giambrone by Dogboy By Andrew Zaleski 20 58 Five arguments Cities of people Andrew Giambrone on the “Unequal Scenes,” a drone case for density. Julia Hotz on photography project, illumi- Seattle’s election experiment. nates scars in the urban fabric. Fábio Duarte, Washington By Johnny Miller Fajardo, and Carlo Ratti on embracing unplanned settle- 68 ments. Shoma Abhyankar on addressing India’s slums. And Ancient cities are Joseph Dana on Cape Town’s made of data fight for energy independence. High-tech tools are helping 28 us understand the past. By Annalee Newitz The age of megacities Curbing emissions in a few big cities could have an outsize impact on climate change. By Gabrielle Merite

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GUTTER CREDIT HERE

Introduction 09 Solving for the city By Technology can help fix many problems that cities face Jennifer today. So why hasn’t it? Clark GUTTER CREDIT HERE rban technology projects affordable housing, or public transport— have long sought to man- could come from better policies and more age the city—to organize funding. These problems don’t necessarily U its ambiguities, mitigate require new technology. its uncertainties, and pre- dict or direct its growth What is clear is that technology companies and decline. The latest, “smart city” proj- are increasingly taking on administrative and ects, have much in common with previous infrastructure responsibilities that govern- iterations. Again and again, these initiatives ments have long fulfilled. If smart cities are promise novel “solutions” to urban “problems.” to avoid exacerbating urban inequalities, we The hype is based partly on a belief that must understand where these projects will cre- technology will deliver unprecedented value ate new opportunities and problems, and who to urban areas. The opportunity seems so vast may lose out as a result. And that starts by tak- that at times our ability to measure, assess, ing a hard look at how cities have fared so far. and make decisions about it almost feels inad- equate. The message to cities is: You don’t The birth of the smart city craze know what you’re dealing with, but you don’t want to get left behind. The “smart cities” buzz began with IBM’s After a decade of pilot projects and flashy Smarter Cities Challenge in 2010. The com- demonstrations, though, it’s still not clear pany vowed to award technology worth mil- whether smart city technologies can actually lions of dollars to cities that wished to upgrade solve or even mitigate the challenges cities their infrastructure. Among other things, that face. A lot of progress on our most pressing initiative established a highly competitive urban issues—such as broadband access, approach to urban innovation that pitted cities against each other in a bid to win free products and services from the private sector.

10 Cities The 2010s brought a wave of these their own markets for emerging products. This doesn’t happen for every project, or competitions, backed by corporations that selected cities to host pilot projects. Virtually all of those projects have failed to every time, and tensions between tech- Many philanthropic organizations, includ- ing Bloomberg Philanthropies and the adapt technology “solutions” to the needs nocratic planners and community devel- Rockefeller Foundation, launched similar events. And in 2015, the US Department of individual cities and regions. opment groups remain. But it isn’t the of Transportation used this same approach for its Smart City Challenge, selecting one When we consider smart cities in the 1960s anymore. winning city (Columbus, Ohio) from the 78 that applied to serve as a test bed for context of earlier urban technology proj- However, urban planners haven’t been transportation technology. ects, it’s clear that this struggle is not driving the smart cities trend. Instead, it’s Many of these early initiatives were partnerships between tech firms and indi- new, but it does have a different flavor. been driven by the tech sector, which has vidual cities aimed at upgrading large urban systems for transportation, energy, In previous waves, other industries with very different norms and goals. Test beds waste, or communications. Hardware, software, business services, and connec- disparate interests also drove the push and experimentation are common in tech tivity companies formed alliances to offer system-wide solutions. for urban innovation: the auto industry, but uncomfortable for cities, for example. An alliance that AT&T launched in 2016 the cement industry, steel manufacturers, At their best, cities tailor complicated was emblematic of this approach. The company partnered with Cisco, Deloitte, railroads, real estate developers, and more. networks of old and new sociotechni- Ericsson, GE, IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas. The goal The tech sector is simply the industry of cal systems to work in a particular place was to develop smart city systems made up of a whole package of integrated prod- the moment trying to steer projects and for communities with different cultures, ucts and services. This industry-led con- sortium model left little room for small influence public priorities. interests, and priorities. But for the tech firms and startups. sector, such local variation challenges the Looking back, that first phase feels very different from today. In 2021, a greater The city is not the customer whole notion of creating an urban operat- diversity of firms are exploring a wider array of revenue models and marketing Urban planners have long debated how ing system that can scale. strategies, including Civiq Smartscapes (which sells communications network best to integrate new technologies into the And for cities, especially US cities, com- infrastructure), Nordsense (embedded sensor networks for waste management), built environment. Change is often diffi- peting with other cities for private invest- Soofa (information and wayfinding kiosks), and UrbanFootprint (a mapping analytics cult, disruptive, and expensive. Projects ment sets off a race to the bottom in which platform and service). However, these newcomers are generally less focused on that are too big or move too fast generate public agencies vie to win new technolo- building city-wide systems or upgrading physical infrastructure than on developing political pushback and economic upheaval. gies that don’t work well with the technical new digital services for a particular sector, or apps targeted at residents themselves. New York City’s massive push for roads, systems or processes they already have in This highlights a change in business bridges, and urban renewal during the place. Many experienced the smart cities models as well as in technology strategy. It also underscores what has been most mid 20th century, for example, instigated craze of the 2010s with a sense of anxiety: challenging for the tech sector: not devel- oping the technologies themselves, but a backlash against “big plans” that persists they joined in as much because they feared understanding the market for smart city projects and the context in which they to this day. The legacy of the Cross Bronx being left behind in the battle for the cre- will unfold. Expressway looms large in the collective ative class and the new innovation economy Many of these projects have been driven by tech companies accustomed to making memory of urban planners, and it’s reig- as because they thought new technologies nited as each generation could provide real solutions. picks up The Power Broker, All this is to say that in many Robert Caro’s classic biog- ways, the city is no longer the raphy of Robert Moses, the primary consumer for smart city powerful public admin- THE TECH firms. Rather, it functions pri- istrator behind much of marily as an innovation sandbox New York’s midcentury SECTOR that the tech sector uses to pro- transformation. His name IS SIMPLY totype products and distribute has become a metonym for services. For the industry, cities the bulldozing of vibrant THE INDUSTRY are mainly just the places where neighborhoods to make OF THE its customers live. room for highways. Since then, we’ve MOMENT A lighter touch made substantial prog- TRYING TO ress. Community involve- In previous eras, partnerships between cities and industries ment in planning is now STEER gave rise to new roads, bridges, the norm rather than the PROJECTS buildings, parks, and even whole exception. Residents often neighborhoods. These changes, PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES help set priorities and AND from sprawling suburbs like define the scale and scope INFLUENCE Levittown to the vast Eisenhower- of urban projects through era Interstate Highway System to neighborhood planning PUBLIC Boston’s Central Artery, drew units, public meetings, PRIORITIES. plenty of criticism. But at least online platforms, and they involved real investment in electronic mailing lists. the built environment.

Introduction 11 In previous eras, partnerships between cities and industries brought investment in infrastructure projects like Boston’s Cen- tral Artery, now site of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. GREENWAY CONSERVANCY Today, though, cities such as Toronto any concrete surface.” But public), like wayfinding kiosks and Wi-Fi- have organized against large-scale smart these displays barely inte- enabled waste cans, declined precipitously city initiatives that propose changes to grate with a city’s exist- as people avoided high-traffic areas. physical infrastructure, and many tech ing transportation system, firms have pivoted toward “lighter” proj- much less improve it. Many of the most visible “smart city” ects. Popular among these are smart ser- success stories of the last decade were vices such as ride-sharing and food delivery The tensions these actually software-based shared services apps, which gather a great deal of data but business models trigger are like ride hailing, car sharing, home shar- leave the physical city unchanged. largely regulatory and not ing, and co-working. Those services have physical—they’re invisi- been little used during the pandemic. One real problem is that smart city proj- ble to a casual observer. Meanwhile, the shared services that peo- ects, in their many manifestations, don’t look The privatization of the ple everywhere need most are still clean backward to see what must be modified, city—of its public services water, emergency communications, reli- adapted, unwound, or undone. Functionally, and spaces—has made it able heat and electricity, flexible trans- cities sit upon layers of interconnected possible for companies to portation, and responsive public health (and sometimes disconnected) systems. To access and use data that systems. stand on any downtown street corner is to local governments collect about residents. observe old and new infrastructure (traffic The flash points become issues of data The potential for technology to produce signals, light poles) installed at different rights rather than rights of way. more sustainable, equitable, and resilient times for different reasons by both public cities remains very real. The lesson of the agencies and private firms. (Regulations Covid-19 exposed smart cities last decade is that the emphasis was on the also vary widely between jurisdictions: in wrong word in “smart cities.” The attention the US, for example, local governments Many have speculated about the implica- must be on the city. have highly tailored land use controls.) But tions of the covid-19 pandemic for cities. most of today’s projects aren’t designed Some argue that people will leave for the We’re always making choices about to be backward compatible with existing suburbs; others predict a renewed commit- how we organize cities and the economy urban systems. The smart cities idea, like ment to public spaces. Whatever happens, to produce the outcomes we want. But it’s the tech sector itself, is forward focused. covid-19 has shown that failing to invest economics and politics, much more than in critical infrastructure is both an acute technology, that determine who benefits The “light” interventions that are now problem and a chronic one. from (and who pays for) the systems we popular float above the complexity of the choose, and under what conditions. urban landscape. They rely on existing Foreshadowing this disaster were tragic, platforms: the same roads, same homes, but arguably limited, urban problems like That said, the availability of technical same cars. These business models demand the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a 2014 solutions certainly does influence our (and offer) few upgrades and minimize switch in the city’s water supply caused choices about what’s possible and what we tech companies’ need to negotiate with pipes to leach lead into drinking water—an prefer. But even those choices are highly incumbent systems. Soofa, for example, infrastructure failure that set off a public variable and reflect our local priorities. advertises that its smart wayfinding kiosks health emergency. A viable future for smart city technology can be installed with only “four bolts into would mean engaging with tough questions Before 2020, people could tell them- that the tech sector has often avoided— selves that such things happen only in questions about what advances would best other places. But the pandemic proved serve cities as such. that systems—like the US public health system—can fail anywhere, and even Realizing that future will demand three everywhere at once. And it has shown things. First, creators of smart city technol- that a decade’s worth of smart city proj- ogy must draw on specialized knowledge ects weren’t primarily about upgrading of the local context. Second, we need a existing urban infrastructure. They were framework for data governance: agree- more about developing a market for tech- ments on how data is collected, shared, nology gear and services and the data that and used. And finally, public participation they generate. is essential. Simply put, the way forward is to respond to the needs of the community, The pandemic has destabilized a loose not the motives of industry. truce between the tech sector and the cities it sought as partners in testing these prod- Jennifer Clark is a professor of city ucts. The utility of pilot projects designed and regional planning at Ohio State for shared urban spaces (both private and University and author of Uneven Inno- vation: The Work of Smart Cities.

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Turning a popular app into a wide-ranging RE 13 public service platform has made people’s lives more convenient, but it’s also triggered PVOI ERWT concerns about surveillance. —PAGE 15 Get upBtoooksps,eed on the kaerytst,haemndesc,ubltiguriedeas, anidn mpearjsoprepcltaivyeers discussed in this issue. DISPATCHES HISTORY CITY OF CITIES THE RISE OF An ambitious urban development plan takes shape in China. THE MEGALOPOLIS By Ling Xin Some city clusters have formed organically over time. China has urbanized with unprecedented speed. About 20 years ago, only 30% of the Chinese population lived in cities; today it’s 60%. That translates the 1950s, the French geog- to roughly 400 million people—more than the entire US population—moving I N rapher Jean Gottmann into China’s cities in the past two decades (the same proportional transition took 90 years to happen in Europe, and 60 years in the US). And this migra- noticed a new urban para- tion isn’t over; 70% of China’s population is expected to be urban by 2035. digm emerging on the northeast coast of the United States. The To accommodate the influx, China’s national urban development policy 1,000-kilometer-long region from has shifted from expanding individual cities to systematically building out Boston to Washington, DC, with its massive city clusters, each of which will be home to as many as a hundred mil- 30 million inhabitants,was, he found, lion people. Cities in a cluster will collaborate economically, ecologically, and increasingly functioning as one large politically, the thinking goes, in turn boosting each region’s competitiveness. city. Gottmann used the Greek word “megalopolis” to name this novel In the four stories that follow, we explore the origins of China’s new strat- economic and political entity. egy and highlight three areas where the foundations for these city clusters are being laid—in the nation’s high-speed rail network, in the growth of its With its high population den- digital public services, and through regional environmental management. sity, ease of transport, economic dominance, and cultural influence, ROSE WONG the Boston-Washington megalop- olis became home to the richest, best-educated, and best-serviced population in the country. “A meg- alopolis for a nation is what Main Street is for most communities,” wrote Gottmann’s colleague Wolf Von Eckardt. “It is the laboratory of a new urban way of life which is sweeping the civilized world.” Other megalopolises soon appeared in different parts of the world. Among the most success- ful to date is Japan’s Taiheiyo Belt. Stretching nearly 1,200 kilometers from Tokyo through Nagoya to Osaka, the Taiheiyo Belt contains two-thirds of the Japanese popula- tion and accounts for 70% of national economic output.

14 Cities Jing-Jin-Ji TRANSPORT Yangtze A NATION ON TRACK River Delta New rail lines will connect residents within Yangtze River and across clusters. Middle Reaches Cheng-Yu hen Fang Hengkun was still a college Pearl River Delta W student in Beijing, about 20 years ago, Building such megalopolises in he used to go back home to the city of China—where they’re referred to as city clusters—seems to be the Dalian in Liaoning province by train for winter country’s best option for expanding access to urban opportunities with- break. The 1,000-kilometer trip took 12 hours. out overwhelming cities, says Zhu Dajian, an economist who studies He would arrive at the Beijing Railway Station sustainable development at Tongji University in Shanghai. Xi’s stance inspired immense inter- three hours early because “it was the only train Neighboring cities have, for est in regional governance, and “city between Beijing and Dalian that day,” he says. example, been known to spend vast sums building redundant indus- cluster” became an official term in Now a railway engineer working for Beijing’s tries and then competing for pri- macy. Shanghai, for one, has tried to government documents. municipal government, Fang is busy upgrading position itself as a hub for biotech and chip manufacturing by offering By 2035, five major city clus- suburban lines and planning new ones to serve companies incentives to open plants there—but several nearby cities have ters are expected to be established the rising demand in the nation’s capital. His launched nearly identical efforts. China is betting that more regional in China: the Jing-Jin-Ji cluster in team also plans to increase the frequency and coordination will lead to more effi- cient investments nationwide. Such the north, the Yangtze River accessibility of intercity trains that con- cooperation could also help alleviate overpopulation and pollution, which Delta cluster (east), the Pearl nect Beijing with more than 50 other cit- have plagued some of the country’s biggest urban centers. River Delta cluster (south), ies. For example, to support the 100,000 While some cities established the Cheng-Yu cluster (west), daily commuters between Beijing and informal geographic and economic ties long ago, China only recently and the Yangtze River Middle Tianjin, about 150 high-speed intercity wrote the building of city clusters into its national policy in a systematic Reaches cluster in central trains are running every day, as often as way. In 2014, President Xi Jinping called for a regional approach to China. Some of these have Ling Xin is three minutes apart. developing Beijing as the leader already started to take shape, a science According to a plan issued by the State of the capital region, known as while others are still on the journalist Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji). who covers Council in February 2021, China will be drawing board. Combined, physics, home to 200,000 kilometers of railways these areas could one day gen- space, and by 2035. One-third of them will be high- technology. erate about half the nation’s speed rails, which will account for about GDP and house half its urban popu- 60% of the total distance covered by all high- lation.To connect the clusters, China speed rail lines in the world by that date. Those aims to complete a grid of 16 new railways will be closely linked to other forms of high-speed railway lines. transportation so that passengers can, accord- If all goes according to plan, the ing to the plan, “get around a city within one clusters will prove to be sustain- hour, get around a city cluster within two hours, able not only economically but also and make a trip between city clusters within ecologically. By promoting public three hours.” transportation, curbing repetitive Railways are expensive to build, Fang admits. production, and coordinating envi- For the new suburban lines under construction, ronmental management, says Liu the cost for each kilometer is about one billion Daizong of the World Resources yuan (or $150 million), and few of the high- Institute’s China office in Beijing, city speed lines in operation around the country are clusters should “help China deliver profitable. As the government keeps pouring COURTESY PHOTO its latest commitment to reaching money into its rail network, the question of carbon emission peak around 2030 how to make this expansion financially viable and carbon neutrality by 2060.” remains open.

Report 15 SERVICES a new wave of digital infrastruc- ture that the national government DIGITAL HIGHWAYS hopes will minimize paperwork and streamline the delivery of public Government agencies across China are building apps services. Though it can be hard to to serve residents more efficiently. break down administrative barriers, some experts argue that China’s used to be a hassle for Ma (“saving the trouble in Guangdong”), According to largely top-down governance system I T Zhongwen, a university a piece of software designed by the Guangdong could help in this regard. “City clus- Guangdong’s provincial government ters is a good starting point to test teacher in Guangzhou, to and embedded in WeChat, China’s government, out new forms of e-government in withdraw money from a special most popular smartphone app. Users Yue Sheng Shi China,” says Zeng Gang, director of government-run savings account can pay traffic tickets, renew a pass- had more than the Institute of Urban Development for housing every year. He had to port or visa, make appointments at East China Normal University in make an online reservation, and with government agencies, or apply 100 Shanghai. then go to a bank and wait in line for a business license. These services MILLION for hours. “I had to take time off are jointly offered by two dozen Of course, the flip side of this work every time, because the bank municipal governments in the Pearl registered arrangement is that big tech compa- only had one counter for the service, River Delta region. According to the users as of nies like Shenzhen-based Tencent, and the counter was only open Guangdong government, Yue Sheng January 2021. which makes WeChat, get access to during work hours,” he recalls. Shi had more than 100 million reg- huge amounts of user data. Turning istered users as of January 2021. a popular app into a wide-ranging These days, Ma gets it all done public service platform has unde- on his smartphone as one of the Similar apps are being developed niably made people’s lives more more than 1,600 public services and used across China as part of convenient in some respects, but now available under Yue Sheng Shi it’s also triggered concerns about data collection, surveillance, and privacy. ROSE WONG ENVIRONMENT spring winds make to address algae blooms in the regulating pollution, says Qin A S gentle waves on the past, but now some of them Boqiang from the Nanjing COOPERATION are working together for the Institute of Geography and OVER COMPETITION misty Lake Tai in first time. Limnology at the Chinese Eastern China, blue-green Academy of Sciences. Cities are working together to algae bloom beneath the To help each other out, monitor and clean up pollution. water. When the weather Wuxi, on the lake’s northern When poorly treated warms, these organisms shore, and Huzhou, on its wastewater from factories quickly take over, giving the southern edge, have started and farmlands flows into Tai, lake a greasy look and a foul sharing remote sensing data nutrients like nitrogen and smell. For more than a decade, and using drones and auto- phosphorus accumulate in algae blooms have disrupted mated boats to monitor the the lake, and algae blooms fishing and tourism on the water’s surface together. The flourish. lake’s shorelines and threat- cities are affected at differ- ened the water supply and ent times of the year—Wuxi Qin hopes more collab- health of tens of millions of in the summer and Huzhou oration among municipali- people living in the lower in the fall—so the team in ties in the basin will motivate Yangtze River Delta. In 2007, Huzhou will send a fleet of cities to establish common a particularly bad outbreak left boats to assist colleagues in discharge standards, build the nearby city of Wuxi with- Wuxi when it gets hit, and modern sewage treatment out drinking water for a week. Wuxi will return the favor. facilities, explore cross-border law enforcement, and ulti- Several cities along the lake The ultimate solution, mately clean up Lake Tai once have made individual efforts however, is curbing and and for all.

Don’t believe everything you hear. Technologies with the ability In Machines We Trust to learn have unlocked a world uncovers the ways that AI of possibilities—and dangers— is shaping modern life. that we’re only beginning to understand. Available wherever you listen.

17 CASE STUDY VIADOTTO On August 14, 2018, the Ponte Morandi, a cable- SAN GIORGIO, stayed bridge in Genoa, collapsed, killing 43 peo- A BRIDGE GENOA ple and severing a major artery of regional transit. DICTIONARY Work quickly began on its replacement. Renzo By Jon Allsop Piano, a celebrity architect who was born in Genoa, Bridges haven’t really changed designed the new bridge, and more than 1,000 laborers worked much for many years, says Anil Agrawal, a professor of civil around the clock to build it in just over a year. It features a digital engineering at the City College of New York. And it would be monitoring system and dehumidifying technology to guard against easy for an untrained eye to miss the ways in which they the corrosion that contributed to its predecessor’s collapse. have. But subtle advances in bridge technology and con- SLUSSEN In 2020 the Slussen bridge, made of steel, was laid struction techniques are mak- BRIDGE, atop a lock in Stockholm. But the 140-meter-long ing modern bridges bigger, STOCKHOLM box-girder bridge (a style in which beams running safer, and longer-lived. just below the roadway form the shape of a hollow Civil engineers have lately box) was assembled in a shipyard in Zhongshan, focused on improving safety by, for example, making bridges near Hong Kong. It traveled from China to Stockholm in one piece more resilient to fire, earth- quakes, and high winds.They’re on a semi-submersible ship, one of only 10 in the world capable also exploring how technology can help them monitor new of handling such cargo, according to Markus Glaas, a manager at bridges and maintain those already in place. Skanska, a large Swedish construction firm that oversaw the proj- For much of the 20th cen- ect. After a 70-day journey, the ship slowly sank into the water so tury, the average design life of a bridge had generally been the bridge could slide into place on its permanent supports—with a about 50 years. To push beyond margin for error of just 15 centimeters. The Slussen is a testament that, many new bridges now have sensors that collect data to how global supply chains have changed bridge construction. on their structural behavior and condition (though much work STONECUTTERS In suspension bridges, vertical support cables hang remains to be done to translate BRIDGE, down from the main cables strung between towers this data into meaningful real- HONG KONG to hold the bridgeway up. Cable-stayed bridges, by time analysis). contrast, have cables that fan out directly from the Novel technologies—like towers. Cable-stayed bridges have been around for new types of concrete or bridges that change shape to centuries but were relatively rare until recent advances in materials minimize wind resistance—are being studied in labs around and construction techniques made them easier and less expensive to the world, but civil engineering standards and building codes build. Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong, which opened in December are slow to evolve. At right are five examples of how bridge 2009, featured giant towers composed of 32 stainless-steel segments technology is already changing. wrapped around a concrete annulus. Since Hong Kong is in a typhoon zone, the bridge was built to withstand wind speeds up to 212 miles per hour. Its engineers also conducted a first-of-its-kind test that modeled what would happen if a boat hit the bridge’s foundations. GETTY (GENOA, HONG KONG); FOSTER + PARTNERS (STOCKHOLM); ANDREW BUCHANAN/SLP (SEATTLE); ALAMY (WUHAN) EVERGREEN Four of the five longest floating bridges in the world POINT are in Washington state. The longest and widest, the FLOATING BRIDGE, Evergreen Point Floating Bridge between Seattle and SEATTLE Bellevue, opened in 2016. Nicholas Rodda of the state transportation department says conventional bridges weren’t the best option because the lake the bridge crosses is so wide and deep. The soft soil didn’t help, either. Floating bridges elsewhere in the world tend to span separate pon- toons that are spaced out like stepping stones, Rodda says. Those in Washington rest on pontoons that are bolted together and anchored to the lakebed with steel cables. Engineers in Norway are planning a floating crossing in the municipality of Bjørnafjorden that, at over three miles, would be more than twice the length of the Evergreen Point bridge. YANGSIGANG China is in the middle of an impressive run of new YANGTZE RIVER bridge construction. The Yangsigang Yangtze River BRIDGE, Bridge opened in Wuhan in 2019 with the world’s WUHAN second-longest main span for a suspension bridge. In 2020, construction began on another, slightly shorter bridge about 50 miles downstream. They are just two of many nota- ble new bridges in China, including the world’s longest bridge-tunnel, linking Hong Kong and Macao, and the world’s two longest steel arch bridges, in Chongqing and Guangxi. And Chinese engineers are “col- lecting huge amounts of data” from new bridge-monitoring systems installed with many of these projects, says Agrawal.

18 Cities SOLAR The Portland Loo PANELS installed on the 10.6 feet long roof can power the by 6 feet wide lights, with an AC electric system as a backup; an Wheelchair accessible optional tank allows the system to operate No mirror independent of Walls are made of stain- sewers less steel coated with Weighs anti-graffiti powder that 6,000 can be power-washed pounds Angled slats at the top and bottom let others see inside while preserving the occupant’s privacy Interior handles help people get up and down from toilet seat Exterior hand-washing station can be used by passersby; hand-sanitizer dispenser available inside Costs about $100,000, not including installation and maintenance Fiberglass toilet seat Optional sharps-disposal Motion-activated Supply cabinet in the back prevents people from getting box gives people a place to LED lights (and an optional includes a hose and spigot for stuck when it’s cold (yes, it discard used needles skylight) provide interior manual cleanings happens) illumination FACE OFF Public restrooms serve the most basic of human needs, but they’re not always GAME OF THRONES easy to find. Some cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Montreal, Canada, Many cities lack public restrooms. Some are trying By Andrew Giambrone are rising to the challenge with stand- to do better, with high-tech or simple approaches. Illustration by Julian Glander alone lavatories that anybody can use, free of charge.

Report 19 Montreal’s TMAX EXTERIOR 10 feet long LIGHTS by 6.5 feet wide indicate status: white Wheelchair accessible means unoccupied, red means in use, and Stainless-steel mirror (to avoid broken glass) yellow means it’s being cleaned or Walls are made of laminate with fixed resins and are resistant to damage, Users fire, and graffiti press a button next to Structure is fully the door to enter; enclosed and includes doors automatically bright interior lighting reopen after 15 minutes of Interior handles help people get up and use down from toilet seat Interior sink includes a soap dispenser and hand dryer Costs about $300,000, not including installation and maintenance Self-cleaning mechanism disin- Another automated bar Weight sensors in the Emergency button and toi- fects entire unit in 90 seconds sprays the floor and dries it floor prevent people from let-paper dispenser button are after each use; one automated barging into an occupied unit bar sprays the toilet seat and with a squeegee or being caught inside during located next to toilet seat dries it with compressed air automatic cleanings About 20“Portland Loos”are now spread Other cities—including Paris and San been installed in roughly 20 cities in North across that city, while central Montreal has Francisco—operate public restrooms too, America. It’s less expensive and has a much installed four self-cleaning toilets since 2018 but Portland and Montreal stand out for simpler design than Montreal’s technically (still open during the pandemic). Though their unique approaches to treating bath- advanced model (called TMAX) but must they differ in technical complexity, both have rooms as essential infrastructure. The Loo be cleaned manually. Montreal’s toilets the potential to make urban communities has proved particularly successful: in fact, clean themselves after every use, though more hospitable and hygienic. its manufacturer has sold dozens that have workers also clean each facility daily.

20 Cities ARGUMENTS THE CASE FOR DENSITY Cities are still desirable places to live and work, despite covid-19. By Andrew Giambrone T he coronavirus pandemic presents a cruel irony Andrew Giambrone In the United States, didn’t covid-19 first for urban dwellers. What good are cities if the is a freelance rage through New York, America’s largest very quality that makes them so dynamic—the city? Doesn’t the density of such places make ease of connecting with people and gathering journalist based them inevitable hot spots for highly conta- in large groups for everything from a baseball in New York gious viruses? Haven’t people instinctively game to an opera—now renders them more fled to the countryside during epidemics at dangerous than before? City who writes least since the Middle Ages? That question lies at the heart of concerns about politics, over the future of cities in a post-covid world. Social dis- Actually, studies show urban living may tancing, mask wearing, and restrictions on mass gather- cities, and not as be as covid-risky as you might suspect. ings will continue in many places, at least until enough social issues. Last June researchers at Johns Hopkins and people are vaccinated for communities to reach herd the University of Utah found that density immunity. Downtowns remain largely dormant, their wasn’t linked to infection rates in US coun- offices and transit hubs drained of nonessential workers. ties after accounting for metropolitan-area At the same time, municipal coffers are taking huge hits population, socioeconomic factors, and from lost tax revenue. Fewer visitors and sales mean less health-care infrastructure; rather, connec- funding for vital city services, including public schools tivity between counties through such things and sanitation, or for cherished amenities like parks. as travel mattered more for viral spread and mortality. A paper published by Germany’s Adding to these economic hardships, it seems only IZA Institute of Labor Economics in July sensible to shy away from cities during a pandemic. found that while covid-19 was more likely to show up sooner in denser counties, popula- tion density didn’t correlate with the overall number of cases and deaths.

Report 21 It’s worth remembering what drew us to Other papers focusing on India cities in the first place. Studies show that and Algeria, led by researchers from proximity to others facilitates innovation, the University of North Bengal and the whether cultural or scientific. University of Khemis Miliana, respectively, reported moderate and strong links between MEREDITH MIOTKE In other words, when it comes to the Asia and Australia were able to rein in the density and infections. At the same time, coronavirus, density isn’t destiny. New York coronavirus last year. Even China, where major cities like Seoul, Hong Kong, and San City was initially the US epicenter of the covid-19 was first discovered, effectively Francisco largely contained the coronavirus pandemic in part because of its status as subdued the pandemic for its 1.4 billion with quick, aggressive interventions like an international destination, but its weekly people, 60% of whom live in cities. closing bars and clubs. caseload dropped as safety measures took root. (Case numbers there spiked again last This isn’t to say density is irrelevant No matter how you interpret these find- fall as hot spots reemerged and the holi- to covid-19 transmission, or that we fully ings, it’s clear that urban density confers days arrived, and again in February as new understand how the disease propagates. numerous benefits during a pandemic. For variants spread, though vaccinations hold Some research, including a study pub- one thing, dense cities tend to have better the promise of driving them down again.) lished last July by JAMA Network Open, hospitals than less populated areas.And it’s has connected population density with easier for city dwellers to access medical Rural counties in Alaska, Colorado, and coronavirus spread. A study published care. The same goes for preventive care, Texas—far from dense population cen- in the journal PLOS One in December which, while still lacking in many places, ters—were hit hard around the start of concluded that “density matters,” though has repeatedly been shown to lower chronic 2021, each with more than 100 daily cases it seemed to make more of a difference disease rates and emergency room visits. per 100,000 residents, according to the in the later stages of outbreaks than at New York Times. Yet high-density cities in the onset. Urbanization was trending up before the pandemic, and despite the appeals of coun- try life, this trend is likely to persist. As we recover from covid, it’s worth remembering what drew us to cities in the first place.They host people of varying skills, backgrounds, and ambitions in the same location. Studies show that this proximity to others facilitates innovation, whether cultural or scientific. And as we’ve seen during the pandemic, telecommunication isn’t a perfect substi- tute for the face-to-face connections we all crave. (Neither does it provide the kind of educational environment some students need to succeed academically and socially.) At their best, cities distribute resources to their citizens efficiently and equitably. While many fall short of that ideal, as the pandemic has laid bare, the alternative par- adigm for human settlement—sprawl—has significant disadvantages. Living farther apart from others imposes costs on eco- nomic productivity, the environment, and in some cases, people’s happiness. Climate change, which is exacerbated by car and air- plane use, stands to compound those costs. Even if density isn’t a panacea for these challenges, it’s one of our best bets for over- coming them. After a year of disease and death, we should be reassured by another lesson of the pandemic: Cities are resilient, just like the people who live there. Q

22 Cities ARGUMENTS A local effort to rewrite the rules of campaign finance is last mayor) by attracting more small ones. expanding to other cities. And while some other municipalities, like New York and Washington, DC, are trying By Julia Hotz to democratize campaign finance by match- ing and multiplying small donations, critics Julia Hotz is say those programs are far less accessible. a journalist “You still have to have your own money to participate,” says Brian McCabe, one of the SEATTLE’Sreporting on researchers who led the 2019 study. what’s working Indeed, perhaps the program’s biggest to address social success, according to McCabe and coau- thor Jen Heerwig, is the sheer number of ELECTIONproblems. donors it’s attracted. Nearly 8% of Seattle’s electorate donated to local candidates in EXPERIMENT 2019, compared with just 1.3% in 2015. That makes Seattle the national leader in local T eresa Mosqueda used to spend is uncomfortable for a lot of candidates, campaign finance “by a lot,” McCabe says. COURTESY PHOTO her days asking people to run says Mosqueda, now a member of the city for office. A union leader and council: “I don’t personally know people A recent poll of over 1,000 voters con- third-generation Mexican- who have $5,000 to give away.” Now the ducted by HarrisX for the political news American from Seattle, she vouchers mean candidates don’t have to site The Hill revealed that 57% believe the figured the most effective way rely on donors with such deep pockets. US political system works only for insiders to address working families’ “You don’t want to feel beholden to wealthy with money and power. As Seattle aims to issues was to encourage peo- corporations or individuals,” she says. directly encourage campaigns by people ple who had once experienced without those advantages, a host of other them to enter politics. But when people As Seattle’s past two city council elec- US cities wonder if democracy vouchers would ask her to run, Mosqueda would tions show, the program hasn’t stopped are an answer to that problem. decline, citing an obstacle faced by most the influence of those mega-donors, nor Americans: she couldn’t afford it. has it radically diversified Seattle’s donor Andrew Allison, founder of the polit- base, which draws mostly from an older ical action committee Austinites for That changed when she learned about white population. But research published Progressive Reform in the Texas capital, democracy vouchers—a taxpayer-funded in 2019 in the Election Law Journal shows recently collected the 20,000 signatures program that mails Seattle residents four it’s certainly weakened those influences; of needed to get a voucher initiative on the $25 certificates to donate to local candi- voters who donated in Seattle’s 2017 and ballot in May. dates. That meant more people could con- 2019 elections, voucher users were less tribute to local campaigns and more people, wealthy than cash donors. “In Austin, about 70% of donations come like Mosqueda, could run. from just three of our 10 districts,” says Now, as Seattle introduces democracy Allison. “And that kind of donor concen- Passed in 2015 by a ballot initiative, vouchers to its mayoral race, the city aims tration doesn’t really square with the idea Seattle’s voucher program was the country’s to further dilute the influence of big donors of one person, one vote.” first of its kind. Asking for big donations (Amazon gave $350,000 to help elect the In 2019, four of nine first-time Seattle city council candidates said they would not have run had it not been for democ- racy vouchers, according to a 2020 report from BERK Consulting. This year, of the 12 mayoral candidates who were confirmed by early April, eight are accepting vouchers, including Colleen Echohawk. “I come from a community where we often don’t get to contribute to political campaigns,” says Echohawk, who would be the city’s first Indigenous mayor. “If I could donate, it’d be like $10.” Echohawk prominently features democ- racyvouchers on herwebsite and Instagram.

Report 23 But she says many of her followers still have EMBRACING “no idea what the heck they are.” THE INFORMAL That may be the program’s biggest flaw; Fábio Duarte Cities are slowly shifting from trying to eradicate in 2019, fewer than 40,000 Seattle resi- and Carlo Ratti shantytowns to supporting them. dents—roughly 5% of the population— used their vouchers. Many seem to mistake are research- By Fábio Duarte, them for junk mail. Though Seattle res- ers at the MIT Washington Fajardo, idents can opt in to virtual vouchers or Senseable City and Carlo Ratti request replacements online, most still Lab. Washington don’t know the program exists. And even Fajardo is the fans of democracy vouchers wonder why secretary of ur- all Seattle property owners should pay— ban planning at albeit just $8 per year—for a program that the City of Rio a slim minority uses. de Janeiro. “If you still have super PACs and private MIT SENSEABLE CITY LAB (DUARTE); ANDRÉ VIEIRA (FAJARDO); SARA MAGNI (RATTI) financing available to candidates, I don’t F inding your way through With little formal aid or administration think it’s a good way to get money out of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not and scant economic opportunities, favela politics,” says Paul Gessing, CEO of the Rio easy. The buildings are densely residents have struggled to contend with Grande Foundation, who was elated when and turbulently arranged in unhealthy living conditions and frequent a proposal for democracy vouchers was a manner that defies tradi- violence. A thick wall of social segregation defeated in his home city of Albuquerque, tional identification systems means that resources from the city—includ- New Mexico, in 2019. like street names and num- ing electricity and clean water—must take bers. Rocinha is a favela, one of twisting, uncertain paths to make it inside. In 2017, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a the largest among hundreds of Life expectancy in favelas is just 48, which libertarian law firm, sued Seattle, claiming unplanned settlements that have sprung is 20 years below the national average. that democracy vouchers violated its free- up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since dom of speech by funneling tax dollars to the 19th century. More than 5% of the Much has been made of the dizzying campaigns it didn’t support. But the state’s country’s population now lives in com- growth of the world’s cities, but few peo- supreme court upheld the program. munities like these, with 100,000 people ple are aware of what most urban growth in Rocinha alone. actually looks like. Births and migrations Still, most Americans do favor laws that are concentrated in the developing world, would limit the role of money in politics, The challenge of navigating Rocinha and with the exception of China, most new according to a 2018 Pew Report. has birthed creative solutions, such as the urban fabric is informal—more shantytowns “friendly mailman” program: companies than skyscrapers. For all our futuristic rev- Jack Noland, research manager at deliver parcels to a central drop-off point, eries, the city of tomorrow probably will not RepresentUs, a nonprofit working on cam- and a team of Rocinha residents—the only look much different from Rocinha. paign finance reform, points to several couriers familiar enough with the area to laws that would help do that, including an navigate its maze-like streets—take them In the 20th century, the Brazilian gov- anticorruption act to stop political bribery. the rest of the way. ernment attempted to eradicate favelas But he says voucher programs aim to trans- and replace them with more formal public form the entire political process, not just the outcome, by encouraging candidates to reach out to a broader array of constituents. As proof of the voucher program’s “broad interest,” he points to the For the People Act recently passed by the US House of Representatives. It includes a program that would pilot democracy vouchers for congressional candidates in three states, to be selected by the Federal Election Commission.“Across partisan lines,” Noland says, “there’s this feeling that the system isn’t working as intended and that regular people—be they progressive, independent, conservative—aren’t being represented.” Q

24 Cit ei s ARGUMENTS housing, but the bulldozers could not keep Twenty years after Medell n began to and traded on a blockchain to avoid bureau- up with the massive urban migration that take this innovative approach, new tech- cracy and reduce the cost of transferring made these settlements swell. nology is equipping us with an even more titles. We acknowledge that building such powerful set of tools. Today, the city of Rio a system from 3D scans may raise concerns Other governments and urban planners de Janeiro and MITís Senseable City Lab about data privacy. If weíre able to address have also tried to prevent such settlements are working together to digitally map the those, though, favela residents could buy from forming or to dismantle them when entirety of Rocinha for the first time. and sell property more easily than on any they do, but thatís proved a losing strategy. formal property registry systems. More than 2 billion people worldwide are Researchers on our team are carrying now estimated to live in them. 3D scanners through the narrow alleys Having better knowledge of the favelasí and down the sloping hills, hoping to cap- physical layout could also improve living In the early 2000s, the city of Medell n, ture every inch of the 1.5-square-kilometer conditions. Urban designers could use Colombia, started a reckoning process that neighborhood.Around 300,000 data points this data to decide where to install stairs, would inspire the world. Settlements had are generated every second. or what structures to remove to allow in taken shape in the mountains, and the city more air, sun, or light. committed to serving these communities as The cost to scan the entire community it would any other. It began by construct- of Rocinha will be less than $60,000, which Clearly, the long-term solution to the ing a network of cable cars, soaring above we believe will more than pay for itself by most pressing problems favela residents the terrain that had long divided the city. enabling useful applications for its resi- face is to address the social issues that dents. With an accurate map of Rocinha, lead these settlements to be built in the Efforts to eradicate these communities the city could more easily provide access first place. Every nation has its own chal- gave way to incorporation; the government to public services such as water and waste lenges. Brazil must reduce social inequality, chose them as the sites for new libraries and collection, improve alleyways, and create Western Europe must rethink immigra- public parks. The Medell n model, despite plazas and public places. tion from its former colonies, and nations some shortcomings, has since become the everywhere should prepare for an uptick gold standard in Latin America and around These scans could also be used to create in climate-related migration. the world. property records, which could be managed How we choose to respond to favelas, An unplanned shantytowns, and refugee camps over the settlement in next few years will define the political and Rocinha, Rio de cultural attitudes that determine their long- Janeiro, Brazil. term future. Itís worth recalling, then, that most cities were born from informality. WASHINGTON FAJARDO Many parts of Paris were this way until the interventions of Baron Haussmann, whose 19th-century redesign was made possible with the force of a military strong- man. Fifty years ago, Singapore was still a city of shantytowns. New York once had more illegal settlements than anywhere else in the US, but waves of gentrification have allowed us to forget that messy history. The road to the city of tomorrow runs through Rocinha. Our decisions in this generation—to ignore, eradicate, or inte- grate—will help decide the destinies of unborn billions in the years to come. Favela residents are already experts in managing informality—some were mapping their communities with pen and paper long before we began our work with 3D scan- ners. Working alongside them, we can find a new balance between the top-down and bottom-up forces that have shaped cities since their origin. Q

Report 25 Digital addresses are making life in slums longitudes. Each code consists of four char- a bit more convenient. acters followed by a plus sign and two to four more characters. The characters after by Shoma Abhyankar the plus sign define the size of the area. Shoma Abhyankar ADDRESSING For example, GRQH+H4 points to a is a freelance INDIA’S popular temple in Pune, and FRV5+2W56 is the code of a community toilet in Laxmi writer from Nagar. These codes are available on Google India. Maps and can be used anywhere in the world with an internet connection. SLUMS Despite the services that become avail- COURTESY PHOTO F ourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath other deliveries. With no addresses of their able to those with a physical address, it took was ecstatic when the pizza own, residents had a hard time opening time to convince residents to sign up. Many arrived. It was the first time bank and postal accounts or accessing elec- had never heard of Google Maps and were she’d ever ordered from a food tric and water bills. During the pandemic, suspicious of Joshi’s staff, mistaking them delivery app. “I always felt shy medical teams struggled to track down for officials from India’s Slum Rehabilitation when my friends talked about infected residents. Authority. So the nonprofit enlisted local ordering food from apps,” she students to go door to door and tell people says. “Now I, too, can show off.” Last September, a nonprofit organiza- about the program. Dashrath lives in Laxmi tion called Shelter Associates began a pilot Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, along- project with Google and UNICEF to provide More than a thousand homes, drainage side some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped unique digital addresses to houses in Laxmi chambers, community toilets, help centers, brick and tin structures line crooked lanes Nagar. Now, Dashrath has a special code and drinking water tanks in the slum now wide enough for just one person. she can type into delivery apps and share have plus codes. And every house in the with friends to direct them to her front door. program has a physical blue address board According to the 2011 census, India has displaying its plus code for all to see. 108,000 slums that are home to 65 million “It was the pandemic that really spurred residents. It will add more urban residents the initiative,” says Pratima Joshi, an archi- “It saves me a lot of time,” says Suresh by 2050 than any other country, according tect who cofounded the nonprofit and has Devram Dharmavat, who used to close his to a 2014 UN estimate, and its slums are worked closely with slums in the cities of grocery shop on days he visited wholesale growing faster than its cities. Kolhapur and Thane since 1993. markets. Today, he gets many of the items he needs delivered by using his plus code. Until recently, Dashrath shared a com- The digital addresses residents received mon address with everyone around her— were “plus codes,” a free feature developed So far, Joshi’s organization has helped that of the slum itself. A large banyan tree by Google and built with open-source soft- 9,000 families in Pune,Thane, and Kolhapur served as a collection center for mail and ware. A plus code is a simple alphanumeric obtain digital addresses, and it aims to cover combination derived from latitudes and 58 more slums. Eventually, she hopes, residents will be able to add their codes to Aadhaar, India’s biometric ID program. Similar projects are under way else- where: a nonprofit called Addressing the Unaddressed used plus codes to connect slum dwellers in Kolkata with banks and post offices; the Rural Utah Project in the US provided digital addresses to Navajo Nation residents for voter registration; and the International Rescue Committee used plus codes for immunization and family planning projects in Somalia. Many services don’t yet accept plus codes, and it will take time for companies and government agencies to use them. For now, though, just having an address seems to have made life a little more convenient for some. Q

26 Cities ARGUMENTS CAPE TOWN’S Joseph Dana is it will build its own solar farm to power its FIGHT FOR the senior editor data centers in South Africa, thereby insulat- ENERGY ing itself from outages on the national grid. INDEPENDENCE of the weekly If companies can do it, why can’t cities? tech newsletter Cities are trying to take charge of their own power supply. The answer is mired in a complex web of Exponential regulations and restrictions.The Ministry of By Joseph Dana View. He lives in Mineral Resources and Energy, in consulta- tion with the National Energy Regulator of P ower outages are a way of life in Africa’s most Cape Town. South Africa, has the sole power to decide industrialized country. Over the last decade, where South African citizens get their South Africa’s electricity grid has come apart energy, how it is sold, and what source is ADAM GOLFER at the seams and failed to deliver dependable used to generate it. In practice, this gives power. As renewable energy gets cheaper, Eskom, the state-owned provider, a monop- South African cities such as Cape Town have oly over energy production and supply. demanded the right to find their own sources. The primary culprit in South Africa’s power Six years ago, Cape Town demanded that woes is the aging national electricity provider, Eskom. the ministry grant it the authority to pur- After years of mismanagement of state funds earmarked chase renewable energy from independent for critical infrastructure repairs, Eskom’s plants are regu- power producers. Those producers would larly unable to operate at full capacity. The result is rolling first deliver power directly to Cape Town via blackouts that last from two to six hours per day.The power the grid, and if they generated more elec- cuts have proved disastrous for the economy, with costs tricity than Cape Town needed, any surplus estimated at between $4 billion and $8 billion in 2019. would flow out to the rest of the country. That year, desperate to find a solution, Cape Town The request ended in a court battle over announced plans to purchase its own power from inde- constitutional questions about who gets to pendent renewable-power producers. The falling cost make such decisions. Given the strength of and exponential growth of renewable-energy technology South Africa’s constitution in supporting have made this possible. Amazon recently announced citizens’ rights, the case has evolved into a larger fight for the rights of citizens to have dependable power. Cape Town didn’t win that case, but the debate it started created political pressure. In October 2020 the government announced an amendment to electricity regulations that would allow municipalities to find their own methods of generating electricity or purchase it from independent producers. However, the minister still has the final authority to sign off on any new electricity agreements involving cities. Moreover, President Cyril Ramaphosa underlined his commitment to a “centralized state-owned enterprise” model in February’s state of the union address, in which he outlined various ways his government was going to procure more power for the country. The energy battle between South African cities and the national government is entering a new, and arguably more aggressive, phase. Since the October amendment was pub- licized, several cities have made plans to go it alone. Durban, South Africa’s third- largest city, announced its plan in January

Report But wait, there’s more. NICOLÁS ORTEGA The city aims to get 40% of its energy from agreement.Their ability to influence national Your subscription sources other than Eskom by 2030 and and international politics will grow as more gets you more than wants to use only clean energy by 2050. people continue to move there.Yet as South just this magazine Africa demonstrates, national governments And the sleepy university town of aren’t going down without a fight. You’re already a Stellenbosch, in the heart of South Africa’s subscriber. Register wine country, has submitted a request to While the battle over energy sover- your account and the national government to investigate eignty will almost certainly spread to more start enjoying: alternative energy sources. cities, not all areas will follow Cape Town’s approach. The Western Cape province, • Paywall-free web If Cape Town and other cities win the where the city is located, is blessed with access right to purchase their own electricity, ample wind and a relatively high number rural areas in the country could benefit of sunny days. Renewable energy works • Exclusive digital as well, because private companies will well in this part of the world. Other cities stories have financial incentives to produce more may not be able to purchase their own renewable power. More electricity produc- renewable power so easily. • The Algorithm tion should help everyone. newsletter But clearly, the combination of an urban- Cape Town’s ongoing battle over clean izing population and the widespread avail- • Subscriber-only app energy is symbolic of political tensions ability of renewable power is challenging between national and city governments the way the modern nation-state controls technologyreview.com/ that green tech is only accelerating. energy policy. We can expect national- subonly municipal splits like the one driving Cape By and large, city governance models Town’s energy crisis to become the rule, are more agile than their national counter- not the exception. Q parts. For example, cities have been at the forefront of implementing the Paris climate

28 SKYSCRAPER MEGACITIES from a megacity lowest carbon footprint per THE AGE OF SKETCHED FLOOR capita to highest 1 million people (in tons of CO2). MEGACITIES in 2035 Most vulnerable: Curbing emissions in a few big cities could have African cities are an outsize impact on climate change. FLOOR expanding faster 1 million people than any others. By Gabrielle Merite They will also face in 2020 the most serious s the world grows more urbanized, many A cities are becoming more populous while GROUND FLOOR threats from first 10 million climate change. also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate change. In 2020, our people in 2020 Most populous: world was home to 34 megacities, defined by the In 2035, Delhi United Nations as having at least 10 million residents. CIRCLE AREA will be the most In 2035, there will be 48, according to UN predictions. annual carbon These megacities will be hot spots of economic growth. footprint, in populous city in the But they will also face serious environmental challenges megatons of CO2 world. Despite its including droughts, pollution, sea-level rise, and fast growth rate, extreme weather. ICONS climate hazards the city’s per capita Megacities will play a key role in confronting carbon footprint is climate change; the world’s 100 most populous cities extreme hot are responsible for 18% of global carbon emissions. weather very low. But urban areas vary greatly in how efficient they are and how much residents will suffer if emissions flash floods go unchecked. coastal floods Cities with affluent residents who live high- consumption lifestyles drive atmospheric pollution. severe storms But with slow growth rates and more funding for adaptation measures, they will be better prepared for climate change. Over the next 14 years, most of the world’s newest megacities will develop in the Global South, and primarily in Africa and Asia. These metropolises will face more climate adversity despite having smaller carbon footprints. A lack of infrastructure and funding puts their rapidly growing populations at greater risk. Despite this inequity, there is still hope. The concentration of wealth and greater access to technology within metropolitan areas create a unique opportunity to take action. The advantages cities have gained through industrial activity position them well to lead us to a cleaner future. DATA FROM “CARBON FOOTPRINTS OF 13,000 CITIES.” DANIEL MORAN ET AL 2018 ENVIRON. RES. LETT. 13 064041 AND UN DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS - POPULATION DYNAMICS

29 In decline: Japan’s population is in rapid decline. Osaka and Tokyo are the only megacities that will see their populations decrease by 2035. Biggest polluter: Shenzhen has the highest carbon footprint per capita. Its residents produce more than eight times as much carbon as those in Tokyo.

30 POLICE DEPARTMENTS WANT TO KNOW AS MUCH AS THEY LEGALLY CAN. BUT DOES EVER-GREATER RELIANCE ON SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY SERVE THE PUBLIC INTEREST? -BOR HOOD BY ROWAN MOORE GERETY PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIKI CHAN WYLIE GUTTER CREDIT HERE

GUTTER CREDIT HERE 31 NEIGH WATCH

32 Cities A T a conference in New Orleans in The city council rebuffed Greiner’s first 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief funding request for a real time crime center, of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a in 2007. But the mayor gave his blessing to presentation by the New York City pursue the project within the existing police Police Department about a sophisticated new data hub called a “real budget. Greiner approached Esri and flew down to the company’s headquarters in time crime center.” Reams of information rendered in red and green Redlands, California. He “started up a little splotches, dotted lines, and tiny yellow icons appeared as overlays on friendship”with Esri’s billionaire cofounder, an interactive map of New York City: Murders. Shootings. Road clo- Jack Dangermond, and spoke at the com- sures. You could see the routes of planes landing at LaGuardia and the pany’s convention, floating a plan to fly a schedules of container ships arriving at the mouth of the Hudson River. 30-foot camera-equipped blimp over Ogden to monitor emergencies as they devel- oped. (“I got beat up by Jay Leno for that,” Greiner said. The blimp never launched.) In the early 1990s, the NYPD had pio- respective locations of car thefts and car Since Ogden already had a subscription neered a system called CompStat that aimed recoveries, to see if joyrides tended to end to Esri’s flagship product, ArcGIS, which to discern patterns in crime data, since near the joyrider’s home. You could watch it used for planning and public works, the widely adopted by large police depart- police cars and fire trucks move around the company offered to build a free test site for ments around the country. With the real city, or plot cell-phone records over time a real time crime center (RTCC). time crime center, the idea was to go a step to look back at a suspect’s whereabouts Around the country, the expansion of further: What if dispatchers could use the during the hours before and after a crime. police technology has followed a similar department’s vast trove of data to inform the police response to incidents as they occurred? AROUND THE COUNTRY, THE EXPANSION OF Back in Ogden, population POLICE TECHNOLOGY 82,702, the main problem on Greiner’s mind was a stubbornly HAS FOLLOWED A SIMILAR PATTERN , high rate of vehicle burglaries. DRIVEN MORE BY CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN As it was, the department’s lone POLICE AGENCIES AND THEIR VENDORS crime analyst was left to look for THAN BETWEEN POLICE patterns by plotting addresses on paper maps, or by manually calcu- AND THE PUBLIC THEY SERVE. lating the average time between similar crimes in a given area. The city had recently purchased license-plate readers with money from a In 2021, it might be simpler to ask what federal grant, but it had no way to integrate can’t be mapped. Just as Google and social the resulting archive of images with the rest media have enabled each of us to reach into of the department’s investigations. It was the figurative diaries and desk drawers of obvious that much more could be made of anyone we might be curious about, law the data on hand. enforcement agencies today have access “I’m not New York City,” Greiner to powerful new engines of data process- thought, “but I could scale this down with ing and association. Ogden is hardly the the right software.” Greiner called a former tip of the spear: police agencies in major colleague who’d gone to work for Esri, a cities are already using facial recognition large mapping company, and asked what to identify suspects—sometimes falsely— kinds of disparate information he might and deploying predictive policing to define put on a map. The answer, it turned out, patrol routes. was anything you could put in a spread- “That’s not happening here,” Ogden’s sheet: the address history of people on current police chief, Eric Young, told parole—sorting for those with past drug, me. “We don’t have any kind of machine burglary, or weapons convictions—or the intelligence.”

Neighborhood watch 33 Above: pattern, driven more by conversations Ogden grew up in the late 19th century, Dave Weloth, a retired between police agencies and their vendors the junction nearest to the spot where police detective, directs than between police and the public they the two halves of the transcontinental the Ogden Police Area serve. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, railroad were finally stitched together Tactical Analysis Center an advocacy group that tracks the spread in 1869. Marketed at the time as the (formerly know as the Real of surveillance technology among local law “crossroads of the West,” it sits at the seam Time Crime Center). enforcement agencies, currently counts between two of the region’s defining nat- 85 RTCCs in cities as small as Westwego, ural features. On one side, the Wasatch Opposite: Louisiana, whose population has yet to Mountains form the westernmost edge Eric Young, a 28-year crack 10,000. I traveled to Ogden to find of the Rockies; on the other, the Great veteran of the department, answers to a question Greiner phrased Basin extends outward from the shores of became Ogden’s chief of this way: “What are we gonna do with the Great Salt Lake. Ogden’s mayor, Mike police in January. this new tool that gets really close to your Caldwell, likes to say the railroad made constitutional rights?” And as federal and Ogden “rich at the right time.” But the rail- state laws take their time to catch up to the road also brought an unsavory reputation wares on offer at conventions like Esri’s, it is still trying to overcome. Local legend who gets to decide how close is too close? has it that Al Capone stepped off a train in

34 Cities the 1920s, did a lap around 25th Street, and backgrounds in federal law enforcement. network of license-plate readers. As declared Ogden too wild a town for him to A former US Treasury officer was going Greiner recalled, thefts increase in the stay. By the time Jon Greiner took over as through a statewide register of pawned winter, “because people warm up their police chief in 1995, the main challenges goods, looking for matches with property cars in the driveway, then go back inside on 25th Street were panhandling and pub- reported stolen in Ogden. and leave their keys in the ignition.” Today, lic drunkenness. Still, the city’s leadership Weloth told me, “running and unattend- sees the real time crime center as a linch- Weloth had one of the analysts cue up eds” still account for about a third of car pin of efforts to revitalize its downtown. a video from a recent homicide investiga- thefts in the city. This includes an inci- tion, in which cell-phone records obtained dent last November when a young mother The RTCC occupies a dim triangular by subpoena helped disprove key parts of left her 10-month-old in the back seat of office on the second floor of the city’s a suspect’s story about his whereabouts her running car, which was stolen. Both public safety building. Much of the light on the night his girlfriend was murdered. the mayor and the chief of police told comes from twin monitors on each of six Footage from a city-owned surveillance me the license-plate reader had been desks that wind their way along the wall, camera at Ogden’s water treatment plant instrumental in finding the kid within augmented by two rows of wall-mounted allowed Weloth’s team to “put him where two hours. But they didn’t mention that displays overhead. There’s a cell-phone the phone said he was,” tightening the case two women had found the baby crying extraction machine in the back corner, for the prosecution. on a front porch some miles away—and and several drones stacked in hard cases. This was one of a few greatest hits that A team of seven analysts works in stag- gered shifts, monitoring police-radio traffic MUCH HARDER TO EVALUATE and working “requests for information” from detectives and patrol officers. Their IS HOW supervisor, David Weloth, is a laid-back former detective with a neatly trimmed THE USE OF SURVEILLANCE TOOLS beard and a silver crew cut. Weloth retired from the Ogden City Police Department AFFECTS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN (OPD) in 2005, but he came back less than a year later to work as a crime analyst and OFFICERS AND THE RESIDENTS has stayed on ever since. THEY ENCOUNTER IN THEIR When I arrived for a visit in February, OPD detective Heather West was scroll- DAILY ROUNDS. ing through a queue of hundreds of photos captured by a new license-plate-reading came up repeatedly in discussions about that the automatic reader had only helped system called Flock Safety, looking for a how Ogden uses the technology in its real them recover the car. distinctive pickup truck—gray with a red time crime center. In another, in 2018, ana- camper shell—thought to have been used lysts tapped into a network of city-owned The police department maintains a in a theft. The previous week, Weloth cameras to locate a kidnapping suspect web page advising residents on “10 Ways explained, Flock had helped the depart- after the woman he’d held managed to to reduce your vehicle from being stolen” ment recover five stolen vehicles in three flag down an officer and provide a phys- and periodically sends community policing days. Since they got it in December 2020, ical description. When officers arrived officers out to relay the message. Would they’d queried the system more than 800 on scene, the man shot at them; police a more robust public education program times. On searches without a plate num- returned fire and killed him. be a better way to reduce car theft than an ber, though, looking for a particular kind or intrusive citywide license-plate surveil- color of car, the algorithm had a tendency If there’s any good reason to deploy lance system? That’s not a question anyone to veer off course. “For some reason, it likes invasive technology, surely solving a mur- at OPD appears to be asking. red Mazda 3s,” West said, still looking at der and stopping a violent crime both her screen. qualify. What’s much harder to evaluate When the RTCC launched, Weloth is how the use of surveillance tools affects explained, his goal was to “close Weloth introduced the team as Fox the relationship between officers and the the gap between raw data and News played silently on a TV in the cor- residents they encounter in their daily something that’s actionable.” To ner. West holds one of two OPD detective rounds, or how they change the collective do that, he first had to figure out positions on the team, which also includes understanding of the purpose of policing. “What have we already paid for?” More a sheriff’s deputy from surrounding Weber than 100 city-owned surveillance cameras, County and four civilian analysts with Take car theft. Recovering stolen cars has been an early success of the city’s

Neighborhood watch 35 Below: installed by Ogden’s public works depart- of the incident on one of the big screens. ment after 9/11, were trained on sites like The goal is not, he says, to constantly sur- Joshua Terry, an analyst the parking lot of the fleet and facilities veil everyone but to use what tools the ana- who does much of the building, or the door to the city’s computer lysts can to aid active investigations. “We real time crime center’s server room. In some places, the cameras couldn’t care less what people are doing,” mapping work, with a drone. could be controlled remotely. Analysts he says, even though “people think we sit could review footage and pan, tilt, or zoom here watching these cameras.” those cameras in accordance with requests from dispatch or officers in the field. “I’d be bored to death,” a colleague said with a chuckle. This is what had allowed Joshua Terry, who does much of the real time crime cen- Besides, Weloth pointed out, the sys- ter’s mapping work, to follow along during tem had accountability: “I can tell exactly the 2018 kidnapping call, zeroing in on who moved what camera, where, when.” a dark figure on the sidewalk in a Dallas Cowboys jacket seconds before he darted When the state chapter of the American out of view. “That’s the reason we have it Civil Liberties Union called a city council on,” Terry told me, playing back the footage member with concerns about the possible use of facial recognition, Weloth explained, he offered a tour of the RTCC. “We’re very

36 Cities cautious about stuff that’s not supported Utah is one of 16 states with statutes Above: by law,” he said. “One mistake and we’re that explicitly address automated license- The city’s leadership sees gonna pay the price.” plate readers; the OPD’s policy calls for two the real time crime center supervisors to sign off before querying a as a linchpin of efforts to The challenge is that for much of police plate number against the database, and revitalize downtown. surveillance technology, the most relevant plate information can’t be stored for lon- law is the Fourth Amendment prohibition ger than nine months; it’s usually deleted Opposite: on “unreasonable searches” of people’s within 30 days. Still, there’s no federal or Betty Sawyer, president of “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” The state law that specifically regulates govern- the Ogden NAACP, says the court system has yet to figure out how this ment use of surveillance cameras, and none department should do more applies to modern surveillance systems. As of the department’s audits are published. to engage city residents Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2012 in conversations about new Supreme Court opinion, “Awareness that Sotomayor’s 2012 opinion was non- police technologies. the Government may be watching chills binding (but widely cited), and it served associational and expressive freedoms.And mostly to point out that important issues the Government’s unrestrained power to haven’t been addressed in law. As Weloth assemble data that reveal private aspects had said when I first called to plan my visit, of identity is susceptible to abuse.” “We regulate ourselves extremely well.”

Neighborhood watch 37 One afternoon, I accompanied Heather police department had to obtain waivers to perform the same service for two neigh- West, the detective who’d been to get its drones off the ground; it took boring towns. Ogden drones have also been perusing gray pickups in the license- two years to develop policies and get the used to pinpoint hot spots after wildland plate database, and Josh Terry, the necessary approvals to start making flights. fires, locate missing persons, and fly “over- analyst who’d spotted the kidnapper watch” for SWAT team raids. with the Cowboys jacket, to fly a drone over The police department purchased its a park abutting a city-owned golf course on drones with a mind to managing large pub- This flight was more routine. When I the edge of town. West was at the controls; lic events or complex incidents like hostage pulled into the parking lot, two officers Terry followed the drone’s path in the sky situations. But, as Dave Weloth soon found, from Ogden’s community policing unit and maintained “situational awareness” for “the more we use our drones, the more looked on as West steered the craft over a the crew; another detective focused on the use cases we find.” At the real time crime dense stand of Gambel oak and then hov- iPad showing what the drone was seeing, center, Terry, who has a master’s in geo- ered over a triangular log fort on a hillside as opposed to where and how it was flying. graphic information technology, had given a couple of hundred yards away. Though me a tour of the city with images gathered they’d never encountered people on drone Of all the gadgets under the hood at the on recent drone flights, clicking through to sweeps through the area, trash and make- real time crime center, drones may well be cloud-shaped splotches, assembled from shift structures were commonplace. Once the most tightly regulated, subject to safety the drone’s composite photographs, that the RTCC pinpointed the location of any (but not privacy) regulations and review dotted the map of Ogden. encampments, the community service offi- by the Federal Aviation Administration. cers would go in on foot to get a closer look. In Ogden, neighbor to a large Air Force Above 21st Street and Washington, he “We get a lot of positive feedback from base, these rules are compounded by flight zoomed in on the site of a fatal crash caused runners, hikers,” one officer explained. restrictions covering most of the city. The by a motorcycle running a red light.A bloody After one recent visit to a camp near a sheet covered the driver’s body, legs splayed pond on 21st Street, he and the county social service workers who accompanied THE COURT SYSTEM HAS YET TO him found housing for two people they’d met there. When clearing camps, police FIGURE OUT HOW also “try and connect [people] with ser- vices they need,” Weloth said. The depart- THE FOURTH AMENDMENT ment recently hired a full-time homeless outreach coordinator to help. “We can’t APPLIES police ourselves out of this problem,” he said, comparing the department’s efforts TO MODERN SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS. to keep new camps from springing up to “pushing water uphill.” on the pavement, surrounded by a ring of fire trucks. Within minutes, the drone’s Still, no one seemed to give much cameras had scanned the scene and created thought to the fact that quietly, people a 3D model accurate to a centimeter, replac- who were homeless had become the sight ing the complex choreography of place most frequently captured by the police markers and fixed cameras on the ground department’s drone program. Of the 137 that sometimes leave major intersections non-training flights made since May 2019, closed for hours after a deadly collision. nearly half—62—were flyovers of home- less encampments, with regular flights When the region was hit by a powerful over a parkway on the Ogden River and windstorm last September, Terry flew a in woods by the railroad, whose owner, drone over massive piles of downed trees Union Pacific, employs its own private and brush collected by the city. When security as well. It was easy to see the county officials saw the resulting volu- appeal: if, instead of spending hours clam- metric analysis—12,938 cubic yards—that bering through the woods, you could find would be submitted as part of a claim people in minutes by looking down from to the Federal Emergency Management on high, why not? Agency, they asked the police department “We’ve had a lot of homicides come out of those illegal encampments,” Ogden’s mayor, Mike Caldwell, told me. Chief

38 Cities Young cited two incidents to support To Mayor Caldwell, this wasn’t a mean- myths and speak to the truth of what you Caldwell’s claim. The first was the 2018 ingful distinction. Asked whether there are doing?” she said. murder of a homeless man, whose killer were some complaints or alleged crimes told police he considered homeless people that weren’t serious enough to justify use One risk for the police department is a “problem.” The second was a fatal stab- of the RTCC’s most invasive technologies, that the RTCC’s usefulness is, at least for bing in an encampment near the railroad he said, “I think we should use all the tools some of the city, ultimately overshadowed tracks, just outside city limits; the suspect … The average everyday person wouldn’t by mistrust over cops’ ability to use their arrested in the case was homeless him- even know that these tools are out there or new powers with restraint. As Malik Dayo, self. Both incidents were tragic examples that anything is being monitored.” who organized several Black Lives Matter of the well-documented vulnerability to protests in Ogden last summer, told me, violence of people without shelter. But For Betty Sawyer, president of the “I can leave my house, drive to the store, does it follow that drones would be an Ogden chapter of the NAACP, that’s pre- and come back, and if [police] wanted to, effective deterrent? cisely the problem. Sawyer told me she they can figure out what time I left, what wasn’t aware the city had license-plate time I came back, and if I made any stops The idea that police were flying over readers and remotely monitored surveil- along the way.” Some cities have preempted the city’s open spaces to investigate homi- lance cameras until I called her for an similar objections with an avalanche of cides is also hard to square with the con- interview. When she asked the depart- public data: in Southern California, the tention that the flights were part of the ment for more information, Chief Young city of Chula Vista publishes routes and city’s homeless outreach. Aren’t those shared a presentation he’d made before accompanying case numbers for every different activities, or shouldn’t they be? the City Council in December—one week drone flight its police department con- Either way, Caldwell said, “if it wasn’t the before the new license-plate readers were ducts. Weloth assured me the checks drone, it would be officers climbing over deployed. “How many people are listen- and balances on Ogden’s license-plate readers would prevent the scenario Dayo POLICE TEND TO VIEW described. Dayo was unmoved. “I think it’s gonna be abused,” he said. “I really do.” ALL THE TOOLS AT THEIR DISPOSAL Police tend to view all the tools at their AS PART OF THE SAME BASIC CONTINUUM disposal as part of the same basic contin- uum—drones and bicycles alike helping DRONES AND BICYCLES ALIKE HELPING “to protect and serve.” After a few days in Ogden, though, I couldn’t help but think “TO PROTECT AND SERVE.” that the RTCC’s tools were also function- ing as a kind of digital armor for a particular deadfall and going into those places. That ing to weekly city council meetings?” she worldview. Was the department’s reliance keeps our officers safe, and gives us more asked. “If no one’s talking about it but it’s on technology allowing it to do more with bandwidth.” here—how, why, what’s the reason for less, or was it letting the city ignore the com- it? Is that the best use of our dollar when plexities of its most urgent social problems? One important function of resource we’re down officers? These are things that constraints, though—bandwidth, in the should be put up front, not after the fact.” Last August, a covid-19 outbreak at the mayor’s equation—is that they force gov- Lantern House, Ogden’s largest homeless ernments, and citizens, to consider prior- Last summer, as protests flared across shelter, infected at least 48 residents and ities. One Friday afternoon, I met Doug the country in response to the police killing killed two. Confirmed cases were quar- Young, a 49-year-old who has lived out- of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Sawyer antined in a separate wing of the shelter, doors in Ogden on and off for the last 12 spearheaded a group that held a series of but people soon began to set up tents on years. He wore a gray poncho and a cowboy meetings with the mayor and police chief. It the sidewalk outside, where 33rd Street hat with a pin in the shape of a cow’s skull. was an effort to improve police-community dead-ended by the railroad tracks. Young said he often saw drones overhead relations in a city where no Black cop when he camped behind a local Walmart, serves in a department of 126 sworn offi- Among them was a man who asked me and he had learned to distinguish police cers, and where the police force is less than to use only his first name, Ryan, and said drones by the whirr of their motors. “If it 10% Hispanic, though Hispanic residents he no longer felt safe sleeping on closely stops violent crime, cool. If it’s for some make up more than 30% of Ogden’s pop- spaced bunks: “You’re within four feet of petty bullshit, leave us the fuck alone,” ulation. “Our whole goal is: How do we five people.” Outside, people had to move he said. build in transparency so we can dispel the their stuff twice a week for workers to clear trash, and sometimes human waste, from the area—there were no dumpsters, and no porta-potties—but it felt safer than being

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40 Cities indoors.“We were staying so close together Paige Berhow, who retired as assistant employees accessed them only a handful of it was a health risk,” he said. police chief in the Ogden suburb of times each month.They soon found reasons Riverdale and now lives in the city, to peer through the cameras daily. From The police department set up a trailer became an officer in the early 1980s, November 23, 2020, to February 23, 2021 with surveillance cameras atop a high pole when her on-duty equipment con- (the most recent three months for which to record what happened in the new camp. sisted of little more than a uniform and a the city provided data), ATAC processed Through the fall, as the group living out- revolver. Then came tasers and bulletproof over 27,000 queries, or about 300 each day. side the shelter swelled to some 60 people vests and computer dashboards in every in about 30 tents, the cameras captured patrol car. “With every layer of stuff, that’s Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a com- several incidents of violence. A car window another layer of detachment from the pub- puter scientist at the University of Utah was smashed. Someone punched a pizza lic, too,” she told me. As Berhow pointed who studies the social implications of delivery driver in the face. out, much of the expanding footprint of algorithmic decision-making, worries technology in police departments has come that police departments have embraced On December 10, a Thursday, a team in the name of officer safety, though on-duty novel tools without the resources or the including police, firefighters, and county officer deaths have declined dramatically expertise to properly evaluate their influ- social workers cleared the encampment over the last several decades. ence. How might the distribution of sur- once and for all. “Up to this point, Ogden veillance cameras, for instance, affect the city has taken a moderated approach during David Weloth hesitated when I asked department’s understanding of the dis- the pandemic. However, the situation what would change, 10 years into Ogden’s tribution of crime? How could software has now become untenable,” a city press experiment, if the police department sud- like that sold by Palantir (a data analytics release read, identifying the encampment denly had to do without the RTCC, since firm with roots in the intelligence com- as a source of crime and a drain on city renamed the Area Tactical Analysis Center. munity) amplify existing biases and dis- resources. tortions in the criminal justice system? “A lot of government agencies who are “WE WOULD HAVE getting solicited by vendors would like … to scrutinize them properly, but they A VERY DIFFICULT TIME. don’t know how,” he told me. “The idea coming from vendors is that more data is THERE’S NO CRIME REDUCTION always better. That’s really not the case.” WITHOUT ATAC. ” STRATEGY THAT HAPPENS To their credit, the analysts working at ATAC made good on Weloth’s pledge DAVID WELOTH, OGDEN POLICE DEPARTMENT of openness. They were candid, and will- ing to explore potential pitfalls in their “Given the potential for the spread “We would have a very difficult time,” he work. Terry, who did much of the mapping of COVID-19 and other communicable said. “There’s no crime reduction strategy work at ATAC, had spent four years as a diseases often found in camps like these, that happens without ATAC.” contractor with the National Geospatial- risks from camp members spread through- Intelligence Agency working on American out the city.” This was not the approach ATAC’s role in the police department’s drone strikes. He told the story of a fellow advocated by the Centers for Disease relationship with the city has steadily image analyst who misidentified what he Control, which recommends that local expanded over time. The number of thought was a group of men making IEDs governments “allow people who are liv- “requests for information” completed by under cover of darkness. On the strength ing unsheltered or in encampments to the group was up by over 20% last year. of that analysis, Terry says, “they blew up remain where they are,” emphasizing The police department now has a say in the kids carrying firewood.” When Terry came that dispersing encampments increases city’s master plan for surveillance cameras; to Ogden, he was surprised to see that local potential for disease spread. the popularity of Amazon Ring’s camera- police departments had access to tools as equipped doorbells, meanwhile, has given powerful as Palantir’s. Another analyst According to a report in the local paper, analysts a new trove of data to peruse. swiveled in his chair and chimed in. “The 10 people accepted the city’s offer to go technology is getting better and the cost sleep inside the Lantern House, and the But Ogden releases very little data to is coming down,” he said. “At some point rest dispersed. If they found themselves shed light on ATAC’s role, beyond con- will we get access to technology we regret setting up tents along the Ogden River, firmation that it’s still growing. In the they’d be spotted soon enough by one of fall of 2019, when the city launched an having? Probably.” the police department’s drones. expanded network of surveillance cam- eras that ATAC could monitor remotely, Rowan Moore Gerety is a writer in Phoenix, Arizona.

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43 The pandemic New York City’s subways shut down, upended public transit and the new night bus network flick- and forced city planners ered on. to rethink their priorities. Now they’re trying to It was an early battle in the worst map out what comes next. existential crisis for Western urban public transportation in our lifetimes. By John Surico Across Europe and North America, ridership has plunged amid pandemic On paper, the task was gargantuan. PHOTO- MTA wanted to know: Where did travel restrictions. The traditional To slow the rapid spread of the coro- GRAPHS the frontline workers who rely on hub-and-spoke model, with transit navirus, the New York City subway overnight service live? And where networks designed to flush people in would start closing every night for the BY were they most likely headed? With and out of a central business district, first time in 115 years. That meant the CHONA that information, its planners could was upended. Rush hour, as we know Metropolitan Transportation Authority KASINGER plot the most efficient bus routes and it, suddenly became less of a rush. (MTA), its overseer, had to create a maybe even serve these commuters massive bus network to mirror 665 better than the subway ever did. Tiffany Chu, Remix’s cofounder miles of track. That’s roughly equiv- and newly minted CEO, watched alent to a line stretching from New At Remix’s headquarters in San this all play out in real time. “Transit York City to Chicago, for a system Francisco, a team of software engi- agencies are always changing things that was serving around 5.5 million neers sprang into action. The Remix up, but most of [those changes] are people each weekday. And they had team pulled data from a variety of small, incremental ones,” Chu says. to do it fast. sources and plugged it into the tool to “When covid hit, immediately we help find the best routes. As a result saw in Remix’s admin panel just a Shortly after the decision was made, of this work, the MTA added three lot of rapid changes happening: 50% at the end of April 2020, agency plan- new bus routes that would connect, service, then 30% … agencies were ners logged on to Remix, one of the for example, health-care workers just slashing service everywhere.” most popular transportation planning and others in the Bronx and in south platforms in the world.The self-service and east Brooklyn to the west side of A year later, this unprecedented software allows transit agencies to eas- Manhattan or any point along the way. shock to modern mobility is still ily reroute lines or create new ones. reverberating. The long-term shift The MTA had already used it to begin Days blurred into nights as work to remote white-collar work is cast- redesigning the Queens bus network. continued on both coasts. Ultimately, ing doubt on whether rush hour will a task that would typically have taken ever fully return. The office is in ret- But for this new undertaking, the weeks, if not months, was finished in rograde. And for transit systems, the agency would need more data. The a few days. On the evening of May 6, implications are profound. The pandemic, Chu argues, poses a fundamental threat to transit agen- cies in the West. “Agencies are just being forced to learn how to do more with less,” she says. But she believes this massive system-wide disruption is also a rare opportunity to rethink public transportation for the better. OPPORTUNITIES OVER PATTERNS When Chu, now 32, graduated from MIT in 2010, she looked to pair her skills in the then-burgeoning field of user experience design, or UX, with her interest in cities. That took her to gigs at major architectural firms, a

44 Cities stint writing for the design publica- the platform estimates how much CHU planning process that, for so long, tion Dwell, and a position at Zipcar, it might cost and who might ride it SAYS THE has been none of those things. where she was the car-share compa- in view of who is able to access it, PANDEMIC ny’s first UX hire. But she felt pulled ultimately helping planners assess DOESN’T Jarrett Walker, a renowned transit to do more. whether it’s a worthwhile public MEAN THE consultant, was one of Remix’s early investment. DEATH OF advisors. In addition to cost and ser- Friends told her about a fellow- THE CITY vice levels, he suggested adding travel ship at Code for America, in San Adding more data deepens the BUT THE time—how long would it take peo- Francisco, a year-long role focused tool’s technical analysis: with a few RISE OF THE ple to get around, and what choices on technology aimed at making clicks, demographic information and NEIGHBOR- would they encounter along the way? government work better for peo- existing ridership figures help plan- HOOD. So the group built what has become ple. She applied and soon packed ners visualize the routes that would one of the platform’s most popular her bags for California. That’s where best meet a community’s needs. scenario planning tools: “Jane,” a she found some like minds: designer There’s also a Google Docs–like ele- rider isochrone, or travel time indi- Sam Hashemi and engineers Dan ment: users can leave notes for one cator, that shows all the places she Getelman and Danny Whalen. another suggesting that, for example, could reach in 15 minutes, 30 min- two stops should be consolidated into utes, and so on. “We were all vaguely interested one. The platform’s design makes it in transportation,” says Chu from easy to share maps and routes that That advice jibes with one of her bright San Francisco apartment, are fluid, clear, and intuitive—in a Walker’s guiding philosophies: that a bike in full view on Zoom. The field public transportation planners must held a particular appeal: thanks to the transportation sector’s long-standing commitment to open data standards, she explains, “there’s a lot of pro- grammatic data you can work with that doesn’t exist in other realms of civic tech.” The quartet worked on a hackathon project, a typical techie icebreaker, a few months into the fellowship. After hearing friends complain of bus routes that never seemed to match up with where they wanted to go, they devised a widget that allowed users to sug- gest new routes to San Francisco’s transit agency. They named their tool Transitmix, inspired by Streetmix, another hackathon project that has since become a popular street design platform. When their fellowships ended, Hashemi rallied the group to pur- sue a product geared toward cities. Code for America seed funding and an investment from Y Combinator led to Remix, which became one of the accelerator’s first gov-tech startups. Hashemi was the CEO; Chu was the chief operating officer. Remix’s primary software appears, at first, to be a kind of cost-benefit calculator. When a planner plots a new route across a map on the screen,

Back to the streets 45 Tech has York–based ride-sharing company brought public Via acquired Remix for $100 million. transit into the (Remix will operate as a Via subsidi- 21st century, but ary, and the company says that Chu companies like and the rest of the staff will stay on.) Uber are also a direct competitor. Dan Getelman, Remixís chief tech- nology officer, says one of the teamís focus on fostering opportunity rather helping to explain the different sides goals is to free up time for transit than predicting patterns. A similar of a question that, ultimately, doesnít agencies to experiment more. Itís sentiment is now gaining traction have a single technical answer, he always frustrating as a transit rider in policymaking circles: access, not says. when you say I guess this made sense ridership, should be the measure of at some point, but it doesnít match the success. And the right technology can A [ridersí] needs or doesnít feel reac- help cities deliver on that promise. COMPLICATED tive to whatís happening,í he says. RELATIONSHIP But agenciesí capabilities vary The tech sector has a compli- immensely, says Evan Landman, Shortly after Remixís launch, in cated relationship with public transit, a transit analyst at Walkerís firm, 2014, a transit manager at Oregonís though. On the one hand, technology Jarrett Walker + Associates. Some Department of Transportation reached has brought some urban infrastruc- are highly sophisticated; others are out: rural agencies in his state needed ture into the 21st century, easing pas- still using tab-laden Excel spread- better tools. He became their first cus- sengersí journeys with advances like sheets. Plotting a new bus route can tomer. We were over the moon and software APIs (think subway count- take forever. Whenever two agencies just bewildered that someone would down clocks), contactless payment, have to collaborate and bridge that pay us! says Chu. and navigation apps. But on the other, divide, the pace drags. tech is a direct competitor; compa- Then came Bay Area agencies, nies like Uber have been criticized No doubt there are problems that then Miami-Dade, then Chicago. for intentionally taking riders (and tech cannot solve—repairing insti- Before long, Chu found herself revenue) away from public transit, tutional trust, for one—but often, Googling small Finnish cities as while simultaneously clogging streets. agencies just need help exploring the Remix signed up its first interna- How the two can best coexist is an options, Landman argues. Thereís tional clients. ongoing debate in both worlds. a widespread perception that urban transportation planning is some- Nearly seven years later, Remix Remix falls, perhaps, into a dif- how a technically complex prob- now has a team of around 70, and a ferent category. Itís a tech company lem when, in reality, itís a politically client list that includes over 350 tran- that goes all in on the public sector, fraught issue with long-standing, sit agencies across five continents, betting that riders will be attracted to well-understood solutions, he says. including titans like the MTA and traditional public transport options Transport for London. with good, reliable service rather Remix doesnít try to solve the pol- than an entirely new product. Itís itics with a magic cure, Landman Every day, more than 240 million a high-tech solution, sure, but the adds, but strives to show how deci- people worldwide interact with plan- premise is shockingly low-tech: build sions may affect individual riders and ning decisions made on the platform, it better, and they will come. And in their landscape. Itís really useful in from individual routes to system- our rapidly changing world of mobil- wide overhauls. In March, the New ity, Getelman says, responsiveness is essential: Being able to do that makes for a better system. ACTING LOCAL A sort of transit inversion happened when covid-19 hit. Yes, city centers emptied, but ridership outside of central corridors—along local routes

46 Cities and at neighborhood stations—didn’t “If you don’t change disappear entirely, and in some cases the rules,” Chu says, it actually increased. Riders were still “nobody’s going to be moving; it’s just that where they were able to change the going had changed. outcome.” Local trips like these have typically been overlooked by planners making This reckoning has reignited inter- out nearby destinations that can be transit decisions. They involve fewer est in the “15-minute city,” where made more accessible. riders, and funding is tied to rider- pedestrian-centric environments and ship. Race and class also play a role; responsive public transit put essential Over time, prioritizing the places poorer riders and people of color, who services within reach of a brisk walk people live instead of just the places are more likely to live farther out and or short bike ride. Transit agencies, they work will mean expanding the are less likely to own a car, have long Chu argues, should take note. “The mission of urban transportation, Chu been left out of citymaking. 15-minute city isn’t supposed to just says. Planners should be able to more be where the buildings are tallest,” easily anticipate people’s needs and As a result, the quality of these she says. “It should be based on a adjust accordingly—as the MTA did public transit trips deteriorates, which truly livable neighborhood center.” with its new pilot bus route from drives down ridership. Seeing fewer public housing sites to vaccination riders, agencies inevitably cut service, Look close enough, and you can sites at colleges in central Queens and ridership slides further still. This already see changes happening. The and Brooklyn. produces the transit version of a death new tool kit of streetscape interven- spiral—a more arduous commute and tions that cities developed in response In a crisis that laid bare the fewer opportunities for the affected to covid-19 hints at a different urban immense imbalances in how we get communities. future—one that includes more “slow around—who has access to what; who streets,” which limit through traffic; has to travel how long; and who, ulti- But since the pandemic began, pop-up or permanent cycle lanes; mately, has to put their lives at risk— Chu has seen a notable change in outdoor dining; and parklets. it’s time to be more flexible, Chu the data sets transit agencies are ask- argues. That means helping people ing for. Instead of primarily request- “It’s investing in small downtown get to where they’re going by creating ing information about which jobs are retail corridors, and people frequent- services that are genuinely better— located where, a question that has long ing them more often during all times or simply making it easier for them shaped planning decisions, Remix is of the day,” says Chu. “You want a to navigate their own neighborhood now helping cities evaluate how easy constant flow of all types of trips, to without a car. And it means starting it is for residents to access essential and from where people are gathering to right the historical wrongs in our services such as health care, educa- and where businesses are.” cities that have left so many urban tion, and food. denizens stranded. Remix’s portfolio is following suit. The change is a welcome one. “If A “streets” platform allows agen- “If you don’t change the rules,” you look at just jobs, that is prob- cies to tinker with everything from Chu says, “nobody’s going to be able ably not going to tell you the full car-free thoroughfares to expanded to change the outcome.” story,” Chu says. “You also need to sidewalks. And a “shared mobility” look at very basic needs, like where tool for emerging “last mile” systems John Surico is a journalist and you can get fresh produce in gro- such as e-bikes and e-scooters lays urban planning researcher. cery stores. That is one of the most important metrics that isn’t usually discussed when you talk about transit accessibility.” In October 2020, Chu wrote on Forbes.com that covid-19 was not “the death of the city,” as many critics proclaimed, but rather could foster the “rise of the neighborhood cen- ter.” With mobility restricted, people were forced to revisit what was close to them.

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