Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

Author:Anthony M. Townsend [Anthony M. Townsend]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-10-07T00:00:00+00:00


7

Reinventing City Hall

Whether it’s built by big companies or wireless activists, the first prerequisite for entry into the club of smart cities is a world-class broadband infrastructure. Over the last decade, a growing number of cities have tried to speed the process and introduce competition by building new networks themselves. But across the United States, the telecommunications industry has fought these civic initiatives to a standstill. Perhaps it is fitting that one of the first battles over the smart city took place in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy

“Forget cheese steaks, cream cheese and brotherly love,” the New York Times gushed. “Philadelphia wants to be known as the city of laptops.”1 On March 5, 2004, Mayor John Street stood before a crowd at Love Park in Center City to inaugurate the first hot spot of Wireless Philadelphia, an ambitious project to blanket the city’s 135 square miles with low-cost Wi-Fi.2 At the time, a handful of smaller cities—such as Long Beach, California—had built public wireless networks in their downtowns. But Philadelphia was the first major American city to aim for ubiquitous, citywide coverage. Street, himself a technophile, saw the network as an engine of rejuvenation for the economically depressed city. As Greg Goldman, the project’s former CEO, reflected some years later, the whole point was “to make Philly a cooler place to live. John Street understood the power of technology and getting it into the hands of the neighborhoods.”3

The city was soon abuzz. A 2005 Philadelphia Magazine cover story on the city’s resurgence boasted, “the Street administration’s plan to turn the entire city into a Wi-Fi hot spot of low-cost wireless Internet access has generated more positive attention than anything we’ve done here since 1776.”4 It was a bold plan, seemingly without political risk for Street or financial risk for the city. The network’s projected cost was just $10 million, to be raised entirely from private sources. Work was to start within the year and be completed in just twelve months. For Goldman, it promised to mark a transformational moment for the city. “It had tremendous political support, it had private capital driving its expansion, it had a tremendous degree of public engagement, it even had strong media support,” he says. The formula was rapidly copied by San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, Miami, and Chicago. As other cities followed Philadelphia’s lead, it seemed an endorsement of the plan.

The city quickly inked a deal with Internet service provider EarthLink to push the public–private partnership forward. After growing into one of the largest dial-up purveyors during the 1990s, EarthLink was trying to get out of that rapidly declining business and elbow its way into the broadband market. Federal telecommunications reforms enacted in 1996 to increase competition had ordered regional telephone companies (the “Baby Bells”) to provide competitors access to their new high-speed digital subscriber lines (DSL). But in practice the Bells were slow to process requests for access, creating long installation delays for companies like EarthLink, which struggled to gain market share.



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