The Smart Enough City by Ben Green

Author:Ben Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press

6

The Innovative City: The Relationship between Technical and Nontechnical Change in City Government

One of the smart city’s most alluring features is its promise of innovation: it uses cutting-edge technology to transform municipal operations. Like efficiency, innovation possesses a nebulous appeal of being both neutral and optimal that is difficult to oppose. After all, who would want her city to stagnate rather than innovate?

Consider the homepage of Sidewalk Labs, which (as of October 2018) uses the word “innovation” five times. The company promises that it is “investing in innovation,” will “accelerate urban innovation,” provides “infrastructure that inspires innovation,” and will “make Toronto [the site of its most ambitious project; see chapter 7] the global hub for urban innovation.”1 Elsewhere, the company has declared that “our mission is to accelerate the process of urban innovation.”2 Even more than technology, it appears that innovation is Sidewalk’s key product. In this sense, innovation is of a piece with other smart city buzzwords like “optimization” and “efficiency”: a vague but supposedly neutral and beneficial goal that is often touted by companies to advance their corporate agenda.

There is little doubt that cities could benefit from new ideas, policies, practices, and tools. Where smart city proponents like Sidewalk go astray, however, is in equating innovation with technology—or, to use Sidewalk’s language, in concluding that “reimagining cities to improve quality of life” requires “digital advances to transform the urban environment.”3

We will see in this chapter just how misguided that perspective is. It is wrong not only because technology alone cannot solve intractable social and political problems but also because of an attribute of city governments that we have observed but not yet fully explored: to derive benefit from technology, they must overcome institutional barriers by reforming policies and practices. This chapter will provide case studies of several cities—most notably, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle—that demonstrate the painstaking processes required to improve governance and urban life with data. We will observe a very different relationship between technology and innovation than technophiles would ever recognize or praise.

* * *

In July 2015, public health officials in New York City identified an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease (an acute form of pneumonia) in the South Bronx. Seven people had already died and dozens more were infected. If not addressed immediately, the illness could spread throughout the Bronx and across New York City, threatening the well-being of millions.

The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) quickly determined that the disease-inducing Legionella bacteria were incubating in the cooling towers that sit atop large buildings to support their air-conditioning systems. This is a common source for Legionnaires’, especially during the summer when the use of air conditioning increases. As DOHMH cleaned the contaminated cooling towers, its staff recognized that a citywide inspection effort was necessary to prevent the disease from incubating in others. The City Council mandated that the city form a tactical response team to rapidly register and clean every cooling tower.

In many respects, this was nothing new for the most populous city in the United States.

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