Volume 124, Number 3. May/June 2021 MIT Technology Review

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Volume 124 Number 3

May/June 2021

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From the editor

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Carlo Ratti point out that some 2 billion people currently live in informal settlements and many of today’s most famed cities began that way (p. 23). Indeed, as Annalee Newitz writes, there is much being discovered in the centuries-old histories of Angkor, Pompeii, New York, and elsewhere that challenges our received wisdom about how great cities rose, and who built them (p. 68). The future, of course, is ours to shape. In many cities, aging infrastructure can threaten disaster in the face of growth. Andrew Zaleski writes that technology has a big role to play in helping improve the way cities meet one of their most basic needs, the safe disposal of sewage (p. 48). Gabrielle Merite points out that where there is a pollution problem, there is an opportunity: the world’s 100 most populous cities account for nearly one-fifth of global carbon emissions (p. 28), and almost all are expected to grow enormously. In fact, the pace of urbanization shows no signs of slowing; China, for example, plans to build five interconnected “city clusters,” each of which might accommodate a hundred million people, as Ling Xin details (p. 13). The decisions made by leaders of these metropolises will have an outsize impact on the trajectory of global climate change. 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 will, and when we do, we can be assured of at least two things: cities will thrive again, and if we are careful we can build them into something even better.

Michael Reilly is executive editor of MIT Technology Review

PATRICK LEGER

oncerts—remember those? Or maybe you miss restaurants most, or plays, musicals, art galleries, museums, nights out at the pub, the club, a ball game ... ah, those were the days. The thrill of gathering, of being a part of something, is the hallmark of the city. Cities bring us together, inspire us, spur our creativity. At their best, they are monuments of human achievement that draw people from far and wide. They open our eyes to new ideas and cultures, and become greater than the sum of streets and buildings and crowded sidewalks. For the past year, cities have felt like perhaps the worst place to be. Density has been the enemy; many people, if they could, holed up at home or fled to someplace rural. Lockdowns were imposed; we sheltered in place. City life as we knew it ended, and felt as if it might never come back. This issue, conceived in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, has come together when the future of cities looks more uncertain than at any other time in recent memory. But the closer we looked, the more we found reason not just to maintain hope but to celebrate all that cities are, and all they could become. Technology is and will be a huge part of that story. Whether or not that’s a good thing is ... complicated. On one hand, there are real technological systems that can help cities serve their residents better. As John Surico’s profile of the transit-planning company Remix attests (p. 42), civic-minded software can be a powerful tool to improve people’s lives. Giving digital address codes to residents of Indian slums has provided access to needed services and simple conveniences like pizza delivery, writes Shoma Abhyankar (p. 25). Joseph Dana finds that cities 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 disempowered, 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 reality looks quite different. Fábio Duarte, Washington Fajardo, and

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Contents

THE CITIES ISSUE Edited by Konstantin Kakaes and Amy Nordrum

Introduction

8

Features

Report

Reviews

30

13

75

Solving for the city

Neighborhood watch

Dispatches

Technology can help fix many problems that cities face today. So why hasn’t it? By Jennifer Clark

Police departments want to know as much as they legally can. But how much surveillance technology is too much? By Rowan Moore Gerety

A look into China’s policy of building out massive city clusters, each of which will be home to as many as a hundred million people. By Ling Xin

“A humming, smoking, ever-changing contraption”

42

17

Uncanny alleys

Back to the streets

A bridge dictionary

The pandemic upended public transit. Now city planners are trying to map out what’s next. By John Surico

Subtle advances in construction techniques are making bridges bigger, safer, and longer-lived. By Jon Allsop

Science fiction is reimagining cities in ways that feel both familiar and strange. By Joanne McNeil

48

18

Rivers of dreams

Game of thrones

How South Bend, Indiana, came to lead the way in smart sewer control. By Andrew Zaleski

Cities try some high-tech approaches to public restrooms. By Andrew Giambrone

How three mid-20th-century visitors saw Los Angeles as a machine. By Colin Marshall 78

Fiction

82

Unpaired By Tim Maughan

The back page

88

The city inside our heads

20 58

Five arguments

Cities of people

Andrew Giambrone on the case for density. Julia Hotz on Seattle’s election experiment. Fábio Duarte, Washington Fajardo, and Carlo Ratti on embracing unplanned settlements. Shoma Abhyankar on addressing India’s slums. And Joseph Dana on Cape Town’s fight for energy independence.

“Unequal Scenes,” a drone photography project, illuminates scars in the urban fabric. By Johnny Miller 68

Ancient cities are made of data High-tech tools are helping us understand the past. By Annalee Newitz

28

The age of megacities

Cover illustration by Dogboy

Curbing emissions in a few big cities could have an outsize impact on climate change. By Gabrielle Merite

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Introduction

09

Solving for the city

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By Jennifer Clark

Technology can help fix many problems that cities face today. So why hasn’t it?

rban technology projects have long sought to manage the city—to organize U its ambiguities, mitigate its uncertainties, and predict or direct its growth and decline. The latest, “smart city” projects, have much in common with previous iterations. Again and again, these initiatives promise novel “solutions” to urban “problems.” The hype is based partly on a belief that technology will deliver unprecedented value to urban areas. The opportunity seems so vast that at times our ability to measure, assess, and make decisions about it almost feels inadequate. The message to cities is: You don’t know what you’re dealing with, but you don’t want to get left behind. After a decade of pilot projects and flashy demonstrations, though, it’s still not clear whether smart city technologies can actually solve or even mitigate the challenges cities face. A lot of progress on our most pressing urban issues—such as broadband access,

affordable housing, or public transport— could come from better policies and more funding. These problems don’t necessarily require new technology. What is clear is that technology companies are increasingly taking on administrative and infrastructure responsibilities that governments have long fulfilled. If smart cities are to avoid exacerbating urban inequalities, we must understand where these projects will create new opportunities and problems, and who may lose out as a result. And that starts by taking a hard look at how cities have fared so far.

The birth of the smart city craze The “smart cities” buzz began with IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge in 2010. The company vowed to award technology worth millions of dollars to cities that wished to upgrade their infrastructure. Among other things, that initiative established a highly competitive approach to urban innovation that pitted cities against each other in a bid to win free products and services from the private sector.

The 2010s brought a wave of these competitions, backed by corporations that selected cities to host pilot projects. Many philanthropic organizations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation, launched similar events. And in 2015, the US Department of Transportation used this same approach for its Smart City Challenge, selecting one winning city (Columbus, Ohio) from the 78 that applied to serve as a test bed for transportation technology. Many of these early initiatives were partnerships between tech firms and individual cities aimed at upgrading large urban systems for transportation, energy, waste, or communications. Hardware, software, business services, and connectivity companies formed alliances to offer system-wide solutions. An alliance that AT&T launched in 2016 was emblematic of this approach. The company partnered with Cisco, Deloitte, Ericsson, GE, IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas. The goal was to develop smart city systems made up of a whole package of integrated products and services. This industry-led consortium model left little room for small firms and startups. Looking back, that first phase feels very different from today. In 2021, a greater diversity of firms are exploring a wider array of revenue models and marketing strategies, including Civiq Smartscapes (which sells communications network infrastructure), Nordsense (embedded sensor networks for waste management), Soofa (information and wayfinding kiosks), and UrbanFootprint (a mapping analytics platform and service). However, these newcomers are generally less focused on building city-wide systems or upgrading physical infrastructure than on developing new digital services for a particular sector, or apps targeted at residents themselves. This highlights a change in business models as well as in technology strategy. It also underscores what has been most challenging for the tech sector: not developing the technologies themselves, but understanding the market for smart city projects and the context in which they will unfold. Many of these projects have been driven by tech companies accustomed to making

Cities

their own markets for emerging products. Virtually all of those projects have failed to adapt technology “solutions” to the needs of individual cities and regions. When we consider smart cities in the context of earlier urban technology projects, it’s clear that this struggle is not new, but it does have a different flavor. In previous waves, other industries with disparate interests also drove the push for urban innovation: the auto industry, the cement industry, steel manufacturers, railroads, real estate developers, and more. The tech sector is simply the industry of the moment trying to steer projects and influence public priorities.

The city is not the customer Urban planners have long debated how best to integrate new technologies into the built environment. Change is often difficult, disruptive, and expensive. Projects that are too big or move too fast generate political pushback and economic upheaval. New York City’s massive push for roads, bridges, and urban renewal during the mid 20th century, for example, instigated a backlash against “big plans” that persists to this day. The legacy of the Cross Bronx Expressway looms large in the collective memory of urban planners, and it’s reignited as each generation picks up The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses, the powerful public administrator behind much of New York’s midcentury transformation. His name has become a metonym for the bulldozing of vibrant neighborhoods to make room for highways. Since then, we’ve made substantial progress. Community involvement in planning is now the norm rather than the exception. Residents often help set priorities and define the scale and scope of urban projects through neighborhood planning units, public meetings, online platforms, and electronic mailing lists.

This doesn’t happen for every project, or every time, and tensions between technocratic planners and community development groups remain. But it isn’t the 1960s anymore. However, urban planners haven’t been driving the smart cities trend. Instead, it’s been driven by the tech sector, which has very different norms and goals. Test beds and experimentation are common in tech but uncomfortable for cities, for example. At their best, cities tailor complicated networks of old and new sociotechnical systems to work in a particular place for communities with different cultures, interests, and priorities. But for the tech sector, such local variation challenges the whole notion of creating an urban operating system that can scale. And for cities, especially US cities, competing with other cities for private investment sets off a race to the bottom in which public agencies vie to win new technologies that don’t work well with the technical systems or processes they already have in place. Many experienced the smart cities craze of the 2010s with a sense of anxiety: they joined in as much because they feared being left behind in the battle for the creative class and the new innovation economy as because they thought new technologies could provide real solutions. All this is to say that in many ways, the city is no longer the primary consumer for smart city firms. Rather, it functions primarily as an innovation sandbox that the tech sector uses to prototype products and distribute services. For the industry, cities are mainly just the places where its customers live.

THE TECH SECTOR IS SIMPLY THE INDUSTRY OF THE MOMENT TRYING TO STEER PROJECTS AND INFLUENCE PUBLIC PRIORITIES.

A lighter touch In previous eras, partnerships between cities and industries gave rise to new roads, bridges, buildings, parks, and even whole neighborhoods. These changes, from sprawling suburbs like Levittown to the vast Eisenhowerera Interstate Highway System to Boston’s Central Artery, drew plenty of criticism. But at least they involved real investment in the built environment.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES

10

Introduction

11

GREENWAY CONSERVANCY

In previous eras, partnerships between cities and industries brought investment in infrastructure projects like Boston’s Central Artery, now site of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.

Today, though, cities such as Toronto have organized against large-scale smart city initiatives that propose changes to physical infrastructure, and many tech firms have pivoted toward “lighter” projects. Popular among these are smart services such as ride-sharing and food delivery apps, which gather a great deal of data but leave the physical city unchanged. One real problem is that smart city projects, in their many manifestations, don’t look backward to see what must be modified, adapted, unwound, or undone. Functionally, cities sit upon layers of interconnected (and sometimes disconnected) systems. To stand on any downtown street corner is to observe old and new infrastructure (traffic signals, light poles) installed at different times for different reasons by both public agencies and private firms. (Regulations also vary widely between jurisdictions: in the US, for example, local governments have highly tailored land use controls.) But most of today’s projects aren’t designed to be backward compatible with existing urban systems. The smart cities idea, like the tech sector itself, is forward focused. The “light” interventions that are now popular float above the complexity of the urban landscape. They rely on existing platforms: the same roads, same homes, same cars. These business models demand (and offer) few upgrades and minimize tech companies’ need to negotiate with incumbent systems. Soofa, for example, advertises that its smart wayfinding kiosks can be installed with only “four bolts into

any concrete surface.” But these displays barely integrate with a city’s existing transportation system, much less improve it. The tensions these business models trigger are largely regulatory and not physical—they’re invisible to a casual observer. The privatization of the city—of its public services and spaces—has made it possible for companies to access and use data that local governments collect about residents. The flash points become issues of data rights rather than rights of way.

Covid-19 exposed smart cities Many have speculated about the implications of the covid-19 pandemic for cities. Some argue that people will leave for the suburbs; others predict a renewed commitment to public spaces. Whatever happens, covid-19 has shown that failing to invest in critical infrastructure is both an acute problem and a chronic one. Foreshadowing this disaster were tragic, but arguably limited, urban problems like the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a 2014 switch in the city’s water supply caused pipes to leach lead into drinking water—an infrastructure failure that set off a public health emergency. Before 2020, people could tell themselves that such things happen only in other places. But the pandemic proved that systems—like the US public health system—can fail anywhere, and even everywhere at once. And it has shown that a decade’s worth of smart city projects weren’t primarily about upgrading existing urban infrastructure. They were more about developing a market for technology gear and services and the data that they generate. The pandemic has destabilized a loose truce between the tech sector and the cities it sought as partners in testing these products. The utility of pilot projects designed for shared urban spaces (both private and

public), like wayfinding kiosks and Wi-Fienabled waste cans, declined precipitously as people avoided high-traffic areas. Many of the most visible “smart city” success stories of the last decade were actually software-based shared services like ride hailing, car sharing, home sharing, and co-working. Those services have been little used during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the shared services that people everywhere need most are still clean water, emergency communications, reliable heat and electricity, flexible transportation, and responsive public health systems. The potential for technology to produce more sustainable, equitable, and resilient cities remains very real. The lesson of the last decade is that the emphasis was on the wrong word in “smart cities.” The attention must be on the city. We’re always making choices about how we organize cities and the economy to produce the outcomes we want. But it’s economics and politics, much more than technology, that determine who benefits from (and who pays for) the systems we choose, and under what conditions. That said, the availability of technical solutions certainly does influence our choices about what’s possible and what we prefer. But even those choices are highly variable and reflect our local priorities. A viable future for smart city technology would mean engaging with tough questions that the tech sector has often avoided— questions about what advances would best serve cities as such. Realizing that future will demand three things. First, creators of smart city technology must draw on specialized knowledge of the local context. Second, we need a framework for data governance: agreements on how data is collected, shared, and used. And finally, public participation is essential. Simply put, the way forward is to respond to the needs of the community, not the motives of industry. Jennifer Clark is a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University and author of Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities.

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RE VO I ERT W P Get upBooks, to speed on the key themes, big ideas, arts, and culture and players in major perspective discussed in this issue.

HISTORY

THE RISE OF THE MEGALOPOLIS Some city clusters have formed organically over time.

DISPATCHES

CITY OF CITIES An ambitious urban development plan takes shape in China. By Ling Xin

ROSE WONG

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 to roughly 400 million people—more than the entire US population—moving 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 migration isn’t over; 70% of China’s population is expected to be urban by 2035. To accommodate the influx, China’s national urban development policy has shifted from expanding individual cities to systematically building out massive city clusters, each of which will be home to as many as a hundred million people. Cities in a cluster will collaborate economically, ecologically, and politically, the thinking goes, in turn boosting each region’s competitiveness. In the four stories that follow, we explore the origins of China’s new strategy 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 digital public services, and through regional environmental management.

the 1950s, the French geogI N rapher Jean Gottmann noticed a new urban paradigm emerging on the northeast coast of the United States. The 1,000-kilometer-long region from Boston to Washington, DC, with its 30 million inhabitants, was, he found, increasingly functioning as one large city. Gottmann used the Greek word “megalopolis” to name this novel economic and political entity. With its high population density, ease of transport, economic dominance, and cultural influence, the Boston-Washington megalopolis became home to the richest, best-educated, and best-serviced population in the country. “A megalopolis 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 successful 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 population and accounts for 70% of national economic output.

13

14

Cities

Jing-Jin-Ji

TRANSPORT

Yangtze River Delta

A NATION ON TRACK

Yangtze River Middle Reaches

New rail lines will connect residents within and across clusters.

Pearl River Delta

Building such megalopolises in China—where they’re referred to as city clusters—seems to be the country’s best option for expanding access to urban opportunities without overwhelming cities, says Zhu Dajian, an economist who studies sustainable development at Tongji University in Shanghai. Neighboring cities have, for example, been known to spend vast sums building redundant industries and then competing for primacy. Shanghai, for one, has tried to position itself as a hub for biotech and chip manufacturing by offering companies incentives to open plants there—but several nearby cities have launched nearly identical efforts. China is betting that more regional coordination will lead to more efficient investments nationwide. Such cooperation could also help alleviate overpopulation and pollution, which have plagued some of the country’s biggest urban centers. While some cities established informal geographic and economic ties long ago, China only recently wrote the building of city clusters into its national policy in a systematic way. In 2014, President Xi Jinping called for a regional approach to developing Beijing as the leader of the capital region, known as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji).

hen Fang Hengkun was still a college student in Beijing, about 20 years ago, W he used to go back home to the city of Dalian in Liaoning province by train for winter break. The 1,000-kilometer trip took 12 hours. He would arrive at the Beijing Railway Station Xi’s stance inspired immense interthree hours early because “it was the only train est in regional governance, and “city between Beijing and Dalian that day,” he says. cluster” became an official term in Now a railway engineer working for Beijing’s government documents. municipal government, Fang is busy upgrading By 2035, five major city clussuburban lines and planning new ones to serve ters are expected to be established the rising demand in the nation’s capital. His team also plans to increase the frequency and in China: the Jing-Jin-Ji cluster in accessibility of intercity trains that conthe north, the Yangtze River Delta cluster (east), the Pearl nect Beijing with more than 50 other citRiver Delta cluster (south), ies. For example, to support the 100,000 the Cheng-Yu cluster (west), daily commuters between Beijing and and the Yangtze River Middle Tianjin, about 150 high-speed intercity Reaches cluster in central trains are running every day, as often as Ling Xin is China. Some of these have three minutes apart. a science already started to take shape, According to a plan issued by the State journalist who covers while others are still on the Council in February 2021, China will be physics, home to 200,000 kilometers of railways drawing board. Combined, space, and by 2035. One-third of them will be highthese areas could one day gentechnology. speed rails, which will account for about erate about half the nation’s 60% of the total distance covered by all highGDP and house half its urban population. 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, accordIf all goes according to plan, the ing to the plan, “get around a city within one clusters will prove to be sustainhour, 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 enviFor 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 highInstitute’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 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.

COURTESY PHOTO

Cheng-Yu

Report

15

SERVICES

DIGITAL HIGHWAYS Government agencies across China are building apps to serve residents more efficiently.

used to be a hassle for Ma I T Zhongwen, a university teacher in Guangzhou, to withdraw money from a special government-run savings account for housing every year. He had to make an online reservation, and then go to a bank and wait in line for hours. “I had to take time off work every time, because the bank only had one counter for the service, and the counter was only open during work hours,” he recalls. These days, Ma gets it all done on his smartphone as one of the more than 1,600 public services now available under Yue Sheng Shi

ENVIRONMENT

ROSE WONG

COOPERATION OVER COMPETITION Cities are working together to monitor and clean up pollution.

(“saving the trouble in Guangdong”), a piece of software designed by Guangdong’s provincial government and embedded in WeChat, China’s most popular smartphone app. Users can pay traffic tickets, renew a passport or visa, make appointments with government agencies, or apply for a business license. These services are jointly offered by two dozen municipal governments in the Pearl River Delta region. According to the Guangdong government, Yue Sheng Shi had more than 100 million registered users as of January 2021. Similar apps are being developed and used across China as part of

spring winds make A S gentle waves on the misty Lake Tai in Eastern China, blue-green algae bloom beneath the water. When the weather warms, these organisms quickly take over, giving the lake a greasy look and a foul smell. For more than a decade, algae blooms have disrupted fishing and tourism on the lake’s shorelines and threatened the water supply and health of tens of millions of people living in the lower Yangtze River Delta. In 2007, a particularly bad outbreak left the nearby city of Wuxi without drinking water for a week. Several cities along the lake have made individual efforts

According to the Guangdong government, Yue Sheng Shi had more than

100 MILLION registered users as of January 2021.

a new wave of digital infrastructure that the national government hopes will minimize paperwork and streamline the delivery of public services. Though it can be hard to break down administrative barriers, some experts argue that China’s largely top-down governance system could help in this regard. “City clusters is a good starting point to test out new forms of e-government in China,” says Zeng Gang, director of the Institute of Urban Development at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Of course, the flip side of this arrangement is that big tech companies like Shenzhen-based Tencent, which makes WeChat, get access to huge amounts of user data. Turning a popular app into a wide-ranging public service platform has undeniably made people’s lives more convenient in some respects, but it’s also triggered concerns about data collection, surveillance, and privacy.

to address algae blooms in the past, but now some of them are working together for the first time. To help each other out, Wuxi, on the lake’s northern shore, and Huzhou, on its southern edge, have started sharing remote sensing data and using drones and automated boats to monitor the water’s surface together. The cities are affected at different times of the year—Wuxi in the summer and Huzhou in the fall—so the team in Huzhou will send a fleet of boats to assist colleagues in Wuxi when it gets hit, and Wuxi will return the favor. The ultimate solution, however, is curbing and

regulating pollution, says Qin Boqiang from the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. When poorly treated wastewater from factories and farmlands flows into Tai, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus accumulate in the lake, and algae blooms flourish. Qin hopes more collaboration among municipalities in the basin will motivate cities to establish common discharge standards, build modern sewage treatment facilities, explore cross-border law enforcement, and ultimately clean up Lake Tai once and for all.

Don’t believe everything you hear. Technologies with the ability to learn have unlocked a world of possibilities—and dangers— that we’re only beginning to understand.

In Machines We Trust uncovers the ways that AI is shaping modern life. Available wherever you listen.

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CASE

STUDY

A BRIDGE DICTIONARY

GETTY (GENOA, HONG KONG); FOSTER + PARTNERS (STOCKHOLM); ANDREW BUCHANAN/SLP (SEATTLE); ALAMY (WUHAN)

By Jon Allsop

Bridges haven’t really changed much for many years, says Anil Agrawal, a professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. And it would be easy for an untrained eye to miss the ways in which they have. But subtle advances in bridge technology and construction techniques are making modern bridges bigger, safer, and longer-lived. Civil engineers have lately focused on improving safety by, for example, making bridges more resilient to fire, earthquakes, and high winds. They’re also exploring how technology can help them monitor new bridges and maintain those already in place. For much of the 20th century, the average design life of a bridge had generally been about 50 years. To push beyond that, many new bridges now have sensors that collect data on their structural behavior and condition (though much work remains to be done to translate this data into meaningful realtime analysis). Novel technologies—like new types of concrete or bridges that change shape to minimize wind resistance—are being studied in labs around the world, but civil engineering standards and building codes are slow to evolve. At right are five examples of how bridge technology is already changing.

On August 14, 2018, the Ponte Morandi, a cablestayed bridge in Genoa, collapsed, killing 43 people and severing a major artery of regional transit. Work quickly began on its replacement. Renzo Piano, a celebrity architect who was born in Genoa, designed the new bridge, and more than 1,000 laborers worked around the clock to build it in just over a year. It features a digital monitoring system and dehumidifying technology to guard against the corrosion that contributed to its predecessor’s collapse.

VIADOTTO SAN GIORGIO, GENOA

In 2020 the Slussen bridge, made of steel, was laid atop a lock in Stockholm. But the 140-meter-long box-girder bridge (a style in which beams running just below the roadway form the shape of a hollow box) was assembled in a shipyard in Zhongshan, near Hong Kong. It traveled from China to Stockholm in one piece on a semi-submersible ship, one of only 10 in the world capable of handling such cargo, according to Markus Glaas, a manager at Skanska, a large Swedish construction firm that oversaw the project. After a 70-day journey, the ship slowly sank into the water so the bridge could slide into place on its permanent supports—with a margin for error of just 15 centimeters. The Slussen is a testament to how global supply chains have changed bridge construction.

SLUSSEN BRIDGE, STOCKHOLM

In suspension bridges, vertical support cables hang down from the main cables strung between towers to hold the bridgeway up. Cable-stayed bridges, by contrast, have cables that fan out directly from the towers. Cable-stayed bridges have been around for centuries but were relatively rare until recent advances in materials and construction techniques made them easier and less expensive to build. Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong, which opened in December 2009, featured giant towers composed of 32 stainless-steel segments 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.

STONECUTTERS BRIDGE, HONG KONG

Four of the five longest floating bridges in the world EVERGREEN are in Washington state. The longest and widest, the POINT Evergreen Point Floating Bridge between Seattle and FLOATING BRIDGE, Bellevue, opened in 2016. Nicholas Rodda of the state SEATTLE 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 pontoons 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.

China is in the middle of an impressive run of new bridge construction. The Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge opened in Wuhan in 2019 with the world’s 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 notable 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 “collecting huge amounts of data” from new bridge-monitoring systems installed with many of these projects, says Agrawal.

YANGSIGANG YANGTZE RIVER BRIDGE, WUHAN

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Cities

The Portland Loo 10.6 feet long by 6 feet wide

SOLAR PANELS installed on the roof can power the lights, with an AC electric system as a backup; an optional tank allows the system to operate independent of sewers

Wheelchair accessible

No mirror

Walls are made of stainless steel coated with anti-graffiti powder that can be power-washed

Angled slats at the top and bottom let others see inside while preserving the occupant’s privacy Weighs 6,000 pounds

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 prevents people from getting stuck when it’s cold (yes, it happens)

FACE

Optional sharps-disposal box gives people a place to discard used needles

Motion-activated LED lights (and an optional skylight) provide interior illumination

Supply cabinet in the back includes a hose and spigot for manual cleanings

OFF

GAME OF THRONES Many cities lack public restrooms. Some are trying to do better, with high-tech or simple approaches.

By Andrew Giambrone Illustration by Julian Glander

Public restrooms serve the most basic of human needs, but they’re not always easy to find. Some cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Montreal, Canada, are rising to the challenge with standalone lavatories that anybody can use, free of charge.

Report

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Montreal’s TMAX 10 feet long by 6.5 feet wide

EXTERIOR LIGHTS indicate status: white means unoccupied, red means in use, and yellow means it’s being cleaned or fixed

Wheelchair accessible

Stainless-steel mirror (to avoid broken glass) Walls are made of laminate with resins and are resistant to damage, fire, and graffiti

Structure is fully enclosed and includes bright interior lighting

Users press a button next to the door to enter; doors automatically reopen after 15 minutes of use

Interior handles help people get up and 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 disinfects entire unit in 90 seconds after each use; one automated bar sprays the toilet seat and dries it with compressed air

Another automated bar sprays the floor and dries it with a squeegee

About 20 “Portland Loos” are now spread across that city, while central Montreal has installed four self-cleaning toilets since 2018 (still open during the pandemic). Though they differ in technical complexity, both have the potential to make urban communities more hospitable and hygienic.

Weight sensors in the floor prevent people from barging into an occupied unit or being caught inside during automatic cleanings

Other cities—including Paris and San Francisco—operate public restrooms too, but Portland and Montreal stand out for their unique approaches to treating bathrooms as essential infrastructure. The Loo has proved particularly successful: in fact, its manufacturer has sold dozens that have

Emergency button and toilet-paper dispenser button are located next to toilet seat

been installed in roughly 20 cities in North America. It’s less expensive and has a much simpler design than Montreal’s technically advanced model (called TMAX) but must be cleaned manually. Montreal’s toilets clean themselves after every use, though workers also clean each facility daily.

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Cities

ARGUMENTS

THE CASE FOR DENSITY Cities are still desirable places to live and work, despite covid-19. By Andrew Giambrone

he coronavirus pandemic presents a cruel irony for urban dwellers. What good are cities if the very quality that makes them so dynamic—the ease of connecting with people and gathering in large groups for everything from a baseball game to an opera—now renders them more dangerous than before? That question lies at the heart of concerns over the future of cities in a post-covid world. Social distancing, mask wearing, and restrictions on mass gatherings will continue in many places, at least until enough people are vaccinated for communities to reach herd immunity. Downtowns remain largely dormant, their offices and transit hubs drained of nonessential workers. At the same time, municipal coffers are taking huge hits from lost tax revenue. Fewer visitors and sales mean less funding for vital city services, including public schools and sanitation, or for cherished amenities like parks. Adding to these economic hardships, it seems only sensible to shy away from cities during a pandemic.

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Andrew Giambrone is a freelance journalist based in New York City who writes about politics, cities, and social issues.

In the United States, didn’t covid-19 first rage through New York, America’s largest city? Doesn’t the density of such places make them inevitable hot spots for highly contagious viruses? Haven’t people instinctively fled to the countryside during epidemics at least since the Middle Ages? Actually, studies show urban living may not as be as covid-risky as you might suspect. Last June researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Utah found that density wasn’t linked to infection rates in US counties after accounting for metropolitan-area population, socioeconomic factors, and health-care infrastructure; rather, connectivity between counties through such things as travel mattered more for viral spread and mortality. A paper published by Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics in July found that while covid-19 was more likely to show up sooner in denser counties, population density didn’t correlate with the overall number of cases and deaths.

Report

MEREDITH MIOTKE

It’s worth remembering what drew us to cities in the first place. Studies show that proximity to others facilitates innovation, whether cultural or scientific. In other words, when it comes to the coronavirus, density isn’t destiny. New York City was initially the US epicenter of the pandemic in part because of its status as an international destination, but its weekly caseload dropped as safety measures took root. (Case numbers there spiked again last fall as hot spots reemerged and the holidays arrived, and again in February as new variants spread, though vaccinations hold the promise of driving them down again.) Rural counties in Alaska, Colorado, and Texas—far from dense population centers—were hit hard around the start of 2021, each with more than 100 daily cases per 100,000 residents, according to the New York Times. Yet high-density cities in

Asia and Australia were able to rein in the coronavirus last year. Even China, where covid-19 was first discovered, effectively subdued the pandemic for its 1.4 billion people, 60% of whom live in cities. This isn’t to say density is irrelevant to covid-19 transmission, or that we fully understand how the disease propagates. Some research, including a study published last July by JAMA Network Open, has connected population density with coronavirus spread. A study published in the journal PLOS One in December concluded that “density matters,” though it seemed to make more of a difference in the later stages of outbreaks than at the onset.

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Other papers focusing on India and Algeria, led by researchers from the University of North Bengal and the University of Khemis Miliana, respectively, reported moderate and strong links between density and infections. At the same time, major cities like Seoul, Hong Kong, and San Francisco largely contained the coronavirus with quick, aggressive interventions like closing bars and clubs. No matter how you interpret these findings, it’s clear that urban density confers numerous benefits during a pandemic. For one thing, dense cities tend to have better hospitals than less populated areas. And it’s easier for city dwellers to access medical care. The same goes for preventive care, which, while still lacking in many places, has repeatedly been shown to lower chronic disease rates and emergency room visits. Urbanization was trending up before the pandemic, and despite the appeals of country 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 substitute 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 paradigm for human settlement—sprawl—has significant disadvantages. Living farther apart from others imposes costs on economic productivity, the environment, and in some cases, people’s happiness. Climate change, which is exacerbated by car and airplane use, stands to compound those costs. Even if density isn’t a panacea for these challenges, it’s one of our best bets for overcoming 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

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Cities

A local effort to rewrite the rules of campaign finance is expanding to other cities. By Julia Hotz

Julia Hotz is a journalist reporting on what’s working to address social problems.

SEATTLE’S ELECTION EXPERIMENT

eresa Mosqueda used to spend her days asking people to run for office. A union leader and third-generation MexicanAmerican from Seattle, she figured the most effective way to address working families’ issues was to encourage people who had once experienced them to enter politics. But when people would ask her to run, Mosqueda would decline, citing an obstacle faced by most Americans: she couldn’t afford it. That changed when she learned about democracy vouchers—a taxpayer-funded program that mails Seattle residents four $25 certificates to donate to local candidates. That meant more people could contribute to local campaigns and more people, like Mosqueda, could run. Passed in 2015 by a ballot initiative, Seattle’s voucher program was the country’s first of its kind. Asking for big donations

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is uncomfortable for a lot of candidates, says Mosqueda, now a member of the city council: “I don’t personally know people who have $5,000 to give away.” Now the vouchers mean candidates don’t have to rely on donors with such deep pockets. “You don’t want to feel beholden to wealthy corporations or individuals,” she says. As Seattle’s past two city council elections show, the program hasn’t stopped the influence of those mega-donors, nor has it radically diversified Seattle’s donor base, which draws mostly from an older white population. But research published in 2019 in the Election Law Journal shows it’s certainly weakened those influences; of voters who donated in Seattle’s 2017 and 2019 elections, voucher users were less wealthy than cash donors. Now, as Seattle introduces democracy vouchers to its mayoral race, the city aims to further dilute the influence of big donors (Amazon gave $350,000 to help elect the

last mayor) by attracting more small ones. And while some other municipalities, like New York and Washington, DC, are trying to democratize campaign finance by matching and multiplying small donations, critics say those programs are far less accessible. “You still have to have your own money to participate,” says Brian McCabe, one of the researchers who led the 2019 study. Indeed, perhaps the program’s biggest success, according to McCabe and coauthor Jen Heerwig, is the sheer number of donors it’s attracted. Nearly 8% of Seattle’s electorate donated to local candidates in 2019, compared with just 1.3% in 2015. That makes Seattle the national leader in local campaign finance “by a lot,” McCabe says. A recent poll of over 1,000 voters conducted by HarrisX for the political news site The Hill revealed that 57% believe the US political system works only for insiders with money and power. As Seattle aims to directly encourage campaigns by people without those advantages, a host of other US cities wonder if democracy vouchers are an answer to that problem. Andrew Allison, founder of the political action committee Austinites for Progressive Reform in the Texas capital, recently collected the 20,000 signatures needed to get a voucher initiative on the ballot in May. “In Austin, about 70% of donations come from just three of our 10 districts,” says Allison. “And that kind of donor concentration doesn’t really square with the idea of one person, one vote.” In 2019, four of nine first-time Seattle city council candidates said they would not have run had it not been for democracy 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 democracy vouchers on her website and Instagram.

COURTESY PHOTO

ARGUMENTS

MIT SENSEABLE CITY LAB (DUARTE); ANDRÉ VIEIRA (FAJARDO); SARA MAGNI (RATTI)

Report

But she says many of her followers still have “no idea what the heck they are.” That may be the program’s biggest flaw; in 2019, fewer than 40,000 Seattle residents—roughly 5% of the population— used their vouchers. Many seem to mistake them for junk mail. Though Seattle residents can opt in to virtual vouchers or request replacements online, most still don’t know the program exists. And even fans of democracy vouchers wonder why all Seattle property owners should pay— albeit just $8 per year—for a program that a slim minority uses. “If you still have super PACs and private financing available to candidates, I don’t think it’s a good way to get money out of politics,” says Paul Gessing, CEO of the Rio Grande Foundation, who was elated when a proposal for democracy vouchers was defeated in his home city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2019. In 2017, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm, sued Seattle, claiming that democracy vouchers violated its freedom of speech by funneling tax dollars to campaigns it didn’t support. But the state’s supreme court upheld the program. Still, most Americans do favor laws that would limit the role of money in politics, according to a 2018 Pew Report. Jack Noland, research manager at RepresentUs, a nonprofit working on campaign finance reform, points to several laws that would help do that, including an anticorruption act to stop political bribery. But he says voucher programs aim to transform 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

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EMBRACING THE INFORMAL Fábio Duarte and Carlo Ratti are researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab. Washington Fajardo is the secretary of urban planning at the City of Rio de Janeiro.

Cities are slowly shifting from trying to eradicate shantytowns to supporting them. By Fábio Duarte, Washington Fajardo, and Carlo Ratti

inding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela, one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since the 19th century. More than 5% of the country’s population now lives in communities like these, with 100,000 people in Rocinha alone. The challenge of navigating Rocinha has birthed creative solutions, such as the “friendly mailman” program: companies deliver parcels to a central drop-off point, and a team of Rocinha residents—the only couriers familiar enough with the area to navigate its maze-like streets—take them the rest of the way.

F

With little formal aid or administration and scant economic opportunities, favela residents have struggled to contend with unhealthy living conditions and frequent violence. A thick wall of social segregation means that resources from the city—including electricity and clean water—must take twisting, uncertain paths to make it inside. Life expectancy in favelas is just 48, which is 20 years below the national average. Much has been made of the dizzying growth of the world’s cities, but few people are aware of what most urban growth actually looks like. Births and migrations are concentrated in the developing world, and with the exception of China, most new urban fabric is informal—more shantytowns than skyscrapers. For all our futuristic reveries, the city of tomorrow probably will not look much different from Rocinha. In the 20th century, the Brazilian government attempted to eradicate favelas and replace them with more formal public

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Cit e i s

housing, but the bulldozers could not keep up with the massive urban migration that made these settlements swell. Other governments and urban planners have also tried to prevent such settlements from forming or to dismantle them when they do, but thatís proved a losing strategy. More than 2 billion people worldwide are now estimated to live in them. In the early 2000s, the city of Medell
n, Colombia, started a reckoning process that would inspire the world. Settlements had taken shape in the mountains, and the city committed to serving these communities as it would any other. It began by constructing a network of cable cars, soaring above the terrain that had long divided the city. Efforts to eradicate these communities gave way to incorporation; the government chose them as the sites for new libraries and public parks. The Medell
n model, despite some shortcomings, has since become the gold standard in Latin America and around the world.

An unplanned settlement in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Twenty years after Medell
n began to take this innovative approach, new technology is equipping us with an even more powerful set of tools. Today, the city of Rio de Janeiro and MITís Senseable City Lab are working together to digitally map the entirety of Rocinha for the first time. Researchers on our team are carrying 3D scanners through the narrow alleys and down the sloping hills, hoping to capture every inch of the 1.5-square-kilometer neighborhood. Around 300,000 data points are generated every second. The cost to scan the entire community of Rocinha will be less than $60,000, which we believe will more than pay for itself by enabling useful applications for its residents. With an accurate map of Rocinha, the city could more easily provide access to public services such as water and waste collection, improve alleyways, and create plazas and public places. These scans could also be used to create property records, which could be managed

and traded on a blockchain to avoid bureaucracy and reduce the cost of transferring titles. We acknowledge that building such a system from 3D scans may raise concerns about data privacy. If weíre able to address those, though, favela residents could buy and sell property more easily than on any formal property registry systems. Having better knowledge of the favelasí physical layout could also improve living conditions. Urban designers could use this data to decide where to install stairs, or what structures to remove to allow in more air, sun, or light. Clearly, the long-term solution to the most pressing problems favela residents face is to address the social issues that lead these settlements to be built in the first place. Every nation has its own challenges. Brazil must reduce social inequality, Western Europe must rethink immigration from its former colonies, and nations everywhere should prepare for an uptick in climate-related migration. How we choose to respond to favelas, shantytowns, and refugee camps over the next few years will define the political and cultural attitudes that determine their longterm future. Itís worth recalling, then, that most cities were born from informality. 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 strongman. 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 integrate—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 scanners. 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

WASHINGTON FAJARDO

ARGUMENTS

Report

Digital addresses are making life in slums a bit more convenient. by Shoma Abhyankar

Shoma Abhyankar is a freelance writer from India.

ourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I, too, can show off.” Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped brick and tin structures line crooked lanes wide enough for just one person. According to the 2011 census, India has 108,000 slums that are home to 65 million residents. It will add more urban residents by 2050 than any other country, according to a 2014 UN estimate, and its slums are growing faster than its cities. Until recently, Dashrath shared a common address with everyone around her— that of the slum itself. A large banyan tree served as a collection center for mail and

F COURTESY PHOTO

ADDRESSING INDIA’S SLUMS other deliveries. With no addresses of their own, residents had a hard time opening bank and postal accounts or accessing electric and water bills. During the pandemic, medical teams struggled to track down infected residents. Last September, a nonprofit organization called Shelter Associates began a pilot project with Google and UNICEF to provide unique digital addresses to houses in Laxmi Nagar. Now, Dashrath has a special code she can type into delivery apps and share with friends to direct them to her front door. “It was the pandemic that really spurred the initiative,” says Pratima Joshi, an architect who cofounded the nonprofit and has worked closely with slums in the cities of Kolhapur and Thane since 1993. The digital addresses residents received were “plus codes,” a free feature developed by Google and built with open-source software. A plus code is a simple alphanumeric combination derived from latitudes and

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longitudes. Each code consists of four characters followed by a plus sign and two to four more characters. The characters after the plus sign define the size of the area. For example, GRQH+H4 points to a popular temple in Pune, and FRV5+2W56 is the code of a community toilet in Laxmi Nagar. These codes are available on Google Maps and can be used anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Despite the services that become available to those with a physical address, it took time to convince residents to sign up. Many had never heard of Google Maps and were suspicious of Joshi’s staff, mistaking them for officials from India’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority. So the nonprofit enlisted local students to go door to door and tell people about the program. More than a thousand homes, drainage chambers, community toilets, help centers, and drinking water tanks in the slum now have plus codes. And every house in the program has a physical blue address board displaying its plus code for all to see. “It saves me a lot of time,” says Suresh Devram Dharmavat, who used to close his grocery shop on days he visited wholesale markets. Today, he gets many of the items he needs delivered by using his plus code. So far, Joshi’s organization has helped 9,000 families in Pune, Thane, and Kolhapur obtain digital addresses, and it aims to cover 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 elsewhere: 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

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Cities

CAPE TOWN’S FIGHT FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE Cities are trying to take charge of their own power supply. By Joseph Dana

ower outages are a way of life in Africa’s most industrialized country. Over the last decade, South Africa’s electricity grid has come apart at the seams and failed to deliver dependable power. As renewable energy gets cheaper, South African cities such as Cape Town have demanded the right to find their own sources. The primary culprit in South Africa’s power woes is the aging national electricity provider, Eskom. After years of mismanagement of state funds earmarked for critical infrastructure repairs, Eskom’s plants are regularly unable to operate at full capacity. The result is rolling blackouts that last from two to six hours per day. The power cuts have proved disastrous for the economy, with costs estimated at between $4 billion and $8 billion in 2019. That year, desperate to find a solution, Cape Town announced plans to purchase its own power from independent renewable-power producers. The falling cost and exponential growth of renewable-energy technology have made this possible. Amazon recently announced

P

Joseph Dana is the senior editor of the weekly tech newsletter Exponential View. He lives in Cape Town.

it will build its own solar farm to power its data centers in South Africa, thereby insulating itself from outages on the national grid. If companies can do it, why can’t cities? The answer is mired in a complex web of regulations and restrictions. The Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy, in consultation with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa, has the sole power to decide where South African citizens get their energy, how it is sold, and what source is used to generate it. In practice, this gives Eskom, the state-owned provider, a monopoly over energy production and supply. Six years ago, Cape Town demanded that the ministry grant it the authority to purchase renewable energy from independent power producers. Those producers would first deliver power directly to Cape Town via the grid, and if they generated more electricity than Cape Town needed, any surplus would flow out to the rest of the country. The request ended in a court battle over constitutional questions about who gets to make such decisions. Given the strength of South Africa’s constitution in supporting 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 publicized, several cities have made plans to go it alone. Durban, South Africa’s thirdlargest city, announced its plan in January

ADAM GOLFER

ARGUMENTS

Report

NICOLÁS ORTEGA

But wait, there’s more. The city aims to get 40% of its energy from sources other than Eskom by 2030 and wants to use only clean energy by 2050. And the sleepy university town of Stellenbosch, in the heart of South Africa’s wine country, has submitted a request to the national government to investigate alternative energy sources. If Cape Town and other cities win the right to purchase their own electricity, rural areas in the country could benefit as well, because private companies will have financial incentives to produce more renewable power. More electricity production should help everyone. Cape Town’s ongoing battle over clean energy is symbolic of political tensions between national and city governments that green tech is only accelerating. By and large, city governance models are more agile than their national counterparts. For example, cities have been at the forefront of implementing the Paris climate

agreement. Their ability to influence national and international politics will grow as more people continue to move there. Yet as South Africa demonstrates, national governments aren’t going down without a fight. While the battle over energy sovereignty will almost certainly spread to more cities, not all areas will follow Cape Town’s approach. The Western Cape province, where the city is located, is blessed with ample wind and a relatively high number of sunny days. Renewable energy works well in this part of the world. Other cities may not be able to purchase their own renewable power so easily. But clearly, the combination of an urbanizing population and the widespread availability of renewable power is challenging the way the modern nation-state controls energy policy. We can expect nationalmunicipal splits like the one driving Cape Town’s energy crisis to become the rule, not the exception. Q

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28

THE AGE OF MEGACITIES Curbing emissions in a few big cities could have an outsize impact on climate change.

SKYSCRAPER a megacity

MEGACITIES from lowest carbon footprint per capita to highest (in tons of CO2).

Most vulnerable: African cities are expanding faster than any others. They will also face the most serious threats from climate change. SKETCHED FLOOR 1 million people in 2035

FLOOR 1 million people in 2020

By Gabrielle Merite

s the world grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate change. In 2020, our world was home to 34 megacities, defined by the United Nations as having at least 10 million residents. In 2035, there will be 48, according to UN predictions. These megacities will be hot spots of economic growth. But they will also face serious environmental challenges including droughts, pollution, sea-level rise, and extreme weather. Megacities will play a key role in confronting climate change; the world’s 100 most populous cities are responsible for 18% of global carbon emissions. But urban areas vary greatly in how efficient they are and how much residents will suffer if emissions go unchecked. Cities with affluent residents who live highconsumption lifestyles drive atmospheric pollution. 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.

A

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

GROUND FLOOR first 10 million people in 2020

CIRCLE AREA annual carbon footprint, in megatons of CO2

ICONS climate hazards

extreme hot weather

flash floods

coastal floods

severe storms

Most populous: In 2035, Delhi will be the most populous city in the world. Despite its fast growth rate, the city’s per capita carbon footprint is very low.

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

AS

MUCH

TO

KNOW

AS

THEY

LEGALLY BUT

DOES ON

CAN.

EVER-GREATER

RELIANCE

SURVEILLANCE

TECHNOLOGY SERVE

THE

PUBLIC

INTEREST?

- B O R H O O D BY

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

MOORE

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GERETY WYLIE

GUTTER CREDIT HERE

ROWAN

31

GUTTER CREDIT HERE

N E I G H

W A T C H

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Cities

A T

a conference in New Orleans in 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a presentation by the New York City Police Department about a sophisticated new data hub called a “real time crime center.” Reams of information rendered in red and green splotches, dotted lines, and tiny yellow icons appeared as overlays on an interactive map of New York City: Murders. Shootings. Road closures. You could see the routes of planes landing at LaGuardia and the schedules of container ships arriving at the mouth of the Hudson River. In the early 1990s, the NYPD had pioneered a system called CompStat that aimed to discern patterns in crime data, since widely adopted by large police departments around the country. With the real time crime center, the idea was to go a step further: What if dispatchers could use the department’s vast trove of data to inform the police response to incidents as they occurred? Back in Ogden, population 82,702, the main problem on Greiner’s mind was a stubbornly high rate of vehicle burglaries. As it was, the department’s lone crime analyst was left to look for patterns by plotting addresses on paper maps, or by manually calculating the average time between similar crimes in a given area. The city had recently purchased license-plate readers with money from a federal grant, but it had no way to integrate the resulting archive of images with the rest of the department’s investigations. It was obvious that much more could be made of the data on hand. “I’m not New York City,” Greiner thought, “but I could scale this down with the right software.” Greiner called a former colleague who’d gone to work for Esri, a large mapping company, and asked what kinds of disparate information he might put on a map. The answer, it turned out, was anything you could put in a spreadsheet: the address history of people on parole—sorting for those with past drug, burglary, or weapons convictions—or the

respective locations of car thefts and car recoveries, to see if joyrides tended to end near the joyrider’s home. You could watch police cars and fire trucks move around the city, or plot cell-phone records over time to look back at a suspect’s whereabouts during the hours before and after a crime.

AROUND

THE

The city council rebuffed Greiner’s first funding request for a real time crime center, in 2007. But the mayor gave his blessing to pursue the project within the existing police budget. Greiner approached Esri and flew down to the company’s headquarters in Redlands, California. He “started up a little friendship” with Esri’s billionaire cofounder, Jack Dangermond, and spoke at the company’s convention, floating a plan to fly a 30-foot camera-equipped blimp over Ogden to monitor emergencies as they developed. (“I got beat up by Jay Leno for that,” Greiner said. The blimp never launched.) Since Ogden already had a subscription to Esri’s flagship product, ArcGIS, which it used for planning and public works, the company offered to build a free test site for a real time crime center (RTCC). Around the country, the expansion of police technology has followed a similar

COUNTRY,

THE

EXPANSION

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FOLLOWED

DRIVEN

MORE

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AGENCIES THAN AND

BY

A

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In 2021, it might be simpler to ask what can’t be mapped. Just as Google and social media have enabled each of us to reach into the figurative diaries and desk drawers of anyone we might be curious about, law enforcement agencies today have access to powerful new engines of data processing and association. Ogden is hardly the tip of the spear: police agencies in major cities are already using facial recognition to identify suspects—sometimes falsely— and deploying predictive policing to define patrol routes. “That’s not happening here,” Ogden’s current police chief, Eric Young, told me. “We don’t have any kind of machine intelligence.”

OF

TECHNOLOGY

THEY

SERVE.

Neighborhood watch

Above: Dave Weloth, a retired police detective, directs the Ogden Police Area Tactical Analysis Center (formerly know as the Real Time Crime Center).

Opposite: Eric Young, a 28-year veteran of the department, became Ogden’s chief of police in January.

pattern, driven more by conversations between police agencies and their vendors than between police and the public they serve. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that tracks the spread of surveillance technology among local law enforcement agencies, currently counts 85 RTCCs in cities as small as Westwego, Louisiana, whose population has yet to crack 10,000. I traveled to Ogden to find answers to a question Greiner phrased this way: “What are we gonna do with this new tool that gets really close to your constitutional rights?” And as federal and state laws take their time to catch up to the wares on offer at conventions like Esri’s, who gets to decide how close is too close?

33

O

gden grew up in the late 19th century, the junction nearest to the spot where the two halves of the transcontinental railroad were finally stitched together in 1869. Marketed at the time as the “crossroads of the West,” it sits at the seam between two of the region’s defining natural features. On one side, the Wasatch Mountains form the westernmost edge of the Rockies; on the other, the Great Basin extends outward from the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Ogden’s mayor, Mike Caldwell, likes to say the railroad made Ogden “rich at the right time.” But the railroad also brought an unsavory reputation it is still trying to overcome. Local legend has it that Al Capone stepped off a train in

34

the 1920s, did a lap around 25th Street, and declared Ogden too wild a town for him to stay. By the time Jon Greiner took over as police chief in 1995, the main challenges on 25th Street were panhandling and public drunkenness. Still, the city’s leadership sees the real time crime center as a linchpin of efforts to revitalize its downtown. The RTCC occupies a dim triangular office on the second floor of the city’s public safety building. Much of the light comes from twin monitors on each of six desks that wind their way along the wall, augmented by two rows of wall-mounted displays overhead. There’s a cell-phone extraction machine in the back corner, and several drones stacked in hard cases. A team of seven analysts works in staggered shifts, monitoring police-radio traffic and working “requests for information” from detectives and patrol officers. Their supervisor, David Weloth, is a laid-back former detective with a neatly trimmed beard and a silver crew cut. Weloth retired from the Ogden City Police Department (OPD) in 2005, but he came back less than a year later to work as a crime analyst and has stayed on ever since. When I arrived for a visit in February, OPD detective Heather West was scrolling through a queue of hundreds of photos captured by a new license-plate-reading system called Flock Safety, looking for a distinctive pickup truck—gray with a red camper shell—thought to have been used in a theft. The previous week, Weloth explained, Flock had helped the department recover five stolen vehicles in three days. Since they got it in December 2020, they’d queried the system more than 800 times. On searches without a plate number, though, looking for a particular kind or color of car, the algorithm had a tendency to veer off course. “For some reason, it likes red Mazda 3s,” West said, still looking at her screen. Weloth introduced the team as Fox News played silently on a TV in the corner. West holds one of two OPD detective positions on the team, which also includes a sheriff’s deputy from surrounding Weber County and four civilian analysts with

Cities

backgrounds in federal law enforcement. A former US Treasury officer was going through a statewide register of pawned goods, looking for matches with property reported stolen in Ogden. Weloth had one of the analysts cue up a video from a recent homicide investigation, in which cell-phone records obtained by subpoena helped disprove key parts of a suspect’s story about his whereabouts on the night his girlfriend was murdered. Footage from a city-owned surveillance camera at Ogden’s water treatment plant allowed Weloth’s team to “put him where the phone said he was,” tightening the case for the prosecution. This was one of a few greatest hits that

MUCH

HARDER

network of license-plate readers. As Greiner recalled, thefts increase in the winter, “because people warm up their cars in the driveway, then go back inside and leave their keys in the ignition.” Today, Weloth told me, “running and unattendeds” still account for about a third of car thefts in the city. This includes an incident last November when a young mother left her 10-month-old in the back seat of her running car, which was stolen. Both the mayor and the chief of police told me the license-plate reader had been instrumental in finding the kid within two hours. But they didn’t mention that two women had found the baby crying on a front porch some miles away—and

TO

EVALUATE IS

THE

USE

OF

AFFECTS

SURVEILLANCE THE

OFFICERS THEY

ENCOUNTER

HOW

TOOLS

RELATIONSHIP AND IN

THE THEIR DAILY

came up repeatedly in discussions about how Ogden uses the technology in its real time crime center. In another, in 2018, analysts tapped into a network of city-owned cameras to locate a kidnapping suspect after the woman he’d held managed to flag down an officer and provide a physical description. When officers arrived on scene, the man shot at them; police returned fire and killed him. If there’s any good reason to deploy invasive technology, surely solving a murder and stopping a violent crime both qualify. What’s much harder to evaluate is how the use of surveillance tools affects the relationship between officers and the residents they encounter in their daily rounds, or how they change the collective understanding of the purpose of policing. Take car theft. Recovering stolen cars has been an early success of the city’s

BETWEEN RESIDENTS ROUNDS.

that the automatic reader had only helped them recover the car. The police department maintains a web page advising residents on “10 Ways to reduce your vehicle from being stolen” and periodically sends community policing officers out to relay the message. Would a more robust public education program be a better way to reduce car theft than an intrusive citywide license-plate surveillance system? That’s not a question anyone at OPD appears to be asking.

W

hen the RTCC launched, Weloth explained, his goal was to “close the gap between raw data and something that’s actionable.” To do that, he first had to figure out “What have we already paid for?” More than 100 city-owned surveillance cameras,

Neighborhood watch

Below: Joshua Terry, an analyst who does much of the real time crime center’s mapping work, with a drone.

installed by Ogden’s public works department after 9/11, were trained on sites like the parking lot of the fleet and facilities building, or the door to the city’s computer server room. In some places, the cameras could be controlled remotely. Analysts could review footage and pan, tilt, or zoom those cameras in accordance with requests from dispatch or officers in the field. This is what had allowed Joshua Terry, who does much of the real time crime center’s mapping work, to follow along during the 2018 kidnapping call, zeroing in on a dark figure on the sidewalk in a Dallas Cowboys jacket seconds before he darted out of view. “That’s the reason we have it on,” Terry told me, playing back the footage

35

of the incident on one of the big screens. The goal is not, he says, to constantly surveil everyone but to use what tools the analysts can to aid active investigations. “We couldn’t care less what people are doing,” he says, even though “people think we sit here watching these cameras.” “I’d be bored to death,” a colleague said with a chuckle. Besides, Weloth pointed out, the system had accountability: “I can tell exactly who moved what camera, where, when.” When the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union called a city council member with concerns about the possible use of facial recognition, Weloth explained, he offered a tour of the RTCC. “We’re very

36

cautious about stuff that’s not supported by law,” he said. “One mistake and we’re gonna pay the price.” The challenge is that for much of police surveillance technology, the most relevant law is the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches” of people’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” The court system has yet to figure out how this applies to modern surveillance systems. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2012 Supreme Court opinion, “Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse.”

Cities

Utah is one of 16 states with statutes that explicitly address automated licenseplate readers; the OPD’s policy calls for two supervisors to sign off before querying a plate number against the database, and plate information can’t be stored for longer than nine months; it’s usually deleted within 30 days. Still, there’s no federal or state law that specifically regulates government use of surveillance cameras, and none of the department’s audits are published. Sotomayor’s 2012 opinion was nonbinding (but widely cited), and it served mostly to point out that important issues haven’t been addressed in law. As Weloth had said when I first called to plan my visit, “We regulate ourselves extremely well.”

Above: The city’s leadership sees the real time crime center as a linchpin of efforts to revitalize downtown.

Opposite: Betty Sawyer, president of the Ogden NAACP, says the department should do more to engage city residents in conversations about new police technologies.

Neighborhood watch

O

ne afternoon, I accompanied Heather West, the detective who’d been perusing gray pickups in the licenseplate database, and Josh Terry, the analyst who’d spotted the kidnapper with the Cowboys jacket, to fly a drone over a park abutting a city-owned golf course on the edge of town. West was at the controls; Terry followed the drone’s path in the sky and maintained “situational awareness” for the crew; another detective focused on the iPad showing what the drone was seeing, as opposed to where and how it was flying. Of all the gadgets under the hood at the real time crime center, drones may well be the most tightly regulated, subject to safety (but not privacy) regulations and review by the Federal Aviation Administration. In Ogden, neighbor to a large Air Force base, these rules are compounded by flight restrictions covering most of the city. The

THE

COURT

FIGURE THE

SYSTEM

police department had to obtain waivers to get its drones off the ground; it took two years to develop policies and get the necessary approvals to start making flights. The police department purchased its drones with a mind to managing large public events or complex incidents like hostage situations. But, as Dave Weloth soon found, “the more we use our drones, the more use cases we find.” At the real time crime center, Terry, who has a master’s in geographic information technology, had given me a tour of the city with images gathered on recent drone flights, clicking through to cloud-shaped splotches, assembled from the drone’s composite photographs, that dotted the map of Ogden. Above 21st Street and Washington, he zoomed in on the site of a fatal crash caused by a motorcycle running a red light. A bloody sheet covered the driver’s body, legs splayed

HAS

OUT

HOW

FOURTH

AMENDMENT

YET

TO

APPLIES TO

MODERN

SURVEILLANCE

SYSTEMS.

on the pavement, surrounded by a ring of fire trucks. Within minutes, the drone’s cameras had scanned the scene and created a 3D model accurate to a centimeter, replacing the complex choreography of place markers and fixed cameras on the ground that sometimes leave major intersections closed for hours after a deadly collision. When the region was hit by a powerful windstorm last September, Terry flew a drone over massive piles of downed trees and brush collected by the city. When county officials saw the resulting volumetric analysis—12,938 cubic yards—that would be submitted as part of a claim to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they asked the police department

37

to perform the same service for two neighboring towns. Ogden drones have also been used to pinpoint hot spots after wildland fires, locate missing persons, and fly “overwatch” for SWAT team raids. This flight was more routine. When I pulled into the parking lot, two officers from Ogden’s community policing unit looked on as West steered the craft over a dense stand of Gambel oak and then hovered over a triangular log fort on a hillside a couple of hundred yards away. Though they’d never encountered people on drone sweeps through the area, trash and makeshift structures were commonplace. Once the RTCC pinpointed the location of any encampments, the community service officers would go in on foot to get a closer look. “We get a lot of positive feedback from runners, hikers,” one officer explained. After one recent visit to a camp near a pond on 21st Street, he and the county social service workers who accompanied him found housing for two people they’d met there. When clearing camps, police also “try and connect [people] with services they need,” Weloth said. The department recently hired a full-time homeless outreach coordinator to help. “We can’t police ourselves out of this problem,” he said, comparing the department’s efforts to keep new camps from springing up to “pushing water uphill.” Still, no one seemed to give much thought to the fact that quietly, people who were homeless had become the sight most frequently captured by the police department’s drone program. Of the 137 non-training flights made since May 2019, nearly half—62—were flyovers of homeless encampments, with regular flights over a parkway on the Ogden River and in woods by the railroad, whose owner, Union Pacific, employs its own private security as well. It was easy to see the appeal: if, instead of spending hours clambering through the woods, you could find people in minutes by looking down from on high, why not? “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 Caldwell’s claim. The first was the 2018 murder of a homeless man, whose killer told police he considered homeless people a “problem.” The second was a fatal stabbing in an encampment near the railroad tracks, just outside city limits; the suspect arrested in the case was homeless himself. Both incidents were tragic examples of the well-documented vulnerability to violence of people without shelter. But does it follow that drones would be an effective deterrent? The idea that police were flying over the city’s open spaces to investigate homicides is also hard to square with the contention that the flights were part of the city’s homeless outreach. Aren’t those different activities, or shouldn’t they be? Either way, Caldwell said, “if it wasn’t the drone, it would be officers climbing over

To Mayor Caldwell, this wasn’t a meaningful distinction. Asked whether there were some complaints or alleged crimes that weren’t serious enough to justify use of the RTCC’s most invasive technologies, he said, “I think we should use all the tools … The average everyday person wouldn’t even know that these tools are out there or that anything is being monitored.” For Betty Sawyer, president of the Ogden chapter of the NAACP, that’s precisely the problem. Sawyer told me she wasn’t aware the city had license-plate readers and remotely monitored surveillance cameras until I called her for an interview. When she asked the department for more information, Chief Young shared a presentation he’d made before the City Council in December—one week before the new license-plate readers were deployed. “How many people are listen-

POLICE ALL AS

THE PART

DRONES

TOOLS OF AND

TEND

TO

VIEW

AT

THEIR

DISPOSAL

SAME

BASIC

CONTINUUM—

BICYCLES

ALIKE

HELPING

THE

“TO

deadfall and going into those places. That keeps our officers safe, and gives us more bandwidth.” One important function of resource constraints, though—bandwidth, in the mayor’s equation—is that they force governments, and citizens, to consider priorities. One Friday afternoon, I met Doug Young, a 49-year-old who has lived outdoors in Ogden on and off for the last 12 years. He wore a gray poncho and a cowboy hat with a pin in the shape of a cow’s skull. Young said he often saw drones overhead when he camped behind a local Walmart, and he had learned to distinguish police drones by the whirr of their motors. “If it stops violent crime, cool. If it’s for some petty bullshit, leave us the fuck alone,” he said.

PROTECT

AND

SERVE.”

ing to weekly city council meetings?” she asked. “If no one’s talking about it but it’s here—how, why, what’s the reason for it? Is that the best use of our dollar when we’re down officers? These are things that should be put up front, not after the fact.” Last summer, as protests flared across the country in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Sawyer spearheaded a group that held a series of meetings with the mayor and police chief. It was an effort to improve police-community relations in a city where no Black cop serves in a department of 126 sworn officers, and where the police force is less than 10% Hispanic, though Hispanic residents make up more than 30% of Ogden’s population. “Our whole goal is: How do we build in transparency so we can dispel the

myths and speak to the truth of what you are doing?” she said. One risk for the police department is that the RTCC’s usefulness is, at least for some of the city, ultimately overshadowed by mistrust over cops’ ability to use their new powers with restraint. As Malik Dayo, who organized several Black Lives Matter protests in Ogden last summer, told me, “I can leave my house, drive to the store, and come back, and if [police] wanted to, they can figure out what time I left, what time I came back, and if I made any stops along the way.” Some cities have preempted similar objections with an avalanche of public data: in Southern California, the city of Chula Vista publishes routes and accompanying case numbers for every drone flight its police department conducts. Weloth assured me the checks and balances on Ogden’s license-plate readers would prevent the scenario Dayo described. Dayo was unmoved. “I think it’s gonna be abused,” he said. “I really do.” Police tend to view all the tools at their disposal as part of the same basic continuum—drones and bicycles alike helping “to protect and serve.” After a few days in Ogden, though, I couldn’t help but think that the RTCC’s tools were also functioning as a kind of digital armor for a particular worldview. Was the department’s reliance on technology allowing it to do more with less, or was it letting the city ignore the complexities of its most urgent social problems? Last August, a covid-19 outbreak at the Lantern House, Ogden’s largest homeless shelter, infected at least 48 residents and killed two. Confirmed cases were quarantined in a separate wing of the shelter, but people soon began to set up tents on the sidewalk outside, where 33rd Street dead-ended by the railroad tracks. Among them was a man who asked me to use only his first name, Ryan, and said he no longer felt safe sleeping on closely spaced bunks: “You’re within four feet of five people.” Outside, people had to move 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 it was a health risk,” he said. The police department set up a trailer with surveillance cameras atop a high pole to record what happened in the new camp. Through the fall, as the group living outside the shelter swelled to some 60 people in about 30 tents, the cameras captured several incidents of violence. A car window was smashed. Someone punched a pizza delivery driver in the face. On December 10, a Thursday, a team including police, firefighters, and county social workers cleared the encampment once and for all. “Up to this point, Ogden city has taken a moderated approach during the pandemic. However, the situation has now become untenable,” a city press release read, identifying the encampment as a source of crime and a drain on city resources.

“WE A

WOULD

VERY

HAVE

DIFFICULT

THERE’S

NO

STRATEGY

P

aige Berhow, who retired as assistant police chief in the Ogden suburb of Riverdale and now lives in the city, became an officer in the early 1980s, when her on-duty equipment consisted of little more than a uniform and a revolver. Then came tasers and bulletproof vests and computer dashboards in every patrol car. “With every layer of stuff, that’s another layer of detachment from the public, too,” she told me. As Berhow pointed out, much of the expanding footprint of technology in police departments has come in the name of officer safety, though on-duty officer deaths have declined dramatically over the last several decades. David Weloth hesitated when I asked what would change, 10 years into Ogden’s experiment, if the police department suddenly had to do without the RTCC, since renamed the Area Tactical Analysis Center.

THAT

TIME. CRIME

REDUCTION

HAPPENS WITHOUT

—DAVID

WELOTH,

OGDEN

“Given the potential for the spread of COVID-19 and other communicable diseases often found in camps like these, risks from camp members spread throughout the city.” This was not the approach advocated by the Centers for Disease Control, which recommends that local governments “allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are,” emphasizing that dispersing encampments increases potential for disease spread. According to a report in the local paper, 10 people accepted the city’s offer to go sleep inside the Lantern House, and the rest dispersed. If they found themselves setting up tents along the Ogden River, they’d be spotted soon enough by one of the police department’s drones.

POLICE

ATAC. ”

DEPARTMENT

“We would have a very difficult time,” he said. “There’s no crime reduction strategy that happens without ATAC.” ATAC’s role in the police department’s relationship with the city has steadily expanded over time. The number of “requests for information” completed by the group was up by over 20% last year. The police department now has a say in the city’s master plan for surveillance cameras; the popularity of Amazon Ring’s cameraequipped doorbells, meanwhile, has given analysts a new trove of data to peruse. But Ogden releases very little data to shed light on ATAC’s role, beyond confirmation that it’s still growing. In the fall of 2019, when the city launched an expanded network of surveillance cameras that ATAC could monitor remotely,

employees accessed them only a handful of times each month. They soon found reasons to peer through the cameras daily. From November 23, 2020, to February 23, 2021 (the most recent three months for which the city provided data), ATAC processed over 27,000 queries, or about 300 each day. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist at the University of Utah who studies the social implications of algorithmic decision-making, worries that police departments have embraced novel tools without the resources or the expertise to properly evaluate their influence. How might the distribution of surveillance cameras, for instance, affect the department’s understanding of the distribution of crime? How could software like that sold by Palantir (a data analytics firm with roots in the intelligence community) amplify existing biases and distortions in the criminal justice system? “A lot of government agencies who are getting solicited by vendors would like … to scrutinize them properly, but they don’t know how,” he told me. “The idea coming from vendors is that more data is always better. That’s really not the case.” To their credit, the analysts working at ATAC made good on Weloth’s pledge of openness. They were candid, and willing to explore potential pitfalls in their work. Terry, who did much of the mapping work at ATAC, had spent four years as a contractor with the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency working on American drone strikes. He told the story of a fellow image analyst who misidentified what he thought was a group of men making IEDs under cover of darkness. On the strength of that analysis, Terry says, “they blew up kids carrying firewood.” When Terry came to Ogden, he was surprised to see that local police departments had access to tools as powerful as Palantir’s. Another analyst swiveled in his chair and chimed in. “The technology is getting better and the cost is coming down,” he said. “At some point will we get access to technology we regret having? Probably.” Rowan Moore Gerety is a writer in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Big Reset: Digital Enterprises Shift into High Gear April 5 - May 28, 2021

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future of work, security and privacy issues that have emerged from the massive shift online, new ways

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The pandemic upended public transit and forced city planners to rethink their priorities. Now they’re trying to map out what comes next. By John Surico

On paper, the task was gargantuan. To slow the rapid spread of the coronavirus, the New York City subway would start closing every night for the first time in 115 years. That meant the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), its overseer, had to create a massive bus network to mirror 665 miles of track. That’s roughly equivalent to a line stretching from New York City to Chicago, for a system that was serving around 5.5 million people each weekday. And they had to do it fast. Shortly after the decision was made, at the end of April 2020, agency planners logged on to Remix, one of the most popular transportation planning platforms in the world. The self-service software allows transit agencies to easily reroute lines or create new ones. The MTA had already used it to begin redesigning the Queens bus network. But for this new undertaking, the agency would need more data. The

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHONA KASINGER

MTA wanted to know: Where did the frontline workers who rely on overnight service live? And where were they most likely headed? With that information, its planners could plot the most efficient bus routes and maybe even serve these commuters better than the subway ever did. At Remix’s headquarters in San Francisco, a team of software engineers sprang into action. The Remix team pulled data from a variety of sources and plugged it into the tool to help find the best routes. As a result of this work, the MTA added three new bus routes that would connect, for example, health-care workers and others in the Bronx and in south and east Brooklyn to the west side of Manhattan or any point along the way. Days blurred into nights as work continued on both coasts. Ultimately, a task that would typically have taken weeks, if not months, was finished in a few days. On the evening of May 6,

New York City’s subways shut down, and the new night bus network flickered on. It was an early battle in the worst existential crisis for Western urban public transportation in our lifetimes. Across Europe and North America, ridership has plunged amid pandemic travel restrictions. The traditional hub-and-spoke model, with transit networks designed to flush people in and out of a central business district, was upended. Rush hour, as we know it, suddenly became less of a rush. Tiffany Chu, Remix’s cofounder and newly minted CEO, watched this all play out in real time. “Transit agencies are always changing things up, but most of [those changes] are small, incremental ones,” Chu says. “When covid hit, immediately we saw in Remix’s admin panel just a lot of rapid changes happening: 50% service, then 30% … agencies were just slashing service everywhere.” A year later, this unprecedented shock to modern mobility is still reverberating. The long-term shift to remote white-collar work is casting doubt on whether rush hour will ever fully return. The office is in retrograde. And for transit systems, the implications are profound. The pandemic, Chu argues, poses a fundamental threat to transit agencies 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

stint writing for the design publication Dwell, and a position at Zipcar, where she was the car-share company’s first UX hire. But she felt pulled to do more. Friends told her about a fellowship at Code for America, in San Francisco, a year-long role focused on technology aimed at making government work better for people. She applied and soon packed her bags for California. That’s where she found some like minds: designer Sam Hashemi and engineers Dan Getelman and Danny Whalen. “We were all vaguely interested in transportation,” says Chu from her bright San Francisco apartment, a bike in full view on Zoom. The field held a particular appeal: thanks to the transportation sector’s long-standing commitment to open data standards, she explains, “there’s a lot of programmatic 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 suggest 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 pursue 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,

Cities

the platform estimates how much it might cost and who might ride it in view of who is able to access it, ultimately helping planners assess whether it’s a worthwhile public investment. Adding more data deepens the tool’s technical analysis: with a few clicks, demographic information and existing ridership figures help planners visualize the routes that would best meet a community’s needs. There’s also a Google Docs–like element: users can leave notes for one another suggesting that, for example, two stops should be consolidated into one. The platform’s design makes it easy to share maps and routes that are fluid, clear, and intuitive—in a

CHU SAYS THE PANDEMIC DOESN’T MEAN THE DEATH OF THE CITY BUT THE RISE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

planning process that, for so long, has been none of those things. Jarrett Walker, a renowned transit consultant, was one of Remix’s early advisors. In addition to cost and service levels, he suggested adding travel time—how long would it take people to get around, and what choices would they encounter along the way? So the group built what has become one of the platform’s most popular scenario planning tools: “Jane,” a rider isochrone, or travel time indicator, that shows all the places she could reach in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on. That advice jibes with one of Walker’s guiding philosophies: that public transportation planners must

Back to the streets

Tech has brought public transit into the 21st century, but companies like Uber are also a direct competitor. focus on fostering opportunity rather than predicting patterns. A similar sentiment is now gaining traction in policymaking circles: access, not ridership, should be the measure of success. And the right technology can help cities deliver on that promise. But agenciesí capabilities vary immensely, says Evan Landman, a transit analyst at Walkerís firm, Jarrett Walker + Associates. Some are highly sophisticated; others are still using tab-laden Excel spreadsheets. Plotting a new bus route can take forever. Whenever two agencies have to collaborate and bridge that divide, the pace drags. No doubt there are problems that tech cannot solve—repairing institutional trust, for one—but often, agencies just need help exploring the options, Landman argues.
Thereís a widespread perception that urban transportation planning is somehow a technically complex problem when, in reality, itís a politically fraught issue with long-standing, well-understood solutions,
he says. Remix doesnít try to solve the politics with a
magic cure,
Landman adds, but strives to show how decisions may affect individual riders and their landscape.
Itís really useful in

helping to explain the different sides of a question that, ultimately, doesnít have a single technical answer,
he says.

A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP Shortly after Remixís launch, in 2014, a transit manager at Oregonís Department of Transportation reached out: rural agencies in his state needed better tools. He became their first customer.
We were over the moon and just bewildered that someone would pay us!
says Chu. Then came Bay Area agencies, then Miami-Dade, then Chicago. Before long, Chu found herself Googling small Finnish cities as Remix signed up its first international clients. Nearly seven years later, Remix now has a team of around 70, and a client list that includes over 350 transit agencies across five continents, including titans like the MTA and Transport for London. Every day, more than 240 million people worldwide interact with planning decisions made on the platform, from individual routes to systemwide overhauls. In March, the New

45

York–based ride-sharing company Via acquired Remix for $100 million. (Remix will operate as a Via subsidiary, and the company says that Chu and the rest of the staff will stay on.) Dan Getelman, Remixís chief technology officer, says one of the teamís goals is to free up time for transit agencies to experiment more.
Itís always frustrating as a transit rider when you say
I guess this made sense at some point, but it doesnít match the [ridersí] needs or doesnít feel reactive to whatís happening,í
he says. The tech sector has a complicated relationship with public transit, though. On the one hand, technology has brought some urban infrastructure into the 21st century, easing passengersí journeys with advances like software APIs (think subway countdown clocks), contactless payment, and navigation apps. But on the other, tech is a direct competitor; companies like Uber have been criticized for intentionally taking riders (and revenue) away from public transit, while simultaneously clogging streets. How the two can best coexist is an ongoing debate in both worlds. Remix falls, perhaps, into a different category. Itís a tech company that goes all in on the public sector, betting that riders will be attracted to traditional public transport options with good, reliable service rather than an entirely new product. Itís a high-tech solution, sure, but the premise is shockingly low-tech: build it better, and they will come. And in our rapidly changing world of mobility, 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

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and at neighborhood stations—didn’t disappear entirely, and in some cases it actually increased. Riders were still moving; it’s just that where they were going had changed. Local trips like these have typically been overlooked by planners making transit decisions. They involve fewer riders, and funding is tied to ridership. Race and class also play a role; poorer riders and people of color, who are more likely to live farther out and are less likely to own a car, have long been left out of citymaking. As a result, the quality of these public transit trips deteriorates, which drives down ridership. Seeing fewer riders, agencies inevitably cut service, and ridership slides further still. This produces the transit version of a death spiral—a more arduous commute and fewer opportunities for the affected communities. But since the pandemic began, Chu has seen a notable change in the data sets transit agencies are asking for. Instead of primarily requesting information about which jobs are located where, a question that has long shaped planning decisions, Remix is now helping cities evaluate how easy it is for residents to access essential services such as health care, education, and food. The change is a welcome one. “If you look at just jobs, that is probably not going to tell you the full story,” Chu says. “You also need to look at very basic needs, like where you can get fresh produce in grocery 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 center.” With mobility restricted, people were forced to revisit what was close to them.

Cities

“If you don’t change the rules,” Chu says, “nobody’s going to be able to change the outcome.”

This reckoning has reignited interest in the “15-minute city,” where pedestrian-centric environments and responsive public transit put essential services within reach of a brisk walk or short bike ride. Transit agencies, Chu argues, should take note. “The 15-minute city isn’t supposed to just be where the buildings are tallest,” she says. “It should be based on a truly livable neighborhood center.” Look close enough, and you can already see changes happening. The new tool kit of streetscape interventions that cities developed in response to covid-19 hints at a different urban future—one that includes more “slow streets,” which limit through traffic; pop-up or permanent cycle lanes; outdoor dining; and parklets. “It’s investing in small downtown retail corridors, and people frequenting them more often during all times of the day,” says Chu. “You want a constant flow of all types of trips, to and from where people are gathering and where businesses are.” Remix’s portfolio is following suit. A “streets” platform allows agencies to tinker with everything from car-free thoroughfares to expanded sidewalks. And a “shared mobility” tool for emerging “last mile” systems such as e-bikes and e-scooters lays

out nearby destinations that can be made more accessible. Over time, prioritizing the places people live instead of just the places they work will mean expanding the mission of urban transportation, Chu says. Planners should be able to more easily anticipate people’s needs and adjust accordingly—as the MTA did with its new pilot bus route from public housing sites to vaccination sites at colleges in central Queens and Brooklyn. In a crisis that laid bare the immense imbalances in how we get around—who has access to what; who has to travel how long; and who, ultimately, has to put their lives at risk— it’s time to be more flexible, Chu argues. That means helping people get to where they’re going by creating services that are genuinely better— or simply making it easier for them to navigate their own neighborhood without a car. And it means starting to right the historical wrongs in our cities that have left so many urban denizens stranded. “If you don’t change the rules,” Chu says, “nobody’s going to be able to change the outcome.” John Surico is a journalist and urban planning researcher.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The Green Future Index 2021 OVER ALL R ANKINGS

KEY O

Green leaders

O

Greening middle

O

Climate laggards

O

Climate abstainers

Top 5 Countries Rank

Country

Bottom 5 Countries Score

Rank

Country

Score

1. . . . . . . ........... Iceland ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.5

76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Qatar ..............................

2.6

2 . . . . . . ............ Denmark .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.4

75 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paraguay.......................

2.7

3 . . . . . . ............ Norway ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.2

74. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iran ..................................

2.9

4 . . . . . . . ........... France.......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6

73 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Russia ............................

2.9

5 . . . . . . ........... Ireland.......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6

72 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Algeria ...........................

3.2

The Green Future Index is a ranking of 76 countries and territories building a low-carbon future. It measures how economies are pivoting toward clean energy, industry, agriculture, and society through investment in renewables, innovation, and green finance. Experience the interactive index, view the data, and download the full report at

technologyreview.com/gfi The Green Future Index was produced in association with Salesforce, Citrix, and Morgan Stanley.

Q

Europe prevails with 15 of the top 20 countries. Iceland comes in first with a goal of being carbon neutral by 2040.

Q

Costa Rica (7th) and New Zealand (8th) have made major strides by focusing on renewables and decarbonization.

Q

The G20 needs to recommit to carbonneutral objectives to boost lackluster rankings for Australia (35th), United States (40th), China (45th), and Japan (60th).

Contact us to join our Oceans project: [email protected] The Blue Technology Barometer will examine where and how “blue economy” technologies and solutions are being deployed to further efforts to clean up the oceans, reduce sea-related carbon emissions, and make maritime economic activities economically and environmentally viable.

ANDREW

HOW SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, CAME TO LEAD THE WAY IN SMART SEWER CONTROL

By

Photographs

ZALESKI by

Lucy

Hewett

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50

SOUTH BEND’S STORY OF

the city of South Bend, Indiana, wastewater from people’s kitchens, sinks, washing machines, and toilets flows through 35 neighborhood sewer lines. On good days, just before each line ends, a vertical throttle pipe diverts the sewage into an interceptor tube, which carries it to a treatment plant where solid pollutants and bacteria are filtered out. As in many American cities, those pipes are combined with storm drains—hence the term “combined sewer,” a design that became popular as a cost-saving measure in the 1880s. So on bad days, when heavy rains or snowmelt overwhelms the capacity of the interceptor, the sewage goes straight into the St. Joseph River. This is bad for many reasons. Bacteria in fecal matter make rivers unsafe for swimming or boating. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria from hospital waste are released into the wild to multiply. Pharmaceuticals, pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, and hormones get into the ecosystem. Perhaps worst of all, the influx of nutrient-rich organic detritus can fuel the runaway growth of algae. This can fill rivers and lakes with toxic sludge, endangering wildlife and drinking water supplies.

OVERWHELMED INFRASTRUCTURE IS, UNFORTUNATELY, ALL TOO COMMON .

IN

In theory, the 1972 Clean Water Act prohibited cities (and other polluters) from sending their waste directly into rivers. But in practice, they kept on doing so. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that between 23,000 and 75,000 such overflow incidents take place each year in the United States. They are also a major problem in Europe, where some 650,000 take place annually, most in older cities. Starting in the mid-1990s, the US Department of Justice sued cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Boston, Miami, Cincinnati, and Toledo on behalf of the EPA for violations of the Clean Water Act. It sought consent decrees—where local governments agree to binding terms to prevent tougher penalties— in many more municipalities. Across America every year, combined sewers dump 850 billion gallons of raw sewage into waterways—about the same amount of water the Mississippi River annually carries into the Gulf of Mexico. The EPA had warned the city of South Bend for years about its habitual pollution problem. In 2008, its worst year for storm and wastewater overflow so far this century, 2 billion gallons of untreated sewage flowed past the interceptor tube and into the St. Joseph River. Finally, in 2011, three days before Pete Buttigieg took office as mayor, the agency forced South Bend into a consent decree, ultimately demanding $863 million worth of sewer upgrades. The bill added up, with financing, to about $10,000 per resident in a Rust Belt city where the median household income is under $40,000. South Bend’s story of overwhelmed infrastructure is, unfortunately, all too common. In the summer of 2011, about 250 miles to the east, a million acres of the surface of Lake Erie, the fourth-largest of the US and Canadian Great Lakes, had been covered in an algal bloom caused by combined-sewer overflows (along with agricultural and industrial runoff) from Toledo, Cleveland, and other cities. The New York Times reported “concentrations of microcystin, a liver toxin, [in the lake] that were 1,200 times World Health

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Organization limits, tainting the drinking water for 2.8 million consumers.” Two-thirds of America’s 800,000 miles of sewers are over 60 years old; restoring those pipes could cost more than $1 trillion, according to the American Water Works Association. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that utilities spent $3 billion in 2019 replacing pipes, which was $81 billion less than the group figured they should have spent. President Biden’s recently announced $2 trillion infrastructure plan could go some way toward alleviating the situation, if it becomes law. As currently written, the proposal includes $56 billion in grants and low-cost loans to state and local governments to “upgrade and modernize drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater systems.” Once the money problem is addressed, though, there’s still the question of how exactly to go about making the upgrades. One way to eliminate overflows would be to separate the combined pipes by creating

a whole new network of separate sewers and storm drains. (This is generally seen as prohibitively expensive.) Another option is to build new infrastructure to increase overflow capacity. That’s the approach being taken in London, where an enormous £4 billion ($5.5 billion) tunnel is being dug under the Thames River, intended to carry sewage from 34 points where it commonly overflows to a treatment plant 16 miles to the east, beginning in 2025. Both those methods fall into the category of making bigger holes in which to put bigger pipes. For cash-strapped cities, that kind of expense is often out of reach. Such was the case in South Bend, which embarked on a third route: making its sewers smarter. In 2008, the city began installing a network of devices that measured sewage depth and flow at dozens of points throughout its sewers. Then, in 2011, it implemented a real-time control system, with valves that automatically open and close in response to the sensor data. It wasn’t the first such system; Quebec

Kieran Fahey is in charge of South Bend’s sewer control plan.

City had put in a network in 1999. Copenhagen, Berlin, and Genoa, among other European cities, also began installing real-time monitoring and control systems in the late 1990s. But South Bend is among the pioneers. “Most cities in the US have some aspect of control in their sewer system,” says Branko Kerkez, who researches smart-water systems as a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan. “South Bend became the poster child because they really operationalize it … they overinstrumented [the sewer] so they could see how the whole thing changes in real time.” Kieran Fahey, a tall and bearded Irishman, is in charge of the city’s sewage control plan. Before taking the job in 2015—he followed his wife, who had gotten a job at the University of Notre Dame— Fahey had worked for Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency. He was the guy on the other side of the desk, telling communities what to do to conform with clean-water regulations. In South Bend, he has to figure out if there is a way to keep the city from going broke while complying with the EPA’s mandate. “We’re trying to find the sweet spot,” he says. “Trying to not crucify the community economically, but also trying to make sure the river is taken care of as well.” Since the sensors went in, the sewer overflow per inch of rain has dropped from 42.8 million gallons in 2008 to 6.9 million in 2020. If Fahey succeeds, those sensors might help cut overflows to zero.

S

outh Bend’s sensor network is a descendant of control efforts dating back to the 1960s. The difference comes down to its sheer size and scope: it aims to control overflows over 600 miles of underground pipes. Until the sensor network was put in place, a pair of city workers in South Bend used to drive around once a week, lift up manhole covers, and peer down, using nothing but their eyes to estimate how fast the sewage was flowing. If they saw gunk clogging a throttle line, they hoisted it out with a hook. During a storm, a city worker would have to drive across town to close an overflow valve. This worked, to an extent, for prolonged storms—but not for short,

Cities

“SOUTH BEND BECAME THE POSTER CHILD BECAUSE THEY REALLY OPERATIONALIZE IT.”

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intense rains, which sometimes caused overflows before anyone could take action. The shift to a more systematic, detailed, and faster system for gathering data took years. It was set in motion by Michael Lemmon, a professor at Notre Dame, whose campus sits at the city’s southern edge. In 2001, he got a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to see what could be done with credit-card-size, radio-enabled microcontrollers. After the September 11 attacks, the project was commandeered to see if small sensors could help find Al Qaeda fighters hiding in caves. “I really was not very happy working on these military applications, even though it was important to do,” Lemmon says. “I was thinking about some other ways we could look at sensors.” In 2003, Lemmon and a group of fellow engineers and researchers at Notre Dame realized they might be able to use them to do something about South Bend’s routine sewer overflows. In 2004, the research effort led to the formation of a company called EmNet. Luis Montestruque, an entrepreneurially minded electrical engineer who had worked with Lemmon on the DARPA project while finishing his doctorate, became the company’s president. EmNet pitched its idea to Gary Gilot, then South Bend’s director of public works. Gilot is a soft-spoken, grandfatherly figure, perennially fascinated by new ideas. (As Fahey puts it: “If you said, ‘I want to measure every tree in South Bend because I feel like it’s able to help us with climate change,’ Gary would say, ‘Let’s go ahead and do it.’”) Gilot was intrigued; peering down opened manholes in the middle of traffic to see if a sewer line is overflowing already seemed backward to him. In 2005, he gave EmNet a section of sewer along one city street as a test, to see if real-time monitoring of sewage flows could work. There were problems from the outset. The environment in sewers is uninviting, to say the least.

Smart sewers

Kieran Fahey with a sensor used to measure water pressure and flow in South Bend’s sewers.

53

54

Cities

Michael Lemmon studies agent-based sensoractuator networks at Notre Dame.

Smart sewers

P “WHEN WE OPENED UP THE POWER BOX, IT WAS GONE— DISINTEGRATED. THAT’S HOW HARSH THE ENVIRONMENT IS.”

Excessive humidity weighs down the air. Sulfuric acid is always forming. Temperature swings are incessant and severe, as hot wastewater from showers and washing machines mixes with captured rainwater. Methane and hydrogen sulfide, both highly flammable and potentially explosive gases, are also constant hazards. “The first device that we installed was this electronic board,” says Montestruque. “When we opened up the power box, it was gone—disintegrated. That’s how harsh the environment is.” Protecting electronic equipment became the challenge. Off-the-shelf devices to measure water flow and depth, which EmNet decided to use to lower its installation costs, were tough enough to withstand the conditions. But they’re susceptible to malfunction. Some sensors, in order to collect flow information based on pressure readings, have to hang in the sewage; they tend to be more accurate, but a wad of errant toilet paper could wrap around them, throwing off a reading. Eventually EmNet set up what it calls nodes on the underside of manhole covers. Each node includes a sensor, a microprocessor, a radio, an antenna, and a lithium-ion battery. The sensors were exposed to rushing wastewater while the processor, radio, and battery were housed inside an explosion-proof box— both to protect against corrosion and to keep the electronics or the battery from igniting sewer gases. Attaching the nodes to manhole covers meant maintenance crews could access them easily. On the strength of the data from the initial pilot section, Gilot gave the go-ahead to expand the system, paying EmNet $6 million to install sensors citywide. It officially went online in 2008, and EmNet continued installing nodes through 2010—150 in all. The sensors not only helped prevent overflows in the event of a storm but also served to detect obstructions in sewer lines that might otherwise have led to backups in residential basements.

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reventing a sewage overflow requires both resources and knowledge. Before the sensors came into use, the hydraulic models that administrators like Gilot used had to assume uniform rainfall across the whole city. But rain can be heavy on one side of South Bend and light on another—meaning that while some neighborhood sewer lines are brimming, others experience hardly any flow. With the sensors in use, Gilot’s department was able to determine that placing nine new throttle pipes in neighborhood sewers could drastically reduce overflows. Starting in 2010, EmNet began outfitting these new pipes with microprocessor-equipped valves that automatically open and close in response to real-time calculations gauging the capacity of the interceptor line they feed into. In times of heavy rainfall, the valves along sewers where the flow of stormwater and wastewater is high will automatically open; where flow is low, the valves remain closed. This creates more room in the interceptor pipe for the sewers that need it. In essence, Gilot and Montestruque had made the miles and miles of sewer pipes throughout the city into a makeshift storage tank: because the sewers with low flow aren’t at risk of overflowing, untreated water can sit in those lines—not flooding into the river, not backing up into people’s basements, and not hogging space at the treatment plant. “We captured 23% more wet-weather flow just by using the same sewer system we had, but with smart monitoring and control technology,” Gilot says. Load balancing is not always straightforward. If there is heavy rain in one part of a city but not another, the calculation might be relatively easy—but what should a system do when it’s raining everywhere? Even if the rain is concentrated in one area, it’s never certain whether the storm will move or stay in the same place. And of course, nobody wants a sewer pipe to burst from excessive pressure, especially in a populated area. Montestruque’s solution was an agent-based model in which valves at overflow diversion points “buy” capacity from the interceptor tube. The interceptor tube’s diameter varies as it goes through the city, which complicates the task of figuring out its capacity for carrying waste to the treatment plant at any given moment. The market-based approach has the advantage of being computationally simpler than trying to fully model the complicated fluid dynamics throughout the sewer system. Still, as Kerkez of the University of Michigan points out, a smart array of sensors and gauges can’t turn back

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EmNet founder Luis Montestruque (right) and first employee Tim Ruggaber by the banks of the St. John River. An automatic sewer valve actuator that adjusts flow to the treatment plant (facing page).

Cities

the clock on an aging sewer system. “Everything has a breaking point,” he says. “What real-time control has the potential to do is push the boundaries of that breaking point out further. But there’s no fail-safe solution.” Even with the improvements that Gilot had made, the sewers were still overflowing too often for the EPA’s liking—hence the 2011 consent decree. When Fahey arrived in South Bend, he inherited an optimized sewer system that was nonetheless pushing its limits. To stop overflows, the EPA was asking the city to build seven underground tanks to store excess stormwater and wastewater. Many cities with combined-sewer systems use this approach. The tanks could hold up to 8.7 million gallons; once a big storm passes by, untreated water can be pumped from the tanks into the interceptor pipe and to the treatment plant. The tanks Fahey was contemplating were expensive. What’s more, their proposed locations were based on old stormwater models predicting where overflows were bound to happen. Two large, popular parks with mature trees would have to be sacrificed.

“The community was kind of up in arms with what was being proposed,” Fahey says. “It was just not feasible in South Bend. At the same time, we are putting sewage into the river, and that’s not really allowable either.” One evening in 2016, Fahey met with Montestruque for beers at a local gastropub. Fahey was curious to see if the city could find ways to squeeze more gains out of its sensor-laden sewer system. The two of them realized that the same sensor data they had been using for real-time control of their existing sewer infrastructure could also help them plan for the future. “We said, ‘Listen, with all this data that we have, we should be able to come up with a hyperaccurate representation of how the system behaves,’” Montestruque recalls. In designing a sewer system or planning for infrastructure upgrades, engineers use models and make certain assumptions. They calculate what they think might happen based on what-if scenarios governed by dozens of variables: the amount of rainfall in a year, for example, or the amount of water that will stay in the

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O THE IDEA OF USING THE DATA IS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND JUST HOW STORMS TEND TO AFFECT THE FLOW OF WATER.

sewer system as opposed to overflowing into a river. But during the time the city has had a smart-sewer system, every kind of rainfall imaginable has fallen on South Bend. And because the sensors have been watching this happen all along, the city can look to the data to see how the sewers will react. “Instead of trying to predict what could happen, we’re able to say what did happen, and therefore what will happen again,” says Fahey. It was a municipal-scale internet of things project. With EmNet’s help, Fahey parsed the sensor readings and found that the EPA plan calling for seven tanks at a cost of $863 million could be streamlined to a four-tank plan that would cost only $276 million. Part of the reason for the large difference in cost comes back to those models. In any sewer model, Fahey says, engineers will add a bit extra to account for a leaking tank, a cracking line, a once-in-a-century storm. Eventually, so much margin is added on that the final design is far more infrastructure-heavy than necessary. Sewer network designers widely anticipate that climate change is going to make their lives tougher by increasing the frequency of intense storms. The idea of using the data is to better understand just how storms tend to affect the flow of water through the complicated system of pipes in an urban network. “The difference between the what-ifs and the what-did-happen is dollars. That’s the big thing,” Fahey says. “You’re able to save all those dollars by designing specifically to your needs, as opposed to what you think you might need.”

ver the last several years, the city of South Bend has been hashing out its new infrastructure proposal with officials at the EPA, who still need to give it federal approval. In addition to the four storage tanks, the plan also calls for green infrastructure, like rain gardens, and a promise to increase the capacity of the city’s wastewater treatment plant from its current 77 million gallons per day to 100 million gallons per day. EmNet, meanwhile, is installing sensor systems in other cities. As of this year, it had projects under way in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Its biggest project so far, after its work in South Bend, involved implementing a similar system in Kansas City, Missouri, which was also feeling the strain of an EPA consent decree. Sewer lines in Kansas City are close to 160 years old, and the local government was struggling to prevent overflows into the Missouri River. Now Kansas City’s sewers are equipped with 300 sensors, which city managers expect will save the city about $1 billion in infrastructure costs. And, like South Bend, the city is now trying to renegotiate its deal with the EPA. As populations grow, smart sensors can buy cities time until bigger pipes, bigger tubes, and bigger holes will be required. It’s not a perfect solution, of course. For one thing, introducing networked, real-time controls also means new vulnerabilities to software glitches and hacking. “You’ll never solve a problem with just smart infrastructure,” Fahey says. Still, as Fahey walked the banks of the St. Joseph River last winter, snow crunching beneath his feet, a thought was ever present in his mind. In previous years on such a day, with light snow and some melting, a few thousand gallons of untreated sewage would spill into the river. It would have been easy to see from where Fahey stood. But on that afternoon, the river was calm. It looked clean. And the sewers below weren’t rushing at all. Andrew Zaleski,a writer based near Washington, DC, covers science, technology, and business.

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PORTFOLIO

CITIES OF PEOPLE

The images on this and the following pages are part of “Unequal Scenes,” a drone photography project intended to illuminate scars in the urban fabric. By Johnny Miller

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Parts of Mumbai are among the mostly densely populated areas on the planet. In some places, more than a million people live in less than one square mile. Tightly packed buildings, largely made of gray concrete covered with blue tarps, protect against the monsoon rains.

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On the eastern side of False Bay, in suburban Cape Town, South Africa, a prosperous beachside neighborhood, the Strand (right) is set off from subsidized government housing in Nomzamo (left) by rows of informal settlements (center).

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In northwest Long Beach, California (left), houses abut storage tanks used by the many oil refineries in the area.

A pawn shop on Minnehana Avenue in Minneapolis (above) was destroyed by fire during the unrest following the killing of George Floyd.

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With more than 2 billion users, Facebook has built a global empire of wealth and influence. A homeless encampment sits in the shadow of its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

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The Moinho favela in central São Paulo is sandwiched between an overpass and railroad tracks. It has no public water, electricity, or sanitation.

GUTTER CREDIT HERE

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GUTTER CREDIT HERE

Feature headline

ANCIENT CITIES ARE MADE OF DATA

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HIGH-TECH TOOLS ARE HELPING US UNDERSTAND THE PAST.

BY ANNALEE NEWITZ ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAX-O-MATIC

CONSTRUCTION WORKERS

in New York’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood were breaking ground for a new federal building back in 1991 when they unearthed hundreds of coffins. The more they dug, the more they found—eventually uncovering nearly 500 individuals, many buried with personal items such as buttons, shells, and jewelry. Further investigation revealed that the remains were all between 200 and 300 years old, and they were all African and African-American. This discovery came at an inflection point in scientific history. Breakthroughs in chemical and genetic analysis allowed researchers to figure out where many of these people had been born, what kinds of physical challenges they faced, and even what route they took from Africa to get to North America. The site, known as the African Burial Ground, became one of the best-known archaeological

discoveries in the country and is now a national monument. Joseph Jones, an anthropologist at the College of William & Mary and one of the site’s investigators, told me that the science matured even while his team was still excavating. At the start of their dig, they analyzed skeletal remains using the same techniques that archaeologists had used for almost a century, measuring the size of bones and looking at damage to them to infer details of people’s lives. Today, though, the team is using modern techniques that previous generations of researchers only dreamed of: using lasers to slice micro-thin pieces of tooth enamel so the isotopes trapped within can be analyzed; sequencing ancient DNA to connect people who died centuries ago to their descendants. The African Burial Ground was uncovered at a moment of cultural discovery as well. Historians

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were investigating the role enslaved people played in building northern cities, while Black scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and authors like Toni Morrison were centering the roles of African-Americans in US history. Scientific analysis at the site added persuasive data to these social movements and changed the way many Americans viewed their nation’s founding. It revealed that enslaved people from Africa built many of the cities that Americans still live in today—in the North and the South. And it showed how we went from being a nomadic species that traveled in small bands to sharing tightly packed habitats with millions of other people. The African Burial Ground project was among the first to use a new constellation of “bioarchaeology” tools that went way beyond the traditional pickaxes and brushes. But this was simply the first stage of a much broader archaeological revolution that brought scientists and humanities scholars together to generate data about our ancestors. Today, researchers supplement bioarchaeology with 3D photography, lidar, satellite imagery, and more.

Cities

Sometimes called “data archaeology,” this kind of hightech exploration is well suited to the study of urban history. By using remote sensing technologies like lidar, researchers can uncover an entire city grid, giving us a better picture of what it would have been like to walk through neighborhoods and peek into shops. This kind of data makes accurate digital re-creations possible, which means historians can turn a remote, inaccessible site into something that anyone can visit online. This data democratizes history, too: scholars can now examine hundreds, if not thousands, of remains and process large data sets to gain insight into the experiences of ordinary people—not just the lucky few who owned land, emblazoned their names on monuments, or held public office.

TOOTH TELLING Data archaeology is particularly good for historians studying cities because urban places often hold the stories of immigrants who might be otherwise difficult to trace. Bioarchaeologist Michael Blakey, who has led the African Burial Ground project since the early 1990s, said

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

GROUNDPENETRATING RADAR uses highfrequency radio waves that pass through the Earth’s surface, and bounce off objects and structures below. A receiver records these patterns.

his team would never have known where people in the cemetery came from if they hadn’t been able to do several kinds of chemical analysis on their tooth enamel. Because this enamel is built up in layers as humans mature, chemists can study a cross-section of the tooth and learn what substances people were exposed to as children. It’s a bit like analyzing tree rings, where each layer of enamel represents a period of the person’s life. Immediately, they found a sharp dividing line between people born in Africa and people born in the Americas: lead. Though African civilizations worked with a range of metals, lead was almost exclusively used by Europeans, for things like pipes and pewter dishes. Anyone who had lead in childhood tooth enamel was almost certainly born locally. As the science developed, Blakey’s group also used a technique called strontium isotope analysis to learn more about where people had come from. When people eat and drink in a specific area for a long time, their teeth absorb a small amount of strontium, an element that leaches out of the rocky ground into food and

drinking water. Strontium from older landmasses has a slightly different chemical signature than strontium from newer ones, so looking at the isotopes in people’s tooth enamel lets researchers determine roughly where they lived throughout their lifetimes. Studying this, explained Blakey, allowed his team to discover that some of the people buried in modern-day New York had spent early childhoods in Africa but then lived for some time during adolescence in the Caribbean, where enslaved men were often sent for “seasoning” or, as Blakey put it, “breaking down.” The shape of diaspora was revealed in a single tooth. Archaeologists have since used this technique to explore how cities have developed throughout the world. As a result, we now know that ancient Rome was full of immigrants from across Europe and North Africa. In the Americas, archaeologists are looking at how indigenous cities like Cahokia in today’s southern Illinois were settled by people born elsewhere. Even a 9,000-year-old city like Çatalhöyük in central Turkey was populated by people who came from afar.

DNA SEQUENCING

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

ISOTOPE ANALYSIS

has revolutionized archaeology by allowing for detailed analysis of remains that can reveal a person’s family history and migration patterns. Imagine at-home genetic tests, but for bones.

involves capturing 3D information about a location or object with a range of techniques, including radar and sonar. It can also include lidar, a laser system that uses reflections to judge distance.

can trace the history of an item. By looking for chemical signatures in made objects and organic material, such as the bones at the African Burial Ground, it can determine an item’s age and provenance.

WILL U.S. TECH FIRMS FACE TAXING TIMES ABROAD? Make decisions that make a difference with the Financial Times. Read more at ft.com/newagenda

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Cities

From this research, we now understand that immigrants have been building and living in cities for as long as cities have existed. Some, like the enslaved people in New York, came against their will. Others came on their own, seeking work or a better life, the same way hopeful immigrants do today.

DODGING DAMAGE While bioarchaeological data can reveal a lot about who lived in a city, sophisticated sensor data can illuminate exactly where they lived and what kind of work they did. That’s where ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, comes into play. One of the great tragedies at many buried sites is that digging often destroys the layers in between the surface and the deepest objects—even though they may be valuable in their own right. Like traditional radar, GPR emits radio waves and measures how they bounce back in order to locate objects, shooting them at the ground to help avoid unwanted destruction. At Pompeii, for example, researchers recently used this type of radar to help target areas for exploration in a section of the city that has remained buried under ash for 2,000 years. Only two-thirds of Pompeii has been dug up over the past three centuries, and for most of that time, the job was done with pickaxes. But researchers are approaching the final third of the city with as many high-tech tools as possible. In early 2021, their care paid off: scholars uncovered a beautifully preserved bar where workers would have enjoyed a quick meal and some wine. Even more stunning was the

discovery of a rare, intact ceremonial chariot that would have been used in parades and helped model what traffic would have looked like on Roman streets. Ground-penetrating radar can also reveal multiple levels of history. A recent survey of a palatial house at Pompeii, for example, showed that it was built on the foundations of a much older building. This suggests that the neighborhood was an enclave for the wealthy even before Romans occupied the city starting around 89 BCE. A look underground revealed that workers rebuilt the house, enlarging its gardens considerably after a massive earthquake in 62 CE. According to Cornell classicist Caitlín Barrett and her colleagues, their findings “promise to rewrite the history of one of the oldest and most politically prominent neighborhoods in Pompeii.” Unfortunately, not all archaeology can be done with remote sensing. Because most cities are built in layers, with older structures gradually buried beneath the new, excavators must destroy the upper layers to reach further back in time. That’s why photogrammetry, the practice of capturing 3D information with sonar, lidar, and digital cameras, is now de rigueur at almost every major excavation site. Using these methods, researchers can record details of a structure down to the millimeter and use software to re-create them. This is especially important at sites like Çatalhöyük, where researchers must dig through an upper layer of the city to reach

older structures below. By first scanning those upper layers, scholars can make it possible to virtually revisit any structures that had to be destroyed.

VIRTUAL VISITS Data from photogrammetry also provided the backbone for the award-winning Virtual Angkor project, which re-creates the city that was the capital of Southeast Asia’s Khmer Empire for 500 years until it was sacked in 1431 CE. A collaboration between Monash University’s SensiLab, Flinders University, and the University of Texas at Austin, Virtual Angkor uses 3D scans from areas around the Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat to create breathtaking visualizations— some video, some still—of what ordinary people would have seen when they visited the city in the 1300s. Virtual Angkor was also made possible by another breakthrough in archaeological data gathering. For hundreds of years, Angkor’s layout remained hidden beneath the jungle. That changed in the early 2010s when Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the French School of the Far East, and his team used helicopter-mounted lidar to map around the temple enclosures. What they found changed the world’s understanding of this tropical city. Lidar works by bouncing laser beams off the surface of the ground and back to a receiver; the timing of those reflections indicates how far the light traveled before it hit something. It was the perfect tool for revealing the roads, house foundations, and pools that once covered the

landscape. With lidar maps, archaeologists could at last verify that Angkor had been home to nearly a million people at its height—a claim that had been widely disputed. Virtual Angkor used these maps to create a detailed grid of the city’s downtown, complete with pictures of modest neighborhoods where manual laborers and immigrants would have lived. Because these people lived in wooden houses that decomposed long ago, it was hard for past generations of archaeologists to know where—or even if—people lived in the areas surrounding Angkor’s stone palace. But thanks to the lidar surveys, today’s archaeologists can now see many hectares of neat foundations lined up along roads. Photogrammetry can tell us about the Khmer Empire’s art and architecture, but lidar tells us about the lives of the people who built this legendary metropolis. By using advanced technologies to develop new kinds of data sets, archaeologists at the African Burial Ground also centered the lives of city builders. And the isotope analysis that revealed New York’s forgotten past has also shown us the immigrants who built ancient Roman cities. When we look out over the gleaming skyscrapers and vast sprawl of today’s megacities, it’s easy to forget the old bones that lie beneath. But the more science advances, the closer we get to appreciating who built our world, and what their lives were really like. Annalee Newitz’s latest book is Four Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

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RE

Banham takes pains to refute the “common mechanistic misconception that everything in Los Angeles is caused by the automobile.” —P. 76

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Books, arts, and culture in perspective

COLIN

MARSHALL

ANDREA DAQUINO

“A humming, smoking, ever-changing contraption” How three mid-20th-century visitors saw Los Angeles as a machine.

os Angeles is vast and practically formless, a city so unlike any other that it can hardly be called a city at all. That, at least, is the impression the past few decades of writing on the Southern California metropolis has tended to offer. Hardened into received wisdom, this presumption is now repeated even by astute contemporary observers. But there’s more to LA than that tired critique suggests. To see Los Angeles clearly, one needs to go half a century into the past, when three writers came to take the measure of what was then the fastest-growing

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city in the rich world. Though each brought a distinctive and formidable stock of world experience and historical knowledge, all came to understand postwar Los Angeles by recognizing how technology gave the city both purpose and possibility. “All modern cities are machines, but LA is even more of a machine than the others … it is a humming, smoking, ever-changing contraption,” Christopher Rand wrote in his 1967 book Los Angeles: The Ultimate City, which began as a three-part series in the New Yorker. The lack of water and threat of earthquakes made this place particularly dependent on technology, he argued. Cities, since the very beginning, had relied on water management, but the complexity of LA’s water system, fed by a giant aqueduct that diverts water from the Owens Valley some 200 miles to the north, was far greater than anything that had come before. Rand also pointed out that while LA was known for the film industry, aerospace in fact dominated the city’s economy. The industry was diminished with the end of the Cold War, but decades later, SpaceX, the world’s most valuable privately held company, is based there. “As our technological force manifests itself in Los Angeles, it seems to have many questionable things about it. The aerospace industry, for instance, seems surrounded by a cloud of false publicity,” Rand wrote in 1966. The Ultimate City went out of print years ago. But Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, by the English architecture critic Reyner Banham and published in 1971, remains a fixture on “understanding Los Angeles” reading lists. Banham thought of LA as a city that “makes nonsense of history and

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies By Reyner Banham ALLEN LANE, 1971

The World: Life and Travel 1950–2000 By Jan Morris W.W. NORTON, 2005

breaks all the rules,” as he later said in a television documentary. Unlike Rand, who resented having to drive, Banham embraced the automobile. “One can most properly begin by learning the local language; and the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement,” he wrote. Therefore, “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” As stimulated by the task as Rand was irritated by it, Banham saw driving as a form of “willing acquiescence in an incredibly demanding man/machine system.” Within this system a host of “moral, governmental, commercial, and mechanical” authorities “direct the freeway driver through a situation so closely controlled” that “he will hardly notice any difference when the freeways are finally fitted with computerized automatic control systems that will take charge of the car at the on-ramp and direct it at properly regulated speeds and correctly selected routes to a preprogrammed choice of off-ramp.” But even as Banham envisioned this self-driving future, he wondered whether “the marginal gains in efficiency through automation might be offset by the psychological deprivations caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill.” Collectively these illusions constitute a kind of software, he wrote, and “however inefficiently organized, the million or so human minds at large on the freeway system at any time comprise a far greater computing capacity than could be built into any machine currently conceivable.”

Scarcely anyone in 1971, of course, could have realistically conceived of just how great an expansion of computing capacity lay ahead. More plausible to Banham than the automation of the Los Angeles freeway network was its obsolescence, given that “it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.” Another oft-repeated perception of Los Angeles holds that it was “built for the car.” For all his enthusiasm about driving, however, Banham takes pains to refute the “common mechanistic misconception that everything in Los Angeles is caused by the automobile as a way of life.” As much a historian as a critic, Banham shows how, though Los Angeles may have accommodated the private car more readily than older cities, it could do so only because of a preexisting distinction: the now-dismantled Pacific Electric and Los Angeles urban railways had already allowed it to be built out and subdivided on the mechanical rather than the human scale. “If there has to be a mechanistic interpretation,” he allows, “then it must be that the automobile and the architecture alike are the products of the Pacific Electric Railroad as a way of life.” Deeply invested in both architecture and technology, Banham had made his name almost a decade earlier with Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, a treatise on the aesthetics of European built environments as reimagined by movements like Futurism and the Bauhaus as well as by theoristpractitioners like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. This positioned him well to critique a city like Los Angeles, which was home to an architectural

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community that included European émigrés like Richard Neutra, a prominent modernist. In Banham’s estimation, Neutra “[used] the Californian opportunity to make a European dream come true.” He observes that “the lightweight steel frame, the prefabricated panels, the suspended balconies, the conspicuously advanced mechanical specification, the edgy detailing, look like an attempt to realize a purely European vision of Machine Age architecture.” “Midcentury modern” houses such as those Neutra built in Los Angeles from the 1930s through the ’60s have become objects of near fetishistic desire, with price tags to match. Others experimented further toward a distinctively Southern California architecture, whose rigor in materials and design took advantage of the area’s mild climate and the “indoor-outdoor” lifestyles it enabled. To be sure, this required architectural genius of the kind supplied by Neutra—or colleagues like Rudolph Schindler, Raphael Soriano, and Craig Ellwood, all on the cutting edge of postwar residential architecture in Los Angeles— but also an uncommon amount of knowledge, skill, and experience in engineering and construction. Nor was such skill required just to put up the houses themselves: Banham and Rand both marveled at the tools and techniques employed to carve the area’s mountainsides into level plots, though not without trepidation at the potential environmental consequences. The buildings and infrastructure of Los Angeles, as the late travel writer and historian Jan Morris saw them, embody an unusually high degree of know-how. “Remember ‘know-how’?” she asked in a 1976 essay on the city later collected in her anthology The World: Life and

HOWEVER IMPRESSIVE THE TECHNICIANS EMPLOYED BY THE FILM INDUSTRY, IT WAS AEROSPACE THAT MOST HIGHLY CONCENTRATED THE KNOW-HOW OF MID-20THCENTURY LOS ANGELES.

Travel 1950–2000. “It was one of the vogue words of the forties and fifties, now rather out of fashion. It reflected a whole climate and tone of American thought in the years of supreme American optimism. It stood for skill and experience indeed, but it also expressed the certainty that America’s particular genius, the genius for applied logic, for systems, for devices, was inexorably the herald of progress.” This spirit characterized the prosperous and innovation-minded postwar decades that Banham labeled the “Second Machine Age.” In Los Angeles, as Morris saw it in the 1970s, “the lost American faith in machines and materialism built its own astonishing monument.” Though by that time the city had a somewhat libertine reputation, Morris points out that “it was not liberty that Los Angeles cherished in its prime, or at least not absolute liberty. A spiritual culture can be anarchical, a material culture must be disciplined. Implicit to the promise of technological fulfillment was the necessity of system, and L.A. soon became a firmly ordered place.” Those early streetcar systems “drew together the scattered settlements of the time, bringing them all into cityness.” Then came the freeways, which like all complex machines challenge their users to master them. “There comes a moment,” Morris writes, “when something clicks in one’s own mechanism, and suddenly one grasps the rhythm of the freeway system, masters its tribal or ritual forms, and discovers it to be not a disruptive element at all, but a kind of computer key to the use of Los Angeles.” Having acquired that key, Morris discovers that in Los Angeles, “behind the flash and the braggadocio, solid skills and scholarship

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prosper. There are craftsmen everywhere in L.A., craftsmen in electronics, in film-making, in literature, in social science, in advertising, in fashion. Here Lockheed makes its aircraft. Here NASA makes its space shuttle orbiter.” However impressive the technicians employed by the high-profile film and television industries, it was aerospace that most highly concentrated the know-how of mid-20thcentury Los Angeles. “In theory, Los Angeles is just another American city, thousands of miles from the nation’s capital,” Rand wrote a decade earlier, “but in actuality it is itself a secondary capital, for technological warfare.” He worried that “our great new technology, with all its power to lead us along, is up to now really beyond the scrutiny and control of our democratic institutions.” The machine of the city itself has only grown larger and more complex in the decades since Rand, Banham, and Morris came to grips with how it works. There have been improvements, not least the alleviation of the smog notorious in the 1960s and ’70s. The freeways still stand, but over the past 30 years a new urban rail system has also begun to make its presence felt. Increasing density and verticality have even validated Rand’s premature-sounding observation that Los Angeles’s “preference for one-family houses seems to be on the way out.” These modifications have been performed more slowly than necessary, which is perhaps to be expected: for better or for worse, Los Angeles is no longer an experimental urban prototype. Q Colin Marshall is a writer in Seoul and the author of the Substack newsletter “Books on Cities.”

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Uncanny alleys Science fiction is reimagining cities in ways that feel both familiar and strange.

cience fiction is full of cities imagined from the S ground up, but an author who writes about a real place has to engage with real cultures and real histories. It takes a special kind of world-building skill to develop a city when its origins are already known. The Membranes, a fascinating new book out in June by Chi Ta-wei, meets this challenge. It presents metropolitan Taiwan in 2100 as utterly unfamiliar apart from its culture. In the novella, a young aesthetician named Momo dresses her clients in artificial skins that track their personal data and shield them from the elements. She is part of a “new Renaissance” of technology in T City, which is not quite future Taipei. The view from Momo’s salon reveals the difference: she can see “silver-indigo waves in the infinite depth” and “schools of cadmium yellow fish floating by in tidy regiments.” There is a “membrane” above, in the place where the reader might expect the sky to be. That’s because T City is part of New Taiwan, which contains the entire country’s population and is located on the ocean floor. Humanity has migrated to subaquatic domes to escape the lethal consequences of a vastly deteriorated ozone layer. Tremendous advances in solar power have made this shift possible, and an android underclass provides maintenance labor. Sentient but without rights, they are manufactured with organs that can be harvested by humans. Gradually, Momo grows enlightened to the oppression of androids, connecting the dots between a surgery she had as a child and the disappearance of her childhood best friend. There’s an awful lot going on in this short work: new religions form in this future world, the

ANDREA DAQUINO

CITIES IN SCI-FI

Review

Pacific Ocean territories are divided between countries like the United States and corporations like Toyota, and then there are the peculiar skin treatments at Momo’s salon. What grounds this overwhelming book is Momo’s addiction to digital media. She spends hours on dial-up bulletin board systems and the early search engine Gopher, loves laserdiscs, and pores over “discbooks” and “disczines.” The charming old-fashioned digital layer in the book clues the reader into the real-world events that inspired Chi. While the English translation is new, The Membranes was first published in 1995, just a few years after a decades-long period of martial law in Taiwan was lifted. It transformed the culture with a “sudden flood of new ideas, combined with the relative lack of statutory oversight on a whole generation of youth,” as translator Ari Larissa Heinrich explains in the afterword. Chi was part of this generation, newly trading bootleg tapes and suddenly exposed to international films, surfing the web, and delighting in media and technology. The disorienting exuberance of this period is captured in the frenetic spirit of the book: the wild future of T City was a funhouse-mirror image of Taiwan as Chi experienced it. The Membranes shows that even if a population has regrouped to a city on the floor of the ocean, its communities will continue to make history from a common past. This was a concern of N. K. Jemisin as she worked on 2020’s The City We Became. The book is set in New York City, where the author lives, but in the acknowledgments, she writes that it “required more research than all the other fantasy novels I’ve written, combined.” It wasn’t just the infrastructure and landmarks that Jemisin hoped to capture accurately,

The Membranes By Chi Ta-wei COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021

The City We Became By N.K. Jemisin ORBIT, 2020

Invisible Planets Edited by Ken Liu TOR BOOKS, 2018

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again By M. John Harrison GOLLANCZ, 2020

but the New Yorkers themselves. “Real worlds feature real peoples,” she writes. “Therefore it’s important that I not depict them in ways that disrespect or cause harm.” The City We Became found a wide and enthusiastic audience when it was released last year in the earliest days of the pandemic. It introduces superhero-like characters who act as avatars of the five boroughs of New York, both protectors and embodiments of their locations. They battle entities reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s monsters, with tentacles and “fronds,” which are manifestations of threats New Yorkers face: gentrification, racism, the police. Jemisin’s research and care paid off; the book struck a chord with readers as their own lives were radically altered. For people whose cities were experiencing a different test of resilience amid the covid-19 crisis, its characters felt true. One way that science fiction authors have avoided research like Jemisin’s is by presenting familiar cities that are empty besides a handful of survivors. I Am Legend, the 1954 post-apocalyptic classic by Richard Matheson, is set in a Los Angeles that is recognizable by its geography and street names, but a pandemic has mutated its people— with the exception of one man— into shadow-dwelling vampires. The novel, an enormous influence on modern zombie horror, channels Atomic Age anxiety by depicting formerly bustling neighborhoods as newly desolate. The last man on earth, Robert Neville, rarely leaves his elaborately fortified house. Instead, he lives a cozy life, listening to piano concertos and drinking alone. There’s no coordinated disaster response in the novel. He doesn’t have to collaborate or negotiate with his neighbors on supply runs.

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As he begins experimenting on the vampires to discover the origins of the disease, I Am Legend poses a thought-provoking question: Is Richard the real monster in this new society? It is suspenseful and deservedly considered a classic, but Matheson offers no real sense of place. The other people have been stripped of their history and are little but bloodthirsty mutants; their motivations and interests are predictable and the culture of the city has no bearing on them. Decades earlier, the polymath W.E.B. Du Bois took a rare stab at writing fiction to show how social hierarchies in a city can outlive its own people. His 1920 short story “The Comet,” written in the wake of the flu pandemic, depicts a near extinction event in New York City. A Black man survives, and for the first time in his life, he is able to visit a restaurant on Fifth Avenue without worry. Jim fills his plate in the empty building, thinking, “Yesterday, they would not have served me.” The city of Los Angeles in I Am Legend could be anywhere, but New York is clearly New York in “The Comet.” In just that line, Du Bois provides a snapshot of what life used to be like before the Fifth Avenue restaurant was abandoned. As Jim continues his journey, he comes into contact with a handful of other survivors and finds out that racism did not die when the event took place— and that it will, in fact, persist to the end of the world. Present-day concerns about inequality shape how cities are represented in recent fiction, too. Folding Beijing, a novella by Hao Jingfang that was recently published in the anthology Invisible Planets, imagines the capital of China as controlled by a technical marvel: three classes of people are segmented in physical structures that rise up or

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CITIES IN SCI-FI

retract below ground depending on the time of day. A minority live in the “First Space” and enjoy the most hours on the surface, while a middle class lives in the “Second Space.” But the majority of the city are the laborers and maintenance workers in the “Third Space,” who experience Beijing only from the hours of 10 o’clock at night to six in the morning. Movement between these partitioned classes is strictly regulated, and the ruthlessness of the architecture is reminiscent of the movie Snowpiercer, where there is a divide between luxury train cars for the elite and those who live in squalor in the caboose. When Lao Dao, part of the Third Space, needs money for his child’s kindergarten tuition, he takes on a job smuggling a love letter from a man in Second Space to a woman in First Space. The gig is risky and highly unusual, given how little cross-class interaction happens in the city. The adventure Lao Dao undertakes—sneaking into trash chutes and crawling onto the city’s rotating parts—is representative of the actual hurdles in Beijing society as Jingfang sees it. Beijing is “divided into multiple groups,” the author told Uncanny magazine, where the story was published in 2015. These groups rarely meet, she said, and they have “completely different lifestyles, habits, and socializing spaces.” M. John Harrison’s “The Crisis” is about another architected division of three classes. In the story, London is split between people with homes and those who live on the street, and again divided between human beings and a spectral race of aliens that has claimed the Square Mile as its own. The iGhetti, as they are known, resemble “stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb” when visible. They are “neither a

BY BLENDING REAL PLACES WITH STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES, ALL THESE NOVELS AND STORIES OFFER SOLACE FOR THOSE OF US WHO FEEL SIMILARLY ALIENATED BY THE CITIES THAT WE CALL HOME.

thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world.” Balker, who used to sleep in a doorway behind the British Museum, is rounded up by an unknown official and given a clean bed in the heart of the iGhetti’s lair. He’s now a canary to test whether humans might safely cohabitate with the silent invaders. Another Londoner who lives in a comfortable flat forges a relationship with Balker, and attempts to grapple with the different ways they experience the city. The story appears in Harrison’s career retrospective collection, Settling the World, which was released last year. An early draft was published to Harrison’s blog in 2013 with the title “Welcome to the middle classes.” Several years later, its sting feels especially sharp given the stark divide in cities between essential workers and those who worked from home through the covid-19 crisis. Harrison’s most recent novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is also largely set in London, and it was also released last year, becoming a breakout hit that won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize. The book captures an era, like The Membranes, and is just as tricky to summarize. This novel about misread signals and confusing relationships connected with readers in part because it was published, like The City We Became, at a time when real cities felt uncanny to their residents. New York, as Jemisin depicts it, is a tense new metropolis on stolen land. London, in Harrison’s novel, is so old that its history can seem as though it comes from an entirely different land. He renders the city beautifully, as a place where neighborhoods have strange auras and the meanings of various landmarks have

faded over centuries. But where the confused state of the characters in The Membranes is exhilarating—an expression of liberation—the confusion in The Sunken Land is laced with melancholy and estrangement, since it follows political retrenchment and division. After Brexit, what even is this place that they call home? And who are these other people in it? The Sunken Land introduces Shaw, a man in his 50s living in Wharf Terrace, a neighborhood without a wharf and “no evidence there had ever been one.” His mother has dementia and he has no other family. The woman he is dating has just left London for the provinces. In his crummy studio, his solitude is regularly disturbed by the sounds of strangers down the hall. Shaw takes a job off the books with a conspiracy theorist, and one of the plots his boss peddles is that there are little green humanoid creatures in the water. The notion is so absurd and unlikely that eerie phenomena which might confirm it fail to register with Shaw. He has the sensible expectations of a man who must have thought Brexit would never happen, until it did. The Membranes, with its subaquatic setting, found a place as alien as life gets on planet Earth. The green creatures in The Sunken Land, on the other hand, conjure up the visceral fright of something slithering and unfamiliar brushing past your skin when you enter a lake. By blending real places with strange circumstances, all these novels and stories offer solace for those of us who feel similarly alienated by the cities that we call home. Q Joanne McNeil is the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User.

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Fiction

BY TIM MAUGHAN ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMILY LUONG

SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS: UNSPLASH

T

hey drilled a hole in my skull on the 43rd floor of an empty skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. One of those towers where they told people to go and work from home and they never came back. Floor-to-ceiling windows, beige and white walls, spaces that felt impossibly big now that the cubicle dividers have vanished. One of those places where somebody pays to keep the lights on all night, every night, desperately trying to convince the world outside that this all still matters. When I googled the place, I got the usual stories of illicit high-rise raves, the usual lifestyle content from the usual young influencers—sorry, creators: photos of them dancing, wide-eyed and ecstatic, rich off selling their own lives, silhouetted against the dawn sun creeping up over the Brooklyn skyline. But when I got inside, it was just startups squatting in random corners, and a bored security guard who scanned my face and the temperature of my skin before silently pointing me toward the elevator. They drilled the hole in my skull in a medical tent squeezed into what used to be a server room. There were empty racks still bolted to the walls. They walked me in and laid me down, face first, on what I’m pretty sure was just a massage table, and fed me into a surgical robot that looked like a giant sewing machine. There wasn’t much else in there: a couple of laptops hooked up to a big touchscreen, an industrial air scrubber. Everything was plumbed into a mess of power and network cables that disappeared up into square black holes left by displaced polystyrene ceiling tiles. I only saw this briefly, but I remember it, because

I remember being surprised there was no roof to the medical tent. It was literally a façade. The last thing I saw was the scuffed vinyl floor, through that hole in the massage table, as they gave me the anesthetic and one of the technicians counted down from 10. I didn’t make it past 6. Then I was awake again, sitting up in a wheelchair looking out over that influencer view of Brooklyn, as they shined an LED light in my eyes and checked my reflexes. They gave me a Gatorade and a Kind bar and made me read some news stories out loud from an iPad while they squinted at my reactions on the laptop. A couple of hours later they made me get up and walk around, and as soon as they were happy I wasn’t going to have a seizure they gave me a blister pack of antibiotics and put me in an Uber home, which made me laugh. They paid for it, obviously. There’s no way they would have got the irony. As if on cue, my phone decided I was hungry. It

pushed a map of the surrounding neighborhood to the front of the screen. Places I didn’t recognize, or at least hadn’t eaten in for a couple of years, were highlighted with slowly pulsating pale blue dots. Two Chipotles, a gyro truck, some taco place I had a vague memory of, a soup and sandwich joint that actually looked new, and of course a Whole Foods Go. All of them were Amazon affiliates. I sat in the front of the truck and thought about how I was going to have learn the city all over again, build myself up a new mental map of places I could easily go, lunches I could afford to eat. Or maybe I didn’t need to bother. Maybe I could just let my phone and the data brokers take care of it all.

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A week earlier, my phone would have recommended the diner across the road, the one I was staring numbly at through the windshield. It would have known I was heading for it as soon as I turned onto this block, and then probably tried to distract me with coupon codes for some other, competing Uber-affiliated place. Now, it knew better. It knew going in there would be futile and painful and awkward. And, most important, it knew that going in there would be expensive. I didn’t belong in there anymore. My phone was coming to terms with my changing life a lot easier than I was. It throbbed again, pushed something else to its screen. A text from Nakisha: where r u? everyone’s here! I started to compose a reply but stopped myself. It was pointless—I had nothing to say. Plus, if I did, it’d be weird to text it, when I could just cross the road and walk into the diner and say it to her face. She was in there right now, with a bunch of other Uber drivers. We used to try to come here at least once a month, just to catch up and hang, chat shit and bitch about how fucked everything was. If I was honest, it was always a little tough for me—being around people felt like a struggle at the best of times—but this was more about not being able to face any more goodbyes. I stared at the diner some more, guessing who would be inside. I tried to hold their faces in my mind, but one by one they all slipped away from me, lost in the anonymous crowd. It was always there, a shuffling horde of familiar faces dissolved into vague, generic sketches. Friends, family, acquaintances, forever on the edge of my peripheral vision. Faces lost to me, swept away by the waves of sickness, death, change, and hard economics that had emptied out the city I once knew. Faces it was a whole lot easier to just let fade away than to try and find again, or to mourn. Nakisha’s face didn’t fade, though, as hard as I tried to push it away, as much as I wanted it to be absorbed into the crowd. Let me make this clear now, though, to avoid any misunderstanding: there was never any hint of romance there. No unrequited this, no flirtatious that. There was no obsession, not from me. Just fear and awkwardness, and above all selfish guilt at not being able to accept genuine kindness and friendship, because I knew that one day they would also be ripped away. I hadn’t told anybody in there that I’d switched, not even Nakisha, and I was feeling pretty shitty about it. I’d met her when I’d started

Cities

driving deliveries for Uber, just after Mayor Yang got elected. He’d swept in with a 1.7% lead over the other guy, which is what Americans call a landslide now, on a promise to solve New York City like a math problem. He’d promised everyone they’d get some money from the city every month to help us rebuild our lives and then, after the pandemic, from his Universal Basic Income experiment. But you can’t solve a math problem if you don’t know the numbers, and Yang didn’t get to see them until he was in City Hall, and then it was suddenly very clear that they didn’t quite add up. So he had to turn to the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, the rest of them—to help him keep his promise. So it was decided: you could take your measly token UBI payments from the city, or you could sign up with one of the tech giants and get a little more out of them. The big catch was that the companies didn’t even have to pay you in US dollars, so instead every month you got a little deposit of crypto into the wallet you had to install on your phone. Amazon Coin. ApplePay. FB Libra. Google Play Credits. It seemed complicated, but you only really needed to remember one thing: you’d better spend as much as your UBI with the company you signed up with—or its affiliates—because it went a lot further there. I mean, real numbers: we’re talking the kind of savings that not only meant you might make rent that month but made the poor old US dollar look worthless. Which was why I’d just switched—the owners of my apartment building had just flipped to being Amazon affiliates, which meant that if I continued paying with Uber Money I’d lose the discounts that meant I could afford to live there. I stared at the diner, then back at the map dots on my phone, still pulsing blue as if they were trying to wake me up to the brutal truth. Forget this place. There’s nothing for you here. You don’t even have the right money. The people inside have no connection to you anymore. You’re not one of them. Time to move on. I tapped its screen off, started the truck, and pulled away from the curb. One week later and I was back on the abandoned

43rd floor, for a “calibration and orientation appointment.” Same server room, but the medical tent was gone, and instead I was sitting at a desk that looked like something hastily dragged in from some abandoned reception.

Fiction

They’d given me the iPad again. It was playing a seemingly random montage of images and clips—news headlines, Beyoncé videos, Tom Brady winning yet another Super Bowl, influencers smiling in pristine kitchens, a cat knocking pens off a desk, a cheeseburger. America. “Well, everything looks great,” the technician said, peering at me from over one of the laptops. “The implant seems to have taken root nicely. Getting a nice clear signal back—really clean, visible spikes.” “Great,” I said, as though I understood her. “So what’s it look like in there?” She almost laughed. “Well, I can’t tell you that exactly. But I can tell you’re probably pretty hungry right now, and you’re not much of a Patriots fan.” She showed me a QR code, which I scanned with my phone, which made it install an app, which then showed me how to pair it with the implant. It was apparently no bigger than a grain of rice—she kept saying this, no bigger than a grain of rice, like it had been drummed into her by a marketing agency—and was wedged into the tiny hole the robot had drilled in my skull last week. Now it was sitting there, the skin grown back over the top of it, little hair-like sensors nudging the surface of my brain, waiting and watching for my dopamine levels to spike. “There’s a lot of mythology around dopamine and what it does, and to be honest—like most things in the brain—we’re not completely sure how it works,” she told me, as I prodded around the app on my phone screen. “But put simply: by watching how and when it spikes, we can tell when you like something. Or at least we can tell when something makes you feel happy or fulfilled.” “And that’s going to give me an edge with the data brokers?” “That’s the plan, yeah. We record your dopamine levels. They get sent to Amazon alongside your usual everyday data footprint. Sync them up and we can see what’s really important to you, what makes you happy.” She sighed, sank back in her chair slightly. “These companies, Amazon and Facebook … they can take all the data they want now, but it doesn’t make it any easier to understand. They’re making assumptions about your behavior based on pattern matching and educated guesses. That’s really all machine learning is. But this—this is different. This is real. It’s actual correlation. It’s real insight. And that makes you

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—and your data—uniquely valuable. Hopefully we can get you a bit of extra coin.” I stared past her and out through the windows. My head was full of thoughts: first the beautiful lifestyle influencers and high-rise raves, and then the possibility that I might make rent this month, and the app made my phone vibrate gently in my hand. They told me to get out in the city, to enjoy myself.

To see as much as possible. That’s why they’d been recruiting gig workers—drivers and deliverers: they needed a test population that was mobile, at a time when everyone else was still mainly working from home. They wanted to build a map of the new city, a guide to NYC’s greatest dopamine spikes. The problem was I didn’t know which new city they meant. The Uber-affiliated city or the Amazon-affiliated one? The city of gig workers or the city of high-rise ravers? I guessed they meant the city that never sleeps, the city with a rough exterior but a heart of gold. But I was still stuck in the city where I’d heard nothing but ambulances and birdsong for four months, where the NYPD crushed spirits and skulls to remind us who was in charge, where we all sheltered in place, scared to leave our apartments. All I could see was the city where we let 50,000 people die and never paused to mourn them. I didn’t know which city they meant, but I started to suspect I hated all of them. For the first few days I was convinced the implant wasn’t working. Either that or it was my phone, an aging Samsung that had become even more sluggish after I’d switched. Now every third notification was an ad trying to get me to upgrade to the latest Kindle model, Amazon’s ecosystem reaching out to assimilate me even further. The app was meant to give me a notification every time I had a dopamine spike, but there was nothing, and I kept finding myself obsessively checking that the two were paired properly. Everything looked fine. It was supposedly calibrated so that it didn’t go off when routine activities gave me a minor hit—like taking a shit or dropping a package off on time. Maybe the calibration was off. Or maybe I just didn’t like anything anymore. I put in a support ticket, but they got back to me saying the data feed looked fine, and I should just push myself a little harder—take some time to go find things I already knew I liked. Which I

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tried—even taking the kind of route deviations that pissed off Amazon’s driver management AIs just so I could check out some spot from the past. Some graffiti mural down in the Village, that one coffee place on Washington Square Park, the view back to Manhattan from DUMBO. I even tried wasting coins in non-affiliated food places I really couldn’t afford—cannoli and an espresso on Spring, falafel from Mamoun’s, a slice from Joe’s. Nothing. My phone sat there, unmoved, only buzzing to tell me I was running late for a drop-off, and that it was docking my payments. And then it hit me, when I was sitting in the truck watching some kids shooting hoops and eating a too-expensive chopped cheese hero from a Facebook-affiliated bodega. I turned to the empty passenger seat to say something to somebody who wasn’t there. I caught myself doing it over and over again. I’d reach out to touch their arm to bring their attention to something, or feel the muscle memory of taking their hand as we stared at the view. I’d eat a plate of food and load up a perfect bite on my fork to carefully feed to somebody, one hand gingerly hovering below to catch falling crumbs, so I could watch the smile spread over their face as they chewed it. I even found myself taking photos before realizing I had nobody to share them with beyond Amazon’s ad-tech algorithms or whoever might still be following my long-neglected Instagram feed. The implant was fine; it was me that was unpaired. I’d fallen out of sync with the city, and I hated it for taking people away from me and leaving me on my own. It’s safest to stay indoors: stay home. It’s the only

way you can avoid the awkwardness, the disappointment, the fear. Delete Netflix and Uber Eats, install Prime Video and Amazon Restaurants. Stay at home and build your own city, make your own dopamine map. What’s the point of being lonely if you can’t do it by yourself? At first, I tried to watch only movies set in New York, as though that had some significance. So the Avengers movies seemed a good place to start. I thought maybe watching the city being repeatedly reduced to rubble at a whim—endless computergenerated buildings demolished into nothing more than Technicolor pixel dust—might give me the hits I needed. But the app barely registered a spike for the first two hours and 22 minutes.

Cities

It wasn’t until I got to the post-credits scene— the one where the whole team is sitting around, silently eating, in some nameless, unaffiliated NYC shawarma joint—that my phone started to vibrate. I’m not going to lie: for a fleeting moment I was ecstatic. I couldn’t tell you if it was just the dopamine spike or some joyful relief that the app had actually registered it. I rewound the scene and watched it again. Same spike, but with a slightly lower peak, according to the app. Third time was similar, but the results diminished again. Time to find more content. At first I thought I’d have to watch whole movies for it to have the same impact—like I needed to build up some sense of connection with or investment in the characters before their friendships had any personal weight—and started earnestly slogging through the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But a YouTube fluke showed me otherwise. Before I could stop it, autoplay served me a clip from Ant-Man and the Wasp where Ant-Man is playing with his daughter, and my phone vibrated in my lap. Repeatedly. It was a fucking revelation. I didn’t even have to sit through countless rubble-cities and the eternal melodrama and the endless wisecracking and the infinite polygons. Context was dead: all that mattered was fleeting, calculated emotional spikes. It’s not hard to find the content once you know where to look. Listicles are your guide—the real maps to dopamine city are called things like “The 10 Most Heartwarming Moments in the MCU” or “The MCU’s 12 Best Friendships” or “Relive These Feel-Good Moments from the MCU.” Start by searching Tumblr and Screen Rant and you’ll find them all. It’s even better and more efficient if they give you the time stamps. Tony and James sniping at each other in Iron Man (00:10:42). Nick Fury buddy-copping with Carol in Captain Marvel (01:48:07). Peter Parker and Ned Leeds in whichever Spider-Man movie that was (00:23:38). And then there’s the death scenes, which are perfect if you’ve also got some unresolved societal-level mourning to work through. When Killmonger dies in Black Panther. When Quicksilver dies in Age of Ultron. Spider-Man in Infinity War. Peggy in Winter Soldier. When Groot says “We are Groot” in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. After a while, of course, you don’t need to search it out; it finds you. Before too long, every ad on every web page was screaming at me about young-adult-oriented TV shows I never knew

Fiction

existed and Star Wars spin-off cartoons. My YouTube recommendations filled up with nothing but fan-edited compilations of superheroes weeping, or supercuts of every time Frodo and Sam hugged. There was this whole culture I’d avoided, that I thought I was somehow above, that wasn’t for me. An entire industry built to serve up comforting dopamine hits to a population wracked by technologically mediated loneliness, and exhausted by a society that felt like it was in constant, confusing collapse. People just like me, millions of us, PTSD victims refusing to mourn those dead or left behind, and resigned to being steamrolled by the decades of unease and disappointment still to come, as long as we could tap a screen to get a proxy emotion on demand, as if it were an Uber.

I’d been looping a fan edit of every furtive look

between Anakin and Padme for four hours straight when the recall notification came through. I couldn’t ignore it—it paused everything else on my phone and splashed a message across the screen. Bright white text on blue, telling me how the implant was being deactivated immediately and explaining how I should contact the installers to have it removed. That was followed by a reminder that I was still under an NDA and that talking to the media about any of this could lead to legal action. My first reaction was panic. Big “How the fuck can they take this away from me” energy. I’d just got this together. I finally had some structure, something that worked. My hand went to the implant scar on my skull—it was little more than a small bump now, but it felt hard at its center, and weirdly hot? I slumped back on the couch, pulled up Gamora’s death from Infinity War on the TV, let it run, hoping it would calm me. But the anxiety didn’t fade away as usual. It seemed to dwell there, growing, behind my eyes and in the back of my jaw. I stared at the phone in my hand, waiting for the confirmation I needed, but it was lifeless, unmoving.

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put me under. “You know how much work we had trying to set the filters so they didn’t register a spike whenever someone jerked off? We basically burned a whole round of funding on discovering that—guess what—people like porn.” “And then there’s the people like you,” she said. “Me people like mean what,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open. “People that get hooked into the feedback loop. Where they’re chasing spikes on the app, not what they actually find rewarding. I mean, it makes perfect sense when you think about it, bu—” Then I was awake again, sitting in the wheelchair,

staring out toward Brooklyn. I sipped Gatorade and nibbled on a Kind bar while I watched them deposit enough Amazon Coin in my wallet to cover rent for at least four months. It was hush money, basically—payment for signing a waiver that said I would never sue them or talk about any of this to the media and rival affiliates. They ordered me an Uber as soon as I felt I could walk, and on the way to the elevator I stopped and snapped a photo of the view on my phone. The city was laid out like a map in front of me, more inviting than I’d seen it in years. I was transfixed. Watching it felt as though a pressure had been lifted. There was so much still to do, but a start had been made. Halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, sunlight strobing through its towering structure, I reached for my phone and pulled my gaze away from the Uber’s windows. In silence I deleted the Prime Video and Disney apps, and wiped my YouTube history. I pulled up the photo from the 43rd floor and stared at it again. On some unexplained whim, I texted it to Nakisha. Some minutes passed. My phone buzzed. –whoooa, where the fuck are u? –ha, long story. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. –try me. what about the diner, thursday? My hand trembled. I forced myself to breathe, scared more of the screen than the city outside for the first time in as long as I could remember. –sure, see you there

They took the implant out on the 43rd floor, in

the same server room, in the same medical tent where they drilled a hole in my skull. “Between you and me, it was always a fucking stupid idea,” the technician told me before she

Tim Maughan is a journalist and author. His first novel, Infinite Detail, was shortlisted for a 2020 Locus award for best debut and chosen as the Guardian’s best science fiction book of the year.

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The back page

The city inside our heads

What is the ideal urban environment? Throughout the decades the idea has proved to be fertile imaginative ground.

MARCH 1941

JANUARY 1968

JULY 1982

From “Sir Thomas Gresham’s Picture”: The

From “The Possible City”: We can expect metropolis to be the normal environment of the future: the realized desire of those seeking space, better services, and a home of their own. Present estimates are that 80 percent of our population will live in such regions by the year 2000 and that the largest of these will coalesce into four giant regions—on the Atlantic seaboard, along the lower Great Lakes, in Florida, and in California. The horror of critics is unjustified: It doesn’t “eat up” land, nor will it cause the end of civilization. It frees large areas for rural and recreational uses. Urbanization can in fact be turned to our advantage—can be but may not be. Metropolis has serious problems. Social groups are increasingly segregated. There is a lack of diversity. If you have no car, you are stranded. But none of these difficulties is inherent in the metropolitan form.

From “Design as if People Mattered”: In 1970,

solution to the problem of replanning whole cities is of course very difficult; may be in the greatest sense beyond the capacities of man. To do so demands very close study of postwar needs. It means a government of sufficient good will to do the necessary. It means that planners must be very close indeed to that government so that when the great flood of rebuilding commences, it can proceed with an ordered program. Cities have undergone a spectacular breakdown. The physical destruction offers opportunity for wholesome reconstruction. If this is not done, we may all too soon return, and once and for all, to the fate described by Hobbes, with “no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

I formed a small research group, and began looking at city spaces—to learn why some work for people, and some do not. The project began by looking at New York City parks. One of the first things that struck us was the lack of crowding. A few were jammed, but more were near empty. Sheer space, obviously, was not itself attracting children. Many streets were. It is often assumed that children play in the street because they lack playground space. But many children play in the streets because they like to. One of the best areas we came across was a block on 101st Street in East Harlem. Adjoining stoops and fire escapes provided prime viewing and were highly functional for mothers and older people. Though we did not know it then, this block had within it all the basic elements of a successful urban place.

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