There are plenty of initiatives afoot to apply data-driven technology to cities, with the goal of making them more efficient — the Smart Cities program being a prime example. But what if we rethought the (currently haphazard) management of cities and instead re-imagined them as products of software engineering?
One of the key aspects to keeping cities up and running is finding a way to get problems — be they with roads, buildings, medical emergencies, etc. — reported, and subsequently dealt with as quickly as possible. We create municipal authorities, charge them with handling specific types of issues, and then enable the public to keep them up-to-date on what’s happening. Recently, programs like 311 and FixMyStreet have sprung up to facilitate that communication — they make it easier to tell information about a problem to someone who can fix it.[SButtonZ button="digg"]
But there may be a better way. While 311 is useful, it’s limited — you call to report something, you get directed to some bureaucratic office, and your complaint gets put in someone’s “To Do” pile. So what about a way to streamline the process, where the public, the municipal authorities, and all other interested parties are kept up-to-date on what problems exist, and how they’re being fixed? Adam Greenfield at Urban Omnibus explains:
Technology entrepreneur Jyri Engeström has suggested stealing a page from the practice of software development as a way of addressing shared problem spaces more generally. This got me thinking about an issue-tracking board for cities – in which each complaint receives a unique identifier, a space to characterize it more fully, and the name of the party responsible for addressing it.
This kind of urban issue-tracking board would have to be visual and Web-friendly, simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing. The issue-tracking board would provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. It would display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. It would use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:
(a) Scale. How many people are affected by the issue? Does this concern just me, me and my immediate neighbors, our whole block, the neighborhood, or the entire city?
(b) Severity. How serious is the issue? In descending order, will it result in imminent loss of life, injury or the destruction of property? Is this, rather, an aesthetic hazard, or even simply a suggestion for improvement?
(c) Urgency. How long has the tag been open?
In fact, with the right framework, Greenfield argues, we might be able to create a sort-of operating system for cities — a system that closes the loop between the “eyes on the street,” the problems they spot, and the authorities charged with responding to them. It could have features like a prioritization algorithm, an open-ticket system that will incentivize speedier action (think the tickets you file to the IT guys in your office) and even a layer of data analytics and visualization. Plus there’s the possibility of eventual automation of the problem-reporting process — think streets that tell you when a new pothole is forming. After all, they don’t call it “intelligent infrastructure” for nothing.
‘Streets that tell you when a new pothole is forming” is a technological solution that will end up as the equivalent of crying wolf: when you have a system that over reports faults, people learn not to pay attention to any of them. Besides, the system as it stands now allows faults to be reported; it is the response that may be lacking. The same goes for being kept up to date on the status of a problem – knowing this does not necessarily mean that the problem will be dealt with any quicker of more effectively.
If the streets are falling apart then the solution is to stop the streets from falling apart in the first place, or at least slow the process down. If the streets aren’t being repaired quickly enough (by someone’s measure), then the solution is to get enough crews out there to quickly repair the streets. Neglecting the cost implications, this does sound simple doesn’t it?
To make the management of a city truly open-source, the solutions to issues would not be left to bureucrats. For instance, a citizen can correct a problem much faster than government: http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-real-public-service/ . DIY urbanism is going to usurp bureacracies simply because it can get things done faster: http://la.streetsblog.org/2010/03/18/caution-please-pass-with-care/ and http://la.streetsblog.org/2009/12/07/d-i-y-strikes-again-sharrows-appear-in-east-l-a/ . Quick, cheap, temporary projects that can be accomplished relatively quickly that can later be made permanent if they work – those are the kinds of projects an open-source city will use to make life better for its citizens by its citizens, no bureucrats needed.
Dave,
Sounds like the infrastructure equivalent of vigilantes.
The idea that individual citizens are going to take over fixing potholes, removing dead street trees and fixing up (or tearing down) city-owned abandoned properties is patently absurd. The only reason that cities can not keep up with all of the physical problems that plague them is that tax payers are not interested in footing the bill for the number of workers needed to do the fixing. So why would the people who want don’t want to make monetary sacrifices to solve the problems they complain about instead decide to rent heavy equipment and mess around with hot asphalt? How is creating a system to let the bureaucracies know that 17 people are mad about a pothole going to fund the people needed to fix the pothole? With a limited pot of money for all city services, fixing more physical problems will result in cutting back or eliminating the services that don’t show up on the map – activities for kids in public parks, senior centers, libraries open on a regular basis etc.
I do think that people want to help make their cities better, maybe not by renting bulldozers and filling potholes, but there are other ways. Identifying problems with tools like seeclickfix can save money because the city doesn’t have to hire people to find the problems (e.g. locate the potholes), admittedly this is a small amount of money, and, it requires that the city adapt to the new technology, but it’s a start.
Furthermore, by involving citizens in the process of making their city better, these citizens also learn more about how cities work. This could help increase their willingness to pay taxes or to provide political support for ideas that could help provide city services more efficiently. (A big reason why measures for improving public transport efficiency are not implemented is the lack of political support … bus riders don’t show up at city hall but auto drivers are very well represented.)
Maybe these ideas are pie-in-the-sky, but what’s the alternative?
a trouble ticket system that is more open to the public would be a good idea — you just have to convince the city it’s a good idea. but that’s all we’re talking about here — not running the city ‘like software’ or any of the other lofty statements.