The Complete Studio X X-Cities

Last spring, Anthony Townsend and I hosted “X-Cities,” a series of talks at Columbia University’s Studio-X devoted to the thorny issue of “smart cities.” Four of the five talks (the fourth installment wasn’t recorded) are posted below for your viewing convenience. Perhaps we’ll resurrect the format at a later date.

X-Cities 1: Making the Case for Smart

Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series “X-Cities,” where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair will lay out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of “smart cities” versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced “civic laboratories.” Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?

Lindsay and Townsend will also lay the groundwork for future X-Cities sessions this spring, which feature a stellar list of participants responding to questions on how the relationship between cities and government is being reshaped by ubiquitous computing, what role the private sector will play, how smart technology might redesign the physical fabric of the city, and what the limits on data sharing in tomorrow’s open cities should be.

X-Cities 2: My Life Inside Big Data: Power Struggles in Information Security, Open Government, and the Real Time Milieu

In the past decade we’ve cycled from an Orwellian response to 9/11, locking down public data access, to an open data movement that promises to transform government. In both cases cities have been at the nexus of discussion and policy. Now we are on the precipice of another shift in the data landscape with the emergence of pervasive real time sensors, arriving in the form of mobile devices.

Special guest Sean Gorman, founder of GeoIQ, will cover his voyage through these shifts - from navigating the threat of university collected open data being classified by the government, to starting an open data crowdsourcing site funded by the government, and then to trading beer for data in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. What kinds of scenarios will the new streams of data emerging from mobile devices and social media create, and what will their impact be on the city?

Sean Gorman is the founder of GeoIQ, a collaborative web platform for geographic data analysis. Previously he was in academia as a research professor at George Mason University and before that a graduate student at the University of Florida. In between he worked for startups in the DC area building online communities, providing Geo-IP location, and mapping telecom infrastructure.

X-Cities 3: Heavy Weather

With apologies to Winston Churchill, first we define the application stack of smart cities, and thereafter they stack us. How will the demands of citizens shape the deployment of urban systems, and how will the capabilities and limitations of these systems, in turn, reshape cities? With short presentations followed by a lively discussion, special guests Guru Banavar of IBM and Leif Percifeld, creator of DontFlush.Me, will help us compare and contrast radically different approaches to questions surrounding the governance of intelligent infrastructure.

As VP and CTO of IBM’s Global Public Sector, Dr. Guru Banavar has been at the forefront of IBM’s efforts to create smarter, more sustainable cities. On the heels of the severe weather events in Rio in 2010, Dr. Banavar led a collaboration that resulted in the creation of the city’s operations center — a command center that integrates and interconnects information from over 30 government departments and public agencies in the municipality to improve emergency response management, deliver better city services, and enhance the quality of life for the citizens of Rio.

Following Dr. Banavar’s insights into IBM’s collaboration with the City of Rio, technologist and designer Leif Percifeld of the Public Laboratory will discuss his involvement in projects that encourage citizen participation and information collection around urban infrastructure and environmental issues, including DontFlush.Me, a lightweight sensor network aimed at preventing Combined Sewer Overflows during downpours, and the Air Quality Egg, a community-driven air quality data-gathering project.

X-Cities 4: Cities-as-a-Service — Songdo, PlanIT Valley, and Public/Private Partnerships for Everyday Life

If, as Cisco suggests, the “network is the next utility,” then are smart cities the next great natural monopoly? With the world’s governments living austerely for the foreseeable future, it seems as though it will fall to private actors to finance the estimated $350 trillion needed to build, maintain, and operate the world’s cities over the next forty years. This has led to smart cities experiments such as Songdo IBD (pictured above) and PlanIT Valley — experimental prototype cities of tomorrow developed by commercial entities and paid for with investors’ money.

In return, both cities hope to develop for-profit services that residents will happily pay for — apps for everyday life.
Joining us to discuss the creation of such services is Living PlanIT EVP Eric Brisson and FiTech Consultants managing partner Ian Marlow. Brisson joined Living PlanIT in 2011, as their executive vice president of Product Marketing overseeing the development of new products and solutions. Marlow has spent the past three years advising Songdo developer Gale International on the design, development, and strategy of the technology needed to service and manage the largest private real estate development project in the world (at an estimate price of $35 billion).

X-Cities 5: Apps That Engage: Building Better Interfaces for Smart Cities

While corporations code invisible new urban operating systems to automate energy and traffic networks, city governments and citizen-developers face the far more daunting task of designing engaging interfaces that connect citizens to government, each other and the built environment. Early efforts simply opened up a hodge podge of existing city database to developers, as cities went on a fishing expedition for apps. The results were not impressive. Now, they are getting smarter and commissioning more targeted projects that address real citizen needs and support broader policy agendas.

Joining us to explore this rapidly expanding design space, as computing moves off the desktop and into the streets, are Hana Schank, Principal at Collective User Experience, and Jake Barton, founder of museum and public space design firm Local Projects. We’ll be discussing Schank’s recent critique of city-sponsored technology projects in New York, as well as Barton’s recent efforts to beef up the Big Apple’s citizen-centered capabilities.