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Technology has an incredible impact on how we interact with our cities.
By John Tolva, Chief Technology Officer, City of Chicago - October 10, 2013
For our 2013 Annual Luncheon blog series, we're discussing "Accelerating Change"—the theme of this year's Annual Luncheon. Experts from outside and inside MPC will bring their thoughts to the table on how technology is helping our cities meet the challenges and opportunities facing them today and tomorrow.
There’s been much written about “smart” cities in recent years. Forward-thinking municipal governments are using—or want to use—technology and data to better manage their limited resources. The recent drive to develop intelligent systems has turned “smart” into something of a mantra for cities around the world. Under Mayor Emanuel, the City of Chicago has equipped its residents and businesses with data and tools for making sense of the vital signs of how the city is working. City government here uses this data to spot trends, unintended outcomes, and intervention points through the use of machine-learning and analytics.
But if our goal today is to make our cities smarter than they were before, it’s useful to look at what characterized our best-functioning, most livable cities prior to our current information technologies. As it turns out, the qualifications for yesterday’s “smart” aren’t that different from those of today. Three main components contribute to any successful city, past or present:
- Openness: Historically, cities most welcoming of new ideas, new peoples, and new forms of commerce have had the greatest longevity. Monocultures—whether economic or cultural—have a hard time adapting to the myriad forces pushing from within and pulling from without.
- Legibility: Great cities are understandable. They may be huge and chaotic, but there is an underlying order that makes a legible city easy to use. Street grids, thoughtful zoning, human-scale architecture, ample public space—these are the characteristics of our most vibrant cities.
- Interconnectedness: Urbanization happens because people want to connect. Proximity matters. Resources are easier to share, markets are easier to sustain, and ideas flow more easily in densely interconnected environments.
It would be hard to find an example of a truly great city that did not exhibit all three of these characteristics, each of which contributes to an undeniably “smart” urban experience. So, what’s different now?
Today, open data policies expose the vital signs of how a city works to all its residents and businesses. Web-based portals allow city governments to share real-time data about what people are asking for and how the city is being built. In response, whole ecosystems of applications are developed outside of government that make the city an easier place to live and work.
Our tools for making the city legible are more powerful than ever. GPS-assisted maps and real-time information on public transit fleets enable a new kind of dynamic urban navigation, while innovative 311 applications allow people to see trends in what is happening in their neighborhoods and track the fulfillment of their requests.
Perhaps the most transformative application of technology in this vein is its amplification of the interconnectedness of our cities. The “sharing economy”—that is, businesses and organizations that use online tools to enable sharing of resources—have an outsized effect in dense urban areas. Car-sharing, on-demand rental of unoccupied living space, public bike systems, crowd-funding platforms, even co-working spaces accelerate the informal resource sharing that’s always happened in cities, making it far more efficient.
Our ability to be open, legible and interconnected has been radically accelerated and made more fault-tolerant through the application of technology. Our standards for greatness haven’t changed; we just have more tools at our disposal for achieving them. In the future, technology will help us both meet and exceed those standards of excellence.
John Tolva is the chief technology officer for the City of Chicago. In this role, Tolva coordinates high standards for open, participatory government and strives for the establishment of city-wide technology and innovation priorities; interfaces with the global technology industry; and modernized, streamlined IT systems.