I’m currently taking a certificate course with MIT Media Lab on Smart City development and I am enjoying it thoroughly. In one of the first lessons we talked about the process for developing smart cities, from collecting and studying the data to creating new technology and solutions to modeling and simulating the impact of new technology to facilitating informed decisions by stakeholders to incentivizing “pro-social” development and behavior.
I have had some experience with these ideas so nothing was really new to me but one area really got me thinking – consensus building. After collecting and studying the data of our present situation and creating and modeling it’s possible effects on society, we have to get a consensus from stakeholders to create policy. In democratic societies this pretty much means we need public forums to discuss changes. In 2021 this seems like a pretty big task since most democratic societies can’t agree on much and urban innovation is not the easiest policy to get buy-in on with a crowd who knows the sector well.
I am encouraged by a recent consultation project in Hamburg related to finding a location for dormitories for Syrian refugees. It was an important and successful case in which 34 two-hour sessions were conducted and 400 participants proposed 161 locations. While I am impressed by this project, I can’t help but wonder how much consensus comes from 400 participants in a city of nearly two million and how easily such an exercise would be replicated in more diverse and divided cities or regions.
Here in the DC area we recently had a public hearing about the implementation of bike lanes on a residential street where a lot of families and university students live. The bike lane would eliminate about 180 parking spaces in an area where parking is not that hard to find and yet the discussion brought out warring factions, neither of which spent much time or civility listening to each other. I couldn’t help but notice that the statistics they were giving were not even the same, it was like they were talking about two different projects.
The difference in the Hamburg and DC projects seems to be the way in which the consultation was undertaken. One was run in a scientific way in which suggestions were solicited from the public first (after an informative presentation of the data and simulation results) and local authorities planned action based on those informed suggestions. The public felt that they were involved and had a hand in shaping controversial policy. The second was run as a political activity in which a proposal was created by the authorities and the public factions built their cases “for” and “against” with independent information-seeking activities. The outcome was much less harmonious.
In the end, the reason that the consensus phase comes after the insight building and prediction phases is because consensus can only be reached by participants that are informed. This means they have to have access to the same information and it has to be credible information. In 2021 there is no source of information that is universally trusted but there is the potential that by bringing science back to our city processes, we could build consensus and accelerate equitable urban growth.
smartcityperspectives.com 