Civics for a Digital Age

A new book, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, by Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Institute for the Future, provides some guiding principles we might use in to direct “smart city” development. Townsend sets out to sketch a new understanding of “civics,” one that will account for new technologies.

1. The commercial success and cultural ascendance of the Internet lends an air of inevitability to the idea of smart cities … we should never default to smart technology as a solution.
2. Community-owned broadband is one of the best investments a smart city can make.
3. Build a web, not an operating system.
4. Smart cities need to be savvy about what data and service infrastructure they own and what they give up to private interests in the cloud.
5. Yet the most powerful information in the smart city is the code that controls it. Exposing the algorithms of smart-city software will be the most challenging task of all. They already govern many aspects of our lives, but we are hardly aware of their existence.
6. How can we harden smart cities against [crises], and ensure that when parts of them fail, they do so in controllable ways, and that vital public services can continue to operate even if they are cut off?
7. Organizations and governments should “provide cities with incentives to share, and designers with advice on how to build systems that can solve local problems and be reused elsewhere.
8. Smart-city designers will also need to be transdisciplinary -- able to think across disciplines inside their own minds.
9. Figuring out how to harness real-time data and media to think about long-term challenges is one of the most important opportunities we must exploit.
10. Crowdsourcing with care means limiting its use to areas where government needs to mobilize citizens around efforts where it lacks capacity, and there is broad consensus over desired outcomes.
11. The consequences of disconnection go beyond just a lack of access. Connection is the means by which people will participate in civic life, not just actively but passively as well.