Le Chantier

Urban Information Networks

<This is an English rendering of a talk I gave on November 18, 2011 at the Paris 2030 Colloquium.>

As you might imagine, I will talk about urban information networks.  Such networks have existed since the beginnings of cities; indeed they are one of the basic reasons for the existence of citiy:  to enable the sharing of information among the inhabitants so that they may learn from one another.  This is the same principle that enables millions of termites to federate their little intelligences and thereby create such amazing structures.  Information networks are thus a basic element of life in a city.  I am not thinking here of social networks, which deal with personal information, but rather of information concerning the how the city works, both in demand and supply of services. 

Historically much of this information was hidden and circulated only among a small, spatially-limited group of people.  It was in forms that did not easily permit wider transmission, integration with other information or mathematical analysis.  But today more and more of such information is available in digital form that does enable easy transmission, integration, and analysis.  So now we can begin to ask questions about the immediate needs of individual inhabitants and about the problems they face in exploiting the city's services.  Equally we can ask questions about the real-time performance of the city's services, their immediate capacities and the operational problems that exist.

I will talk about three themes in this space:  number one, The Invisible Rendered Visisble, number two, Information for Resource Management, and number three, OpenData 2.0.

On my first theme, I have already indicated the role that digital systems play in making information more widely and immediately visible.  This is central to enabling the inhabitants to benefit easily from the services and resources of the city.  It is also central to enabling city managers to make the best use of the capacities and resources that are immediately available.  A recurring problem we encounter in urban system management is that decisions are made based on information that is minimal or incomplete or stale.

A common example is the sharing of water among multiple cities within a single water basin.  Local city or utility water managers generally have no current information about how much water is available upstream in the system and about how much water their neighbours are drawing from it.  As a result, they will sometimes withdraw too much water, resulting in environmental problems or they will draw less water than they could, resulting in local supply limits or, in exceptional cases, increased risk of flooding.

An example of how information enables the inhabitants to most effectively use the immediately available capacity of the total, multi-modal transportation system comes from our work with CalTrans in the San Francisco bay area.  Here inhabitants with smart mobile telephones can subscribe to a service that enables CalTrans to observe their journeys based on the GPS reading from the telephone.  From these observations CalTrans can determine the individual user's common journeys.  When the system sees the user beginning a familiar journey, for example commuting from home to the workplace, it looks at the multi-modal choices available to the traveller and the operational status of each of those systems along the required paths, and then makes a recommendation to the traveller for the optimal way to make this journey at this time.  The traveller thus makes the journey with the minimum delays and disruptions and the transportation systems' loads can be balanced.

On my second theme, I am thinking of a project in which I am slightly involved in Zurich, where the technical university, the ETH, has developed a set of principles based on One Planet Living (OPL).  OPL seeks to define and encourage the adoption of a set of resource consumptions that will enable 9 billion people to fairly share the resources - water, food, energy, land - of the one planet we have available.  For energy, this results in an annual consumption of 2,000 kW-hours per person, or an average of roughly 250 Watts per person.  This goal has been adopted for an eco-district development in Zurich.  Achieving such a goal requires that the individual is aware of his or her own energy consumption, just as modern cars give us feedback on fuel consumption, and also careful management of the balance between demand and various sources of electrical energy.

If we now think of individual consumptions in existing cities, how close is each individual to this goal?  The question in most cases is unanswerable, because such information is not available unless the city or the utility has installed smart meters to measure consumption of electricty and water. This is a basic principle from Management Science - if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

Another example of waste resulting from a lack of information comes from the construction industry.  A large city such as New York has of the order of a million buildings.  Since a building - depending on its purpose and how it was built and maintained - has a lifetime of 50 to 100 years, it follows that on average in New York some 10-20,000 buildings are torn down and re-built every year.  Imagine how much that represents in thousands of tons of old materials that are carted away and dumped at some growing distance in a landfill or in the ocean and in new materials that have to be created and transported to the building site.  How many hundreds of thousands of truck journeys on already crowded streets!

For the 2012 Summer Olympics in east London a different approach was adopted.  When the London Olympic Committee issued a contract for the preparation of the site for the Olympic village, it contained a requirement that 90% of the materials in the existing buildings should be re-used.  The management of this work went to an American engineering consultancy, CH2M Hill.  CH2 hired 2,000 unemployed people in east London, taught them construction Health and Safety and how to deconstruct the existing buildings.  Bricks and stone were cleaned up and prepared for use in the new construction.  Steel was shipped to China - at a peak of 300 tons per day - to be recycled.  Wood and other combustible materials were converted to energy.

The result was cheaper - CH2 completed the project on time and well under budget - than dumping the old materials and buying new and resulted in 94% of the old materials being re-used as well as a further 4% being used to produce energy.  Why could not New York implement such a system?  Because today there is no information available on supply and demand of such materials and hence no market for them.  A lack of information again leads to waste.

On my third theme I point to the future of exploitation of urban systems information.  You are no doubt familiar with the OpenData Movement, which is growing rapdily in popularity.  OpenData 1.0, as I call it, begins with publishing documents - government reports including eventually management reports on urban systems operational performance.  This is hugely valuable in developing transparency between government and citizens, something that is greatly lacking today in most cities. 

But an equally valuable step will come when cities begin to expose their operational information in near real-time by allowing it to be federated into private services.  The city in fact is the largest producer of information about what is going on, but today that information remains trapped inside the many agencies.  By publishing it, as the government of Singapore is doing and others - such as Dublink in Dublin, Ireland - are following, that information is available to be tapped by the innovative capabilities of citizens and enterprises.  While I strongly commend CalTrans' leadership in the example mentioned above, why should travellers depend on government to provide multi-modal transportation guidance?  Why not allow innovators to compete for the most effective algorithms to optimise such systems?  There are certainly some urban systems that are critical and whose operation should be reserved to the local government, such as water management, but in many other areas private enterprise is likely to be a more powerful source of innovation than public agencies.  This is what I think of as OpenData 2.0.

I have written elsewhere of this approach - government as an agent for capturing and publishing real-time information about urban systems operations - as the Stupid City, a term that refers back to the Internet principle of putting intelligence around the periphery of the network, rather than in the center as was traditional in the telephone network.

So these are my three thoughts for today on the importance of the flows of operational information in cities and the enormous impacts that can be achieved when these flows become digital.  This is a new way of looking at how cities work, a new way of helping the inhabitants to get the best use of the city's services, and a new way of engaging citizens and enterprises in making the city a better place to live and work.

Fahrenheit Plus Ten

In the novel Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury pictured a society in which mass entertainment had destroyed individual interest in creativity and critical thinking.  This was reinforced by the government’s effort to suppress all works of literature through the destruction of books by burning.  451° Fahrenheit was believed to represent the temperature at which books would spontaneously ignite.

Today we face, if not the destruction of society around the world, then at least the risk of radical changes ensuing from climate change.  The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC ) has recommended setting the goal of limiting the increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere to 2°C, but there is a moderate probability that the increase by mid-century will in fact be rather higher – perhaps 4 to 6°C (7 to 10° Fahrenheit).

Such a temperature rise does not sound too intolerable, but in fact it implies rather violent changes to our environment: more violent tropical storms due to the increased energy available from the oceans, greater loss of large areas of arable land to desertification or at least greatly reduced fertility due to changing rainfall patterns, and also the exposure of major population centers to the risk of flooding due to rising sea levels.  Some areas will also benefit from increased rainfall or extended growing seasons.

The means exist to mitigate at least one cause of this increase in the world’s temperature – the emission of Greenhouse Gases – but it is not clear in 2008 that the world’s major emitters will respond with sufficient commitment and speed to achieve the necessary reductions in time.  So it seems likely that during the 21 Century the appearance of the world we have come to know over the last two millennia will change quite dramatically.  Ice coverage will shrink, some fertile areas will decline, some unfertile areas will become fertile, and some areas will be lost to inundation.  The extent of this change depends to some degree on whether the world’s developed populations will set aside their fondness for energy-intensive lifestyles and devote some personal energy to critical thinking about our own behaviors and about the policies of our governments.

In Bradbury’s novel the protagonist, who is initially one those in charge of book burning, experiences an epiphany and revolts.  He flees from the city and discovers a community whose members have memorized entire books and critical commentaries and who pass this knowledge on to younger members in order to keep it alive.

So I wonder whether as individuals we should not begin to memorize the land we occupy, so that even beyond the effects of climate change we will have living knowledge of how it used to be.  I am not thinking of academic documentaries, valuable as these can be, but rather the personal knowledge of people who are in touch with the world around them and who know some hectares of land “as well as the backs of their hands”.  Farmers, hikers, naturalists, nature photographers, land owners, dog walkers, and joggers.  There are still many people in our society that have direct knowledge of the land around them.  Could each of these millions become a “land watcher” for some simple corner of our planet?

Should we, like Bradbury’s protagonist, begin to create a living memory of how the world was before the storm ahead?

Big Questions

Recently I attended a commercial symposium on "green technologies" in California.  There was enormous interest among the participants in this field, but I was dismayed frankly to realize that this interest is driven almost entirely by the view that this is a great new opportunity to make money.  Nothing against making money, but the challenges of climate change are far more serious than that.

I am concerned that for all the enthusiasm about installing compact fluorescent lights and buying hybrid cars, we have not begun to come to terms with the magnitude of the changes that we face. There is an assumption here that if we all install compact fluorescent lamps and drive hybrid cars, then life can carry on pretty much as normal.  I fear that this may not be true.

While it is good that the majority of the population not agrees we have a problem, we have yet to begin to debate the real magnitude of the problem and who will bear the costs of dealing with it.  Essentially the world needs to choose - fairly quickly please - how much global warming we want to risk.  Given the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that we have already made, we face an unavoidable rise in average temperature of 1-2C even if we make substantial efforts.  This will produce significant climate changes. Doing less to reduce GHG emissions will lead to larger rises in average temperature.  These may be supportable - at some great cost to society - up to around 4C.  Beyond this point the climate researchers warn of potentially disastrous changes.

So one target, already being studied in Europe, is to attempt to limit change to 2C.  It appears possible that we could attain this by appropriate deployment of alternative energy sources, combined with substantial reductions in total energy consumption.  Recall that we are doing this as major parts of the globe begin to achieve the levels of prosperity that the West has enjoyed for the last 50 years.

The good news is that we have the technology we need.  The bad news is that we will need to make very large investments - measured in trillions of dollars - in order to get the technology deployed and to get it adopted for our major uses - heating and cooling buildings, transportation, and industrial processes.  So government and business face a set of very large investments, that I do not believe can be driven purely by market forces, under conditions of substantial uncertainty.  Uncertainty causes delay and time is not on our side here.

So I have developed a list of questions that require study - not just by climate researchers, but by engineers, economists, politicians, and business leaders if we are to set this process in motion.  Essentially we would like to know what will happen over the coming 20-30 years and of course this is in knowable.  But there are methods we can employ that will enable us to understand what are the most likely outcomes.

So here is my list of Big Questions: 

• What is the optimum/equitable allocation of the spectrum of energy sources to various uses as price and availability evolve over the next 20-30 years?
• How is future price and availability influenced by investment decisions made over that period?
• What investments need to be made for each energy source to create the appropriate distribution infrastructure? Who makes these investments, at what ROI, and over what period?
• How fungible are various energy sources and how readily do energy users switch from one source to another source (secondary investment decisions)? How efficient are the commodity markets at allocating buyers to sellers?
• What opportunities exist for unexpected invention or discovery for each energy source or related inventions, e.g. energy storage, and what investments would be needed to develop these fully into products and what investments would be needed to create the appropriate distribution infrastructures?
• What will be government policies in the major energy producing and consuming nations around the world to incent or disincent the production and consumptions of various kinds of energy? How will these affect price and availability?
• What unexpected political, economic, and natural events could happen over the next 20-30 years that might change any of the above?

Since we cannot know these precisely, instead, over a large range of combinations of possible evolutions

• What are the most likely outcomes?
• How sensitive are these outcomes to decisions that we make today?
• How sensitive are these outcomes to when we begin to make major changes and investment?

Virtual Worlds

Recently Lynn and I have been engaging in Extreme Gardening.  The back acre or two has suffered from neglect while I have been mainly in Europe over the last several years.  So during the last few weekends we have moved and stacked about 3 cords of logs, another cord of split firewood, and a couple of yards of assorted rocks using only our hands and a garden cart.  Last weekend we also dug out and filtered a yard of soil from our compost heap, beautiful, fertile soil with the airy consistency of ground coffee.  It's a wonderful experience to be outdoors with dirty hands and aching backs, literally hands on with the land.

It has been a great opportunity to become familiar again with our land.  We live amid the forest of north-western Connecticut and it teems with wildlife.  Apart from the pest deer, we have seen turkeys, a racoon, a fox and a coyote, and families of hawks, wrens, and robins.  Bobcats and a black bear live nearby.  We have wondered at the absence of the stick insects and the praying mantis that we used to see and we have been amazed at the growth of trees we knew as saplings.

This activity has reminded me of a youthful ambition to truly know a piece of land, every rock and rabbit hole and tree, every wild flower and dragon fly.  I can still see the valley in the Yorkshire Moors where this ambition was formed.

It reminded me too how distant our lives have become from the world around us.  Too easily nature becomes something we see through the windscreen of the car as we dash from one indoors to another indoors.  We experience real nature only indirectly on the Discovery Channel - spectacular and remote, to be explored on our behalf by professionals.

For millenia we have erected physical barriers between ourselves and nature to provide shelter against the weather.  In our cities we pave paradise and exclude nature from our habitat.  But even in suburbia and rural areas we have put a distance between ourselves and our environment.  We create Virtual Worlds where our food is filtered through processing industries and our experience through digital networks.  We use technology to construct cocoons, virtual worlds that isolate us from nature, where the temperature is always pleasant, rain never falls except when we take a shower, wild animals are excluded, and we can have light whenever we wish. Then we devote our energies and wealth to elaborating these virtual worlds to the neglect of the real world.

In these Virtual Worlds we are safe from all but the most violent intrusions of nature and so nature now seems threatening, full of ticks, snakes, pollen, and storms.  Global warming becomes yet another reminder that nature is hostile to this artificial lifestyle and rumours surface of a future with less energy for heating, cooling, travel, and entertainment.

But it is we that threaten nature.  So to prevent these threats escalating, I think we need to come out of our Virtual Worlds and embrace nature.  Only with that embrace will healing begin.  I do not mean that everyone should become a tree hugger or engage in Extreme Gardening, but we could all spend a little more time hands on in the outdoors, experiencing the only Real World we have.

It does not have to be the Grand Canyon or the Antarctic.  Just go for a walk in your neighbourhood.  As our eyes become accustomed to seeing nature face to face, our powers of observation improve and we begin to notice nature right there on our doorsteps.  We begin to become part of the Real World again.