If we want the city to produce a different outcome, it will take a different kind of organisation running it, responsible for it. The very idea of the city as a public good fundamentally rests on this. And the very idea of the sustainable city relies on understanding that the city is a public good.
Excerpted from Dan Hill:
“Can (one) design a system, or culture, in which individual actors are aware that they are part of a wider interdependent system of complex movements, with positive end results—safer, smoother—at a systemic level as well as individual?
Wonderfully, it believes in people; it rewards trust, and demonstrates that this is viable.
It requires governance, to help shape a city that can work in such a way (Search YouTube for “shared space Monderman” and you’ll find videos demonstrating that the Dutch examples are all relatively dense—though not high density—environments with active streetfronts and wide pavements. It wouldn’t work where peoples’ idea of urban space is something you drive through at speed. But then what would?)
Removing all “regulation” at this micro-level turns out to be the safe and effective thing to do as it relies on active citizens, not abdicating responsibility for wider systems and acting as an individual or outsourcing the decision-making to traffic lights. So removing regulation, though not governance, here implies far greater personal responsibility. It is not simply “self-interested actors maximising personal gain”—it relies on smart, engaged, aware and active citizens, rather than the passive systems that smart city visions are often predicated upon.
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There is only one true way to find out what balancing act might tend towards sustainable outcomes, and that is to try it. But as “trying it” means considered, iterative prototyping of user-centred platforms, as local experiments that can nonetheless scale, and produced by designers, coders and product managers that understand both The Network and The City, do we have the right people in place, able to take the right approaches?
Sadly, most city officials have absolutely no idea how to do any of this, with a handful of honourable exceptions. Their culture—and thus their operations, attitude, behaviour, skillset—is from another age. Hence we see the systems integrators of the previous age—let’s call it “The Age of IT”—mercilessly exploiting this condition through anachronistic procurement cultures designed almost exclusively for these players.
The results will be the same as for the Age of IT: over-scaled monolithic vertically integrated systems that take too long to develop, are too expensive to buy and maintain (by orders of magnitude), and have an appalling overhead on anyone that tries to use them. Exactly what image does the phrase “government I.T. project” conjure up, after all? (By way of comparison, observe how the “start-up within the UK Cabinet Office”, Government Digital Service, is laying waste to a previous generation of IT systems in a matter of months, creating elegant, simple and user-focused systems using the same agile methodologies and user-centred design that build the likes of Amazon and Twitter, and saving millions upon millions of pounds along the way. You cannot outsource this: it is strategic. We have even more reason to take the same intrinsically internet-age “small pieces, loosely joined” approach to our urban governance systems, given our understanding of the way cities work. But are we?)
This is not about “IT” anymore. A 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status on her iPhone while she’s walking down the street is not really “IT” What we used to call “IT” is now too important for the “IT” department. These technologies are part of cultural and strategic approaches, and have long since shifted from the back room to front of house, to the top table.
Observe how Amazon and Net-A-Porter are changing the physical fabric of the high street; how Nike+ is changing how we exercise; how Kickstarter is changing the structure of the creative industries; how Apple has changed media; how Google is altering basic literacy, almost extending cognition; how Facebook and Twitter helped drive last years’ Peak News events.
Compare to your average municipality’s IT department: do we have the right people, the right culture, around the decision-making table?
We can now easily see the problem when city governments attempt to engage with this. Trained by pervasive, professionally-produced experiences like Facebook, citizens can now see that almost all the efforts of municipalities thus far are embarrassingly bad in comparison. Politicians can see this too, as we all now use these systems. The issue is with people and culture, not the role of government itself. it’s not that they can’t do it; it’s that they can’t do it. They literally do not know how to. They are currently not equipped to work in this way, with these tools, skillsets and attitudes. They need to build a culture of doing, rather than outsourcing, but most do not yet realise that they now have competition. The UK’s Cabinet Office appear to understand that now, and perhaps a few municipalities like New York and Chicago, but they are an exception, and even in the best cases have not reacted enough.
IT was once a service like catering or postage, to be procured. IT, or what replaced iT, is now at the core of almost everything. It is becoming the medium for a government’s relationship with their citizens. The systems and cultures that municipalities are looking to take advantage of are not outsourced, they are not put together by “systems integrators”, they are not IT. They are quite different. The platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon are not outsourced; they are owned and operated, designed and researched, coded and maintained, communicated and supported, almost entirely in-house.
Yet there is no fundamental reason why municipalities could not work in this way, in terms of its strategic positioning, function, history. It is a question of talent, which in turn is a question of motivation. There are plenty of examples of innovation within a public sector environment. From a tiny sliver of personal perspective alone, I can speak of GDS above, or the BBC ten years earlier. You cannot tell me that those core public sector environments were not “innovative”. Beyond that, Sitra’s recent Helsinki Design Lab event was set up to explore further examples, from IDEO’s work with the US Government to Mindlab’s at the heart of the Danish government.
Yet you do not hear enough about them as it runs counter to contemporary political thinking, much contemporary economic thinking, and they can also easily be outweighed by the number of counter-examples (as I just did in the previous section.) They illustrate, however, that it is entirely possible, it is going on, and thus there are no structural reasons why it should not happen. Such good work, in a public sector environment, is usually not in opposition to the idea of innovation in the private sector—often, the people involved have significant experience of both sectors, and tend to blur the boundaries between them, driven instead by “the mission” in either case (a discussion for another day.)
We need to hear more about such examples of public sector innovation, however, as Western culture is soaked in a form of propaganda suggesting that public sector is slow, big, cumbersome and entirely devoid of innovation. This is genuinely damaging.
If you want to get things done, do you turn to government as your potential employer? Not at the moment, not often enough. Yet what if government was directly and boldly prototyping new versions of itself, using these new technologies? It might be that a sense of public good, of civic responsibility, can be found within a re-calibrated approach to municipal government. If we dovetail active citizens with active governments, building the interactions of both around these new logics but balancing their inherent biases, we might discover better cultures for producing good, sustainable decisions.
As Marco Steinberg says, we currently have 18th century institutions facing 21st century problems. Contemporary municipal governments are entirely redolent of their 18th or 19th century counterparts, despite some facile difference. Drop an employee from, say, 1890s Helsinki city council into their 2012 equivalent and they’d recognise much of what they saw. Some of the clothes might be different, there would presumably be more women around, and they might wonder about those small glowing rectangles people keep looking at, but they’d see a department of planning, a city engineer, a schools department and so on, run in largely similar ways (although arguably rather more risk averse).
Yet we are in a radically different urban condition. Not just in terms of built fabric, whose significance is overplayed due to its sheer obviousness, but in terms of our highly interconnected patterns of living amidst the radically different systems that produce the contemporary city, localised and globalised simultaneously. The nature of our challenges are entirely different, with climate change the clearest example of that.
Even accepting that cities evolve—and slowly—urban sustainability will require a transformation. To produce transformative products or services, you must transform organisations. So you must to redesign the city’s organisations, recalling Peter Drucker’s insight that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, in order to be able to redesign the city. If we want the city to produce a different outcome, it will take a different kind of organisation running it, responsible for it.
The very idea of the city as a public good fundamentally rests on this. And the very idea of the sustainable city relies on understanding that the city is a public good.“