Adrian Smith: Residents living around Plaça del Sol joke that theirs is the only square where, despite the name, rain is preferable. Rain means fewer people gather to socialise and drink, reducing noise for the flats overlooking the square. Residents know this with considerable precision because they’ve developed a digital platform for measuring noise levels and mobilising action. I was told the joke by Remei, one of the residents who, with her ‘citizen scientist’ neighbours, are challenging assumptions about Big Data and the Smart City.

The Smart City and data sovereignty

The Smart City is an alluring prospect for many city leaders. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you may have already joined in by looking up bus movements on your phone, accessing Council services online or learning about air contamination levels. By inserting sensors across city infrastructures and creating new data sources – including citizens via their mobile devices – Smart City managers can apply Big Data analysis to monitor and anticipate urban phenomena in new ways, and, so the argument goes, efficiently manage urban activity for the benefit of ‘smart citizens’.

Barcelona has been a pioneering Smart City. The Council’s business partners have been installing sensors and opening data platforms for years. Not everyone is comfortable with this technocratic turn. After Ada Colau was elected Mayor on a mandate of democratising the city and putting citizens centre-stage, digital policy has sought to go ‘beyond the Smart City’. Chief Technology Officer Francesca Bria is opening digital platforms to greater citizen participation and oversight. Worried that the city’s knowledge was being ceded to tech vendors, the Council now promotes technological sovereignty.

On the surface, the noise project in Plaça del Sol is an example of such sovereignty. It even features in Council presentations. Look more deeply, however, and it becomes apparent that neighbourhood activists are really appropriating new technologies into the old-fashioned politics of community development.

Community developments

Plaça de Sol has always been a meeting place. But as the neighbourhood of Gràcia has changed, so the intensity and character of socialising in the square has altered. More bars, restaurants, hotels, tourists and youngsters have arrived, and Plaça del Sol’s long-standing position as venue for large, noisy groups drinking late into the night has become more entrenched. For years, resident complaints to the Council fell on deaf ears. For the Council, Gràcia signified an open, welcoming city and leisure economy. Residents I spoke with were proud of their vibrant neighbourhood. But they recalled a more convivial square, with kids playing games and families and friends socialising. Visitors attracted by Gràcia’s atmosphere also contributed to it, but residents in Plaça del Sol felt this had become a nuisance. It is a story familiar to many cities. Much urban politics turns on the negotiation of convivial uses of space.

What made Plaça del Sol stand out can be traced to a group of technology activists who got in touch with residents early in 2017. The activists were seeking participants in their project called Making Sense, which sought to resurrect a struggling ‘Smart Citizen Kit’ for environmental monitoring. The idea was to provide residents with the tools to measure noise levels, compare them with officially permissible levels, and reduce noise in the square. More than 40 neighbours signed up and installed 25 sensors on balconies and inside apartments.

The neighbours had what project coordinator Mara Balestrini from Ideas for Change calls ‘a matter of concern’. The earlier Smart Citizen Kit had begun as a technological solution looking for a problem: a crowd-funded gadget for measuring pollution, whose data users could upload to a web-platform for comparison with information from other users. Early adopters found the technology trickier to install than developers had presumed. Even successful users stopped monitoring because there was little community purpose. A new approach was needed. Noise in Plaça del Sol provided a problem for this technology fix.

Through meetings and workshops residents learnt about noise monitoring, and, importantly, activists learnt how to make technology matter for residents. The noise data they generated, unsurprisingly, exceeded norms recommended by both the World Health Organisation and municipal guidelines. Residents were codifying something already known: their square is very noisy. However, in rendering their experience into data, these citizen scientists could also compare their experience with official noise levels, refer to scientific studies about health impacts, and correlate levels to different activities in the square during the day and night.

The project decided to compare their square with other places in the city. At this point, they discovered the Council’s Sentilo Smart City platform already included a noise monitor in their square. Officials had been monitoring noise but not publicising the open data. Presented with citizen data, officials initially challenged the competence of resident monitoring, even though official data confirmed a noise problem. But as Rosa, one of the residents, said to me, “This is my data. They cannot deny it”.

Thick data

Residents were learning that data is rarely neutral. The kinds of data gathered, the methods used, how it gets interpreted, what gets overlooked, the context in which it is generated, and by whom, and what to do as a result, are all choices that shape the facts of a matter. For experts building Big Data city platforms, one sensor in one square is simply a data point. On the other side of that point, however, are residents connecting that data to life in all its richness in their square. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued many years ago that situations can only be made meaningful through ‘thick description’. Applied to the Smart City, this means data cannot really be explained and used without understanding the contexts in which it arises and gets used. Data can only mobilise people and change things when it becomes thick with social meaning.

Noise data in Plaça del Sol was becoming thick with social meaning. Collective data gathering proved more potent than decibel levels alone: it was simultaneously mobilising people into changing the situation. Noise was no longer an individual problem, but a collective issue. And it was no longer just noise. The data project arose through face-to-face meetings in a physical workshop space. Importantly, this meant that neighbours got to know one another better, and had reasons for discussing life in the square when they bumped into one another.

Attention turned to solutions. A citizen assembly convened in the square one weekend publicised the campaign and discuss ideas with passers-by. Some people wanted the local police to impose fines on noisy drinkers, whereas others were wary of heavy-handed approaches. Some suggested installing a children’s playground. Architects helped locals examine material changes that could dampen sound.

The Council response has been cautious. New flowerbeds along one side of the square remove steps where groups used to sit and drink. Banners and community police officers remind people to respect the neighbourhood. The Council recently announced plans for a movable playground (whose occupation of the centre of the square can be removed for events, like the Festa Major de Gràcia). Residents will be able to monitor how these interventions change noise in the square. Their demands confront an established leisure economy. As local councillor Robert Soro explained to me, convivial uses have also to address the interests of bar owners, public space managers, tourism, commerce, and others. Beyond economic issues are questions of rights to public space, young peoples’ needs to socialise, neighbouring squares worried about displaced activity, the Council’s vision for Gràcia, and of course, the residents suffering the noise.

The politics beneath Smart City platforms

For the Council, technology activists, and residents of Plaça del Sol, data alone cannot solve their issues. Data cannot transcend the lively and contradictory social worlds that it measures. If data is to act then it needs ultimately to be brought back into those generative social contexts – which, as Jordi Giró at the Catalan Confederation of Neighbourhood Associations reminds us, means cultivating people skills and political capacity. Going beyond the Smart City demands something its technocratic efficiency is supposed to make redundant: investment in old-fashioned, street-level skills in community development. Technology vendors cannot sell such skills. They are cultivated through the kinds of community activism that first brought Ada Colau to prominence, and eventually into office.

Adrian Smith is Professor of Technology and Society at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, and Visiting Professor at the Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This blog comes from a European research project analysing the knowledge politics of smart urbanism. He is on Twitter as @smithadrianpaul

Reposted from The Guardian, with the permission of the author.

Image: Making Sense (Talking about noise in Plaça del Sol)

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Summer 2017 Residencies

San Francisco CA ~ Ashland OR ~ Albuquerque NM

At Ceptr we’re building a platform for distributed applications that will power new forms of human collaboration and help the world successfully navigate the daunting challenges we face. Designed using the organizational patterns found in nature, we’re opening new possibilities for more more equitable and regenerative forms of governance and wealth creation.

You don’t program? Cool! Because the project needs all sorts of skills; storytellers, marketeers, organizers, community developers and more.

Click here to apply

We are looking for summer residents to join our team as we build and launch initial applications, share discoveries, and grow a movement that will change the planet.

As a Resident of the Ceptr team you will help awaken people’s minds to possibilities that they’ve never imagined and create the tools that will make that future a reality.

As an Open Source project, Ceptr is not a profit-driven organization and has no short-term revenue. Most people participate as volunteers. We operate as a “do-acracy,” empowering people to participate in whatever ways they see fit within self-directed teams.

We are implementing new ways of recognizing the contributions of our community members and supporting them and their growth.

Residencies include room and board. There will be domain-specific teams located in San Francisco (CA), Albuquerque (NM), and Ashland (OR).

More important than specific job skills or experience is communication, competence and commitment. We can provide training and development on particular skills, although it is also great if you’re already bringing some good ones.

If selected, this could easily become a career path as most will advance toward positions of leadership or take their training out into the world to start their own entrepreneurial ventures.

If you know of people that are good candidates for a residency, please let them know about the opportunity.

Types of Residencies ~ Ways to Participate

There are many ways to participate and contribute. Below are some that our teams have identified, maybe you can bring some of the skills, talents, and interests we need.

Software Development: Skills/Interests in Go, JavaScript, protocols, blockchain, or distributed computing.

Writing, Blogging, Editing: Good writing skills. Actually enjoy writing and editing. Research, develop, and write engaging blog posts, website content, video scripts, crowdfunding copy. Edit new and previously written documents and prepare them for public distribution. Find supporting images and/or work with photographer to capture useful visual content.

Executive Assistant, Admin & Organization: Competent, detail oriented, and excited to learn. Support founders and team leaders on a wide range of tasks including training, calendar management, travel logistics, email communication, editing, and report writing.

Marketing, Social Media & PR: Good communication skills, facility with many social media tools. Support for the social media strategy. Listen to conversations, analyze data, engage with audience, track questions, monitor influencers and hashtags, identify opportunities. Help design strategic vision and lay groundwork for broadcasting that vision.

Crowdfunding, Communications & Outreach: Experience running a crowdfunding campaign. Coherency holder for one or two of our crowdfunding campaigns. Ability to communicate effectively with a team of broadly skilled individuals including writers, videographers, and marketing strategists to engineer a brilliant campaign in a short amount of time.

Graphic Design: Skills in visual communication and graphic design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. Work with our UX, Web, and Marketing teams to create style guides, branding, and online experiences that are compelling, yet intuitive. Your work will be critical for both our products and community relations.

Web Site Development: HTML, JavaScript, Jekyll, and basic layout & design. Create websites for Ceptr and for specific projects and applications that are engaging and delightful. We are building new ways of computing, but many of these need to interface with or be marketed on the world wide web. Work with our graphic design and backend software development teams to drive engagement and adoption.

UX Design: Design and iterate on user-centered experiences. Expertise in UX software such as InVision, UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer.js, Quartz Composer, and the like is a must. Basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills are a plus. Design and deliver wireframes, user stories, user journeys, and mockups that lead to intuitive user experiences. Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features. Collaborate with Graphic Designers, User Interface Designers, Web Developers and Software Engineers.

Infrastructure and Deployment Engineering: Automating cloud and metal infrastructures with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Storage, Networking, Security.

Test Engineering: Creating test suites for automated distributed app test-driven development processes. Holochain application development includes a testing-harness to automate tests across many automatically instantiated instances of the application. This work includes developing and enhancing that testing-harness and it’s Docker integration. Expertise in Test-driven/Behavior-driven development, Docker, go, unix system scripting all helpful.

Videographer, Video Editor: Natural storyteller with video filming and editing experience. Experience editing with Adobe Premier (preferred), Final Cut Pro or similar software. Create videos for social media, online education and community onboarding to help build understanding of – and nurture participation in – our work to re-design internet communication, collaboration, and work itself.

Animation; Illustration: Natural storyteller with experience in graphic illustration and/or digital animation. Experience creating 2d animations or motion graphics with After Effects or similar software. Illustration chops and experience with Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign a plus. Create video and web animations that help communicate world changing ideas and engage audiences..

Community Development, Event Organizing: Good communication skills, eagerness to learn and create value. Contribute to event organizing and production online and offline. Learn to produce e-learning materials in Learning Management Systems (LMS), be in service to the needs of people in the community. If proficient in the content, then contribute to forum moderation. Contribute to activities related to community development like potlucks, be-ops and others.

Apply now to our Summer 2017 Residency Program

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The U.S. government allows tax deductible donations to socially beneficial organizations incorporated as non-profits. However, the Internal Revenue Service needs proof that the non-profit corporation is actually operating to benefit society. (Apparently, no such scrutiny is applied to anonymous, for-profit corporations operating in known tax havens).

As a result, a small group of people intending to develop a blighted neighborhood, or provide job training to unemployed adults faces a huge obstacle. They cannot attract tax deductible donations without incorporating and filing voluminous tax documentation annually.

Ioby (In Our Back Yard) provides non-profit, incorporated status to ordinary people who want to do good. It enables accountantless and lawyerless groups to conduct crowdsourcing that is tax deductible for donors.

Ioby is, well, your very own shell corporation.

Extracted from https://www.ioby.org/about

What we do

ioby helps neighbors grow and implement great ideas one block at a time. Our crowd-resourcing platform connects leaders with funding and support to make our neighborhoods safer, greener, more livable and more fun.

ioby believes that it should be easy to make meaningful change “in our backyards” – the positive opposite of NIMBY.

How we do it

ioby uses the concept of crowd-resourcing (a term we coined) to drive projects to success:

       crowdfunding + resource organizing = crowd-resourcing

Crowdfunding is the pooling of small online donations for a cause or project.

Resource organizing is a core tenet of community organizing that considers activists and advocates the best supporters to ensure the success and long-term stewardship of a cause or project.

As a combination of these two, ioby’s platform gives everyone the ability to organize all kinds of capital—cash, social networks, in-kind donations, volunteer time, advocacy—from within the neighborhood to make the neighborhood a better place to live.

Extracted from http://www.shareable.net/blog/iobys-erin-barnes-on-the-nonprofit-advantage-in-civic-crowdfunding

This was really part of our founding initiative. The US Forest Service had done all this research in 2007 on the grassroots groups that stewarded open green space in New York City. They inventoried these groups, and they found that about seventy percent of them are volunteer-run and more than half had annual budgets of less than a thousand dollars.

Our interest was in supporting this civic vanguard in this grassroots, mobilized network of people who just were responding to the urge to protect and care for open spaces and public spaces in cities. By being able to extend our 501(c)3 status through fiscal sponsorship, we’re allowing those groups a couple different things.

One is their donors can write off their donations to those projects. The other is the groups don’t have to feel forced to incorporate because they can use ioby as a fiscal sponsor up to a certain point so they don’t have to have that urge to incorporate. They can stay unincorporated for longer periods of time or possibly even consider incorporating in a different way.

Then I guess the third part is, and I think that this varies depending on groups, so I would say some groups have said that being able to operate under ioby’s fiscal umbrella has, in some ways, legitimized their work in the eye’s of some of their potential donors or supporters. It’s about people’s perceptions of where they’re putting their funding or who they’re throwing their weight behind.

Photo by IvanWalsh.com

Photo by deeje

Photo by Parvin ?( OFF for a while )

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Last August, 200 people from across Oakland, California came together to envision and design a development plan for a small parcel of public land. For months leading up to that day, community members and neighborhood coalitions had been organizing against a controversial – and possibly illegal – plan to develop a luxury high-rise apartment complex on land owned by the City of Oakland, in a neighborhood where 75% of residents are low or very-low income and 75% are renters. Having succeeded in pressuring the City to back out of the initially proposed deal with UrbanCore Development through creative direct action and sophisticated community organizing, organizers with the E12th St Coalition wanted to create a visionary community-driven alternative – and the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum was convened. On a sunny Sunday afternoon near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, hundreds of people shared their visions for what could be done with this public land – and not a single person envisioned a market-rate housing complex on that site.

Photo by Save the E12th Parcel for the People

The result of this community planning process: The E12th St. People’s Proposal. This visionary plan, compiled by the E12 St. Coalition in partnership with nonprofit developer Satellite Affordable Housing Associates, includes a 100% affordable housing complex, a public park, commercial space for local businesses, and more. (The grassroots coalition has formally submitted the People’s Proposal to the City of Oakland for consideration and is currently competing against two other proposals, neither of which include anything close to 100% affordable housing.) All of this has been motivated by the radical idea that public land should be used for public good. Radical indeed in a region with one of the fastest increasing land values in the country.

This is just one of many hopeful stories of communities coming together to simultaneously challenge the conventional profit-driven process of economic development, and assert community-driven alternatives that do not displace existing communities. What is foundational to the call for “development without displacement” is a claim to community self-determination, that communities have both the right and the capacity to set their own priorities and pathways for creating more equitable neighborhoods. In other words, communities have the collective right to participate in the processes that shape their future, particularly those most impacted by those processes. The E12th St People’s Proposal is visionary both in what it imagines – a 100% affordable housing development in the heart of one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country – and in who it allowed to imagine and shape the development process.

At this point, there is widespread acknowledgment that the Bay Area is experiencing a housing crisis. However, proposed solutions to the crisis rarely seem to identify or address its root causes, and are most often framed in a market-vs-state binary. But what if that framework – that it will be either the market or the state that solves the housing crisis – is one of those root causes? What if communities themselves, particularly those that have been historically neglected by both the state and the market, were enabled to create their own solutions?

The initial E12 St controversy perfectly illustrates the problematic relationship between the state and the market. It was in the City’s narrow financial interest to try to sneak through a deal with a for-profit developer to build a “market-rate” high-rise apartment complex with one-bedroom apartments starting at over $3,000 per month. To put this in perspective, “market-rate” is now only affordable to household making $113,000 or more in yearly income, while the median income for the area surrounding the Eastlake neighborhood is $38,363. Particularly in a country where wealth is so unequally distributed – wealth initially accumulated through the theft of land, labor, knowledge, and natural resources of Indigenous, African, and other non-European people – the provision of a basic right such as housing should not be left solely to a system where money buys power and certain groups of people are systematically dispossessed.

The state, supposedly the counterbalance to the market, actually creates the necessary conditions for the market to operate in this way. In the case of the East 12th St Parcel, it has taken almost a year of sustained organizing, direct action, community engagement, investigative journalism, and legal analysis to even get the state to consider a proposal for affordable housing, something it is in fact required to prioritize under the Surplus Lands Act.

Perhaps it’s time we collectively acknowledge that the traditional model of profit-driven economic development tends to be part of the problem, rather than the solution. “Economic development,” writes Shawn Escoffery in the preface to the Democracy Collaborative’s recently published report Cities Building Community Wealth, “operates on an implicit assumption that everyone benefits from a city’s prosperity and economic growth. But that’s a sad fallacy.” A recent study by the Brookings Institute shows that income inequality has actually worsened in the nation’s largest 50 cities since 2012 – indicating that the wealthiest have captured most of the economic gains since the financial collapse of 2007. And, of course, even that class inequality is not evenly distributed: by at least one study, the median net worth of a white household in America today is $116,000, compared to only $1,700 for a black household.

So what might be an alternative? Stories like the East 12th Street struggle begin to point the way by demonstrating an oppositional and visionary alternative. Their actions also imply some basic questions like: What if housing was treated primarily as, well, housing, rather than an investment? What if we recognized land as a living source of common wealth rather than an abstract commodity? What if community development was actually shaped by all members of the community, not just the most privileged and most likely to profit?

One way to potentially achieve this is to manage our cities as a commons. The commons is a socio-economic system that has been implemented for millennia in societies across the globe to steward a wide variety of resources and cultures. But a commons can arise anytime a group of people decide to collectively manage an essential resource, with special regard for equitable access and long-term stewardship (to paraphrase a definition by commons scholar and activist, David Bollier). How might seeing our cities as a commons lead to more equitable forms of community development? Here are some ideas:

Land as a commons: None of us created the land beneath your feet or beneath your home. So why should certain people profit off its existence while many more are excluded from even having a place to sleep? In a land commons, the community of residents would collectively determine priorities for land use, perhaps in a process similar to the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum. Many communities across the country are rediscovering the community land trust (CLT) as a tool for community-ownership and control of land. By separating the value of the land from the structures and activities happening on the land, a community land trust allows a community to permanently preserve the affordability of and equitable access to land for housing, urban farming, local businesses, and other community-determined uses. Originally developed by civil rights organizers and farmers in the South who were systematically denied access to land, the CLT model is again being deployed in urban communities of color as a strategy for community wealth building and resisting economic displacement.

Housing as a commons: While the CLT is one mechanism for the commons-based management of land, housing cooperatives and intentional communities are similar models for collective management of housing and living spaces. Popularly associated with hippies and other crunchy white people, housing cooperatives and intentional communities actually have a long history as tools of survival in the African-American community and many other marginalized communities. From the extensive network of low-income housing cooperatives in New York City created in the 1970s to the “Panther Pads” created by the Black Panther Party as political safe houses in the 1970s to Cooperation Jackson’s current vision of urban ecovillages, cooperatively owned and managed housing can be economically efficient, ecologically sustainable, and socially regenerative. Such an approach can help ensure that many more people are housed using existing housing stock and, as importantly, begin to recreate our relationship to houses as spaces for social and economic production, rather than financial speculation and exclusion.

Photo by Imani Khayyam.

Livelihoods as a commons: Displacement and gentrification are not simply about housing affordability. Certain communities are vulnerable to displacement because of generations of disinvestment, job discrimination, mass incarceration, educational inequality, environmental injustice, and more. In a highly monetized society, people should have a right to dignified and productive livelihoods – it’s no coincidence that both Martin Luther King, Jr and the Black Panther Party called for full employment for all people. Allowing people to both own and control their own labor, for example through worker cooperatives and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, has been shown to create more stable, dignified, and higher-paying jobs over the long-term. Furthermore, reducing income inequality is actually better for everyone, not just the poor: numerous studies have shown that life expectancy and other indicators of personal and social health is lower in societies with higher income inequality.

These are all ideas we are actively working on or thinking about at SELC. We’re also developing new ideas for cooperatively financing and managing housing and land as a commons, and creating new legal structures for the commons-based management of, well, everything. Read more about our Housing Program, Cooperative Program, and local policy work and stay tuned for more.

The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to participate in decisions about that resource’s use. From this perspective, all sorts of things start to look like they should be managed as commons: healthcare commons, learning commons, restorative justice commons, renewable energy commons, financial service commons, investment commons, food commons, water commons. It also happens that all of these things are being horribly mismanaged at the moment, literally putting life on earth in peril. So what about this for a radical idea: let people participate in the decisions that most directly affect their everyday lives.

Photo by Mister-Mastro

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