Responsive Cities: Susan Crawford at the 2014 Knight Civic Media Conference

Susan Crawford on stage at the 2014 Knight-Civic Media Conference Cities and citizens around the world are using data around the world to thicken democratic engagement. Susan Crawford will expand on themes from her new book, "The Responsive City," co-authored with Stephen Goldsmith, and the heroism it describes—together with the many open policy questions it raises. Liveblogging contributed by Catherine D'Ignazio, Rodrigo Davies, Ed Platt, J. Nathan Matias, vizthink by Willow Brugh Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, introduces Susan Crawford ,  the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at the Harvard Law School . He mentions her new book, Captive Audience , and that she founded One Web Day . She has a book coming out in the fall called The Responsive City . How can a city that is filled with sensors really change what it means to be a citizen?   Crawford begins by saying that the idea of having a path to impact is very attractive to her. She is seeking optimism and thinks that one way to get there is to look at all the communities that require open internet in their towns. We all need this.   She has been working with Steve Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis on a book called The Responsive City . She recalls a recent conversation with an anthropologist who worked with tribes in Malaysia. The anthropologist is very disturbed about a post-humanist turn in anthropology. This is the idea that the humans are no longer the center of discourse. The idea that we should be thinking about the feelings of trees. She was critical of the idea of "smart" – that it stands for Simplistic, Mechanistic, Ahistorical, Responsive, Tautological.   The stories about Smart Cities seem fundamentally post-humanist – simplistic and mechanistic. The urbanist and researcher Dan Hill describes it as “The Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex”. Crawford says she thinks these critiques are right. They wrote the book to capture what cities can do working with other communities to make their cities better places for human beings to live. Humans are the reasons for cities. We operate at our peril if we forget this. The energy and joy that you feel when you walk through a park. To have a physicist's view of the city is clearly short-sighted and uninspiring, but there’s a lot that cities can do using data to enrich the lives of people who live there. Cities are capable of great things, using a little bit of technology plus fiber. Cities are incapable of controlling large swathes of urban life. She met many civic leaders while working on the book. They see the balance between human beings and the infrastructure that makes the city possible. She introduces Brenna Berman, the CIO of Chicago's Department of Innovation and Technology . This is a rigorous set of work that Chicago is carrying out. The WindyGrid is the human readable form of this. They are also launching sensors this week that are collecting aggregate information about the environment of the city - noise, pollution, and temperature. They are instrumenting the city and then having hte data come into the city's open data platform. With fiber and sensors picking up this data, this can enable finer-grained understanding.   The heroes of cities Crawford lists a number of people-centered examples of leadership around cities and sensors: Mike Flowers of New York City , based on his experience of Iraq, is able to understand how the city works. It’s tribal, it’s political and there are wars. He’s a very empowered civil servant who was able to use this knowledge to make the city work better. Bill Oates, former CIO of City of Boston , walked into the office in 2006 and heard typewriters. He works closely with the Mayor's office of New Urban Mechanics. He is focused on citizen-led governance. It's all about people in the end.   Dan O’Neill in Chicago has worked with the city to gather information about deteriorating buildings and put that data into the city's 311 line. The feedback loop of response has been shortened.   Caroline Shannon of the Rio Urban Agora is establishing centers with good Internet where favela dwellers can organize and conncet with government.   Kathryn Pettit of the Urban Institute is working with nonprofits across the US to use data to have an impact on policy. These people are balancing concerns around privacy and security with the need for the city to do a better job providing services to its citizens. Cities are still at a very primitive stage of using this technology. It’s going to be very slow for cities to act on a lot of this input. Things like procurement rules get in the way of agile development.  The concern about ‘smart’ is a little overblown in some ways because we have so far to go.   Balancing efficiency and compassion     We don't want to value efficiency over compassion but we don't want to devalue efficiency either. Here's the most important point of this talk:   You can use data visibly to amplify the touchpoints of government and journalism on citizens. When you see a v