Pandemonium: The Inclusive City

It seems as if ‘for all’ is becoming the destination in many urbanist discussions of the moment.

In a recent publication, Saddiq Khan, the newly appointed mayor of London published his statement of intent: ‘A CITY FOR ALL LONDONERS’. It is a very readable document that sets out a number of directions that he hopes to follow over the next four years: housing, infrastructure, business, public space, inclusivity.

As the self-defined ‘most pro-business’ mayor, work reigns high over most considerations of what makes a city a great place. And as a result, most parts of the city are perceived through the lens of efficiency and productivity. Housing therefore becomes infrastructure. The alleviation of pollution, the improvement of transport, the promise of social integration are transformed into factors that ensure a healthier, punctual and ready workforce. Inclusion, therefore, means access to the workplace and the market, and that’s all.

Inclusion was also at the centre of the New Urban Agenda, that was recently ratified at the UN Habitat III conference in Quito. I have written previously about this here. There is one quote worth repeating here from the agreed document, concerning the role of cities:

We anchor our vision in the concept of cities for all, referring to the equal use and enjoyment of cities, towns, and villages, seeking to promote inclusivity . . .

In my article I connected this sentiment to that of Henri LeFebrve’s ‘The Right to the City”. And I was fortunate enough to get an update on the discussion in Quito from lawyer Thomas Coggins, who highlighted the direction of the debates in the chamber. As Coggins notes, the use of a right based was avoided and instead most involved adopted ‘some fuzzy concept about inclusion’ rather than being specific about what it meant.

So — as seen in both examples — if the access to the city, as both a physical place and as more theoretical space of flourishing, is not a human right, what are we talking about here?

It is worth also putting into this discussion, Richard Sennett’s long-standing, and compelling, work on the Open City. Sennett is not necessarily interested in the population that fill the city. Rather his argument focusses on the ways these physical spaces are created, and the management program that maintains a reasonable level of inclusion. Nonetheless this is not a pragmatic playbook for how to do this right. The open city is ‘incomplete, errant, conflictual, non-linear.

If Sennett offers any kind of program, his vision of openness is based in the maintenance of civic institutions and ideals that need constant vigilance. It is an active, not a passive, call for inclusion: a projection into the future in order to keep the present honest.

2.

Contrast this with the way that that the connected city is discussed. We face an increasingly technologised city, layering a digital skein across every aspect of our urban lives. How can we see more clearly the everyday implications of these monumental changes? Many smart city initiatives talk about ‘people-centred solutions’, and making the city ‘more human’, but can this be true?

In our everyday lives we no longer make a difference between being on line and off line: the two worlds are now seamless. We can barely see daylight between the idea, as argued by Nathan Jurgenson, of different kinds of social interaction. This is the point where the ordinary everyday of the city integrates with technological innovations that we are struggle to keep up with, as I explored here. So does this make our world open?

Firstly, we don’t know enough about the things we are doing, or their long term effects. It is worth reminding ourselves that this technology is so new we are learning how to use it at rate most of us are unused to. In this pell mell we have forgotten to acknowledge that it takes more time to understand how technology impacts on our intimate human relations that it impacts on our economy.

At present, therefore, we find the most meaning for this technological narrative in the one sphere that has been impacted the quickest: the economic. Huge fortune are being made, so this must be a good thing. Innovation is always, good isn’t it? how could you deny creativity?

Yet as these success stories are broadcast and as the market expands, this does not in any way tell us how to live with these innovations. As the market expands, it seeks news colonies: and this time it means further and further into ourselves. We have, without scrutiny, brought these new innovations into the most private precincts of our lives . When we talk about ‘open’ here, we are offering up every corner of our being without understanding that we are doing. And once they are here, they stick.

Technology has been far better at breaking into our own selves than that it has been at opening the city. But it is a double invasion. The promises of the connected city is a mechanism to invade our privacy.

How? We give away private details for services that give the asymmetrical benefits in return. For example, by publishing this, I am making money that I will never see, for someone on the west coast. By opening up our homes to Airbnb we gain some short term value but do we really know how this will impact on our understanding of those intimate places we seek for ourselves. This morning (because I use a running monitor when I jog [which is itself an example of the bargain I am talking about]) I was identified as a potential consumer of an advert for a sleep monitor, which will measure the quantity of my slumber to ensure that I get enough sleep to work/exercise harder the next day.

But you know this, right? My point is that we are slower than we imagine in absorbing the political and social implications of these interventions. We always have been. We give away huge amounts of personal details for very little return. Let’s not beat up ourselves for missing this lesson, let’s just learn it.

It is worth remembering that we have been here before. Humphrey Jennings’s history, Pandemonium, is a dangerously ignored work at this moment. Jennings was the exemplary documentary film maker who made classics like ‘Listen to Britain’, and was involved in the Mass Observation movement. Pandemonium is a collection of first-hand accounts from all walks of life to the cataclysmic Industrial Revolution. It shows the actual everyday experience of the coming change and how traumatic it was for people at every level of society. It is worth remembering those historical lessons.

Pandemonium, was first envisioned in in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. It is the name of the capital city of Hell, built at the command of Mammon, — it was more vast and resplendent than anything built by man.

3.

But what does this have to say about the potential of the ‘connected city’ to expand the vaulted claims of increased inclusivity?

The openness that is being celebrated in this new era, often disguises its intentions in subtle ways, offering one transaction in the short term, with the illusion of openness, for a different long-term consequence. This in turn, is more likely to deliver what Sennett calls the fragile metropolis rather than an open city.

4.

The first point is that this inclusion is not all-inclusive. Never has been.

The entry bar into the connected city may be low, but it still excludes a sizeable proportion of people. Let’s take smartphones as the most accessible connection to the wider wired metropolis. In 2010 70% of the population of the world’s major cities had access to a smart phone. This is a vast number. But so is the 30% who do not have such privileges. Especially when that 30% is more often than not the bottom 30% who can’t afford handset and expensive contracts.

Similarly, according to Pew, adult access to the internet in the US between 2000–15 is at a top level of 84%. breaking that figure down is useful: the old are less likely than the young to be connected; those who earn more than $75,000, or have a college education is more likely to have access than those who earn less that $30,000. Rural communities have a slightly less figure of connectivity (78%). There is also a racial division, with 78% of black, and 81% of Hispanics, while 85% of white and 97% Asian Americans are connected.

The same story can be found in the UK. In the ONS figures for 2016, 87.9% of adults are connected. But that leave over 5.3 million people who have never used the internet. Again there is an age difference — 38.7% of the over 75s do not use the internet. 1 in 4 disabled people do not have access.

So, the connected city itself does not connect everyone, and proportionally it is those who are most vulnerable who are the most likely to be unconnected. The City has shut its doors to those who most need it most.

And as Jane Jacobs wrote: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

5.

Listen, in contrast, to Richard Clarke, the former White House security chief, who in June last year announced: “over time, there will be fewer people who recall pre-Information Age privacy, more people who will have grown up with few expectations of privacy”. He later made it clear that future expectation for privacy would also be unequally distributed: “Privacy may then be a commodity that only the wealthy can acquire”. Is privacy to become a luxury few of us can afford?

From now on our everyday objects will be connected into an ever more vast web that will monitor and make our lives more efficient. As a result you will be in control of your home remotely, and with the collection of data via sensors and monitors the things in your life will begin to communicate, connect and become even smarter. Lights will turn on when you wake up, the coffee machine will start to bubble as you get into the shower, and the radio will turn on your favourite station. And once you have left the house, the gadgets that fill up and enable your life will switch off to save energy and ensure the safety of your home.

There will be other innovations that will guide your daily life: the bathroom cabinet will tell you to take your medicine; the fridge will order items even before you know when you are running low. Your television will remember what you like to watch and record anything that it thinks you will enjoy.

It appears that we are willing to trade our privacy at the right price, or for the right commodity. In this case, ease and convenience is considered more of a priority than a sense of self. This barrier can no longer be found at the front door that divides the public street and the private home, nor can it be found between our private and public persona. For centuries we have created an idea of ourselves as a private self, a place where we store away all the things we do not want to expose to the public. Is this private place lost for good?

6.

Walking the full length of the High Line, the latest stretch of the elevated walkway that opened in 2014, one reaches twenty-eight acres of muddy building sites that is being redeveloped as the Hudson Yards. Launched by Bloomberg in 2004, this promises to be the largest private real estate development in the history of the U.S. including five office towers, a mall, a cultural centre, a hotel, a school for 750 pupils and over 5000 apartments. The site will be an extraordinary feat of engineering, many of the towers and structures raised upon stilts, hovering over the still working railway yards. More than that, the whole development will be designed with the latest smart technology integrated into the plans. The owners, the Canadian Oxford Properties Group, have agreed with the Brooklyn-based NYU Centre for Urban Science and Progress [CUSP] to create the world’s first ‘Quantified Community’.

Thus they have agreed that the site will be packed with monitors, sensors and cameras that will collect all possible data from the site in order to be able to service the community better. These include:

‘Measuring, modeling, and predicting pedestrian flows through traffic and transit points, open spaces, and retail space. Gauging air quality both within buildings and across the open spaces and surrounding areas. Measuring health and activity levels of residents and workers using a custom-designed, opt-in mobile application. Measuring and benchmarking solid waste with particular focus on increasing the recovery of recyclables and organic (i.e. food) waste. Measuring and modeling of energy production and usage throughout the project, including optimization of on-site cogeneration plant and thermal microgrid.’

This is the idea of the open city. In this vision of the future, technology will command the community: it will help those in charge to monitor our energy usage and try and make our lives more efficient; it will make us fitter — and happier; it will watch who uses our public spaces and who shops where; it will monitor what we throw away, and find ways for us to be less wasteful. It will smooth away the rough frictions that make up the burden of our everyday lives.

But in order to do that you have do cut off the possibility of the city being imcomplete, errant, non-linear as Sennett noted: or in other words, as human as the people who make it. To exnpand Sennett’s own quote: ‘The closed city is full of boundaries and walls; the open city possesses more borders and membranes. The closed city can be designed and operated top-down; it is a city which belongs to the masters. The open city is a bottom-up place; it belongs to the people.’

The greatest trick the connected city movement ever played was to suggest they they were offering something outside, and beyond, politics. It is no irony that the first book selected by Mark Zuckerberg’s book club was Moises Naim’s ‘The End of Power’, which has little time for the messiness of democracy, noting: ‘Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating — sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all.’ Reduce everything to the market, you no longer need to listen, discuss, negotiate.

In the end, technology — which has the potential to be emancipatory platform — combined with this kind of philosophy can threaten democracy itself.