Open Source Urbanism: Beyond Smart Cities

Sergei Zhilin (TU Delft), Jeroen van den Hoven, Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft/Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

Open Source Urbanism can help mitigate the migration crisis and improve living conditions all over the world.

The dream of building “good cities” is old¹. Since the 20^th century, there have been many attempts to create, develop or shape cities, sometimes even from scratch. Examples range from gigantic modernistic approaches known from Brasilia and Chandigarh, to more radical, but theoretical concepts aimed at changing society and engineering social order, such as Ecotopia or the Venus project. Recent developments are driven by the planetary trend towards urbanization, mass migration, and the need for sustainability. New visions of a global urban future were developed, such as “Sustainable”, “Eco”, or “Resilient” Cities, typically based on a top-down approach to the design of urban habitats.

Cities created from scratch heavily depend on massive private investments, for example, Songdo in South Korea or Lavasa in India. Despite ambitious goals and many technological innovations, their long-term success cannot be taken for granted, as they are often conceived by urban planners without the participation of people who later live in these cities. Such projects are typically implemented without much feedback from citizens. This makes it difficult to meet their needs. In fact, some of these cities have ended as “ghost cities”.

In the wake of the digital revolution, data-driven approaches promised to overcome these problems. “Smart cities”, “smart nations,” and even a “smarter planet” were proposed. Various big IT companies decided to invest huge amounts of money into platforms designed to run the “cities of the future”. Fuelled by the upcoming Internet of Things, cities would be covered with plenty of sensors to automate them and thereby turn them into a technology-driven “paradise.” So far, however, these expectations have not been met.² Why?

Geoffrey West points out that cities cannot be run like companies.³ A company is oriented at maximizing profit, i.e. a single quantity, while a city must balance a lot of different goals and interests. This tends to make companies efficient, but vulnerable to mistakes. Cities are often less efficient, but more resilient. Driven by diverse interests, cities naturally do not put all eggs in one basket. This is why cities typically live longer than businesses, kingdoms, empires, and nation states.⁴

Importantly, cities are not just giant supply chains. They are also not huge entertainment parks, in which citizens consume premanufactured experiences. Instead, they are places of experimentation, learning, social interaction, creativity, innovation, and participation. Cities are places, in which diverse talents and perspectives come together, and collective intelligence emerges. Quality of life results, when many kinds of people can pursue their interests and unfold their talents while these activities inspire and catalyse each other. In other words, cities partly self-organize, based on a (co-)evolutionary dynamics.^5,6

While rapid urbanization comes with many problems, such as the overuse of resources, climate change and inequality,⁵ cities become ever more important, as they are motors of innovation.^3,5 Presently, more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urban population is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. To meet the social, economic, and ecological challenges, innovation must be further accelerated, as the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals stress.

Given the digital revolution and the sustainability challenges, we now have to re-invent the way cities and human settlements are built and operated, and how cities can contribute to the solutions of humanity’s present and future existential problems. In the past, we had primarily two ways of addressing such issues: (1) nation-states (and their organization in the United Nations) and (2) global corporations. Both have not managed to deliver the necessary solutions on time, e.g. to problems such as climate change and lack of sustainability. Therefore, we propose a third way of addressing global problems: through networks of cities. ⁷ So, how to unleash the urban innovation engine?

CITY CHALLENGES

“City Olympics” or “City Challenges” could boost innovation on a cross-city level involving all stakeholders. They would be national, international or even global competitions to find innovative solutions to important challenges. Competitive disciplines could, for example, be the reduction of climate change, the development of new, energy-efficient systems, sustainability, resilience, social integration, and peace. The solutions would be publicly funded and should be Open Source (for example, under a Creative Commons license) in order to be reused and developed further by a multitude of actors in all cities i.e. by corporations, SMEs and spin-offs, researchers, NGOs and civil society. In this way, the potential of trends such as Open Source Movement, Hackathons, Fablabs, MakerSpaces, Gov Labs and Citizen Science would be raised to an entirely new level, creating the potential for civil society solutions. The new success principles would be collaborative practices such as co-learning, co-creation, combinatorial innovation, co-ordination, co-operation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence.

Increasing the role of cities and regions as drivers of innovation would allow innovative solutions and initiatives to be launched in a bottom-up way. All interested circles could contribute to City Challenges. Scientists and engineers would come up with new solutions and citizens would be invited to participate as well, e.g. through Citizen Science. Media would continuously feature the efforts and progress made in the various projects. Companies could try to sell better products and services. Politicians would mobilize the society. Overall, this would create a positive, playful and forward-looking spirit, which could largely promote the transformation towards a digital and sustainable society. In the short time available (remember that the UN wants to accomplish the sustainability goals by around 2030), the ecological transformation of our society can only succeed if the majority of our society is taken on board, and if everyone can participate and profit.

OPENSOURCING URBAN INNOVATIONS

Cities are the places where the engagement of citizens can have the greatest impact. The most liveable cities manage to create opportunities to unfold the talents of many different people and cultures and to catalyse fruitful interactions among them. Opportunities for participation and co-creation are key for success.

Alexandros Washburn⁸ said about the design process of New York City that he could not control anything, but influence everything; successful urban design required the right combination of top-down and bottom-up involvement. It is therefore essential that urban development involves all stakeholders including citizens. Vauban, a quarter of the city of Freiburg, Germany, is a good example for this. The city council encouraged the citizens to actively participate in land-use planning and city budgeting. Sustainability and new energy-saving technologies were a primary focus of the planning strategy. In two new districts (Rieselfeld and Vauban), self-built and community architecture was created, which led to urban environments conceived and designed by future inhabitants according to their own vision. Now, Freiburg counts as benchmark city. Its concepts of sustainable urban planning and community participation are widely used by other cities all over the world.

So far, most urban planning professionals do not pay much attention to long-term involvement of citizens in urban development. With the ubiquity of information and communication technologies, our cities are getting smarter, but not automatically more inclusive, just, and democratic. The Citizen Score, a surveillance-based approach to control the behaviours of people, shows how easily technological progress may lead to technological totalitarianism. In the private sector as well, global corporations, geared towards profit, can turn into threats of democracy and human rights. When services are free, people are the product, data can fall into the wrong hands, and human dignity, autonomy, and freedom will be compromised. In data-rich societies, where people are measured and watched, profiled and targeted, this problem is quite significant. If cities of the future were run like businesses, based on surveillance, driven by data and controlled by algorithms, liberty, democracy, and human rights might quickly erode.

The application of open source principles to the co-creation of urban environments could overcome these problems by supporting active participation, technological pluralism and diversity. Thereby, it would also avoid technological lock-ins and dead-ends. The open source movement, which started with opening software (see the example of GitHub) now promotes the co-production of open content (Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap), open hardware (3D-printer RepRap), and even open architecture (WikiHouse). Open Source Urbanism would be the next logical step of this open source trend.

In 2011, Saskia Sassen wrote: “I see in Open Source a DNA that resonates strongly with how people make the city theirs or urbanize what might be an individual initiative. And yet, it stays so far away from the city. I think that it will require making. We need to push this urbanizing of technologies to strengthen horizontal practices and initiatives.”⁴

Yochai Benkler argues that open source projects indicate the beginning of a social, technological, organizational and economic transformation of the society towards a new mode of production.⁹ This new mode, called commons-based peer production, is a collective activity of volunteers, usually coordinated via the Internet, producing free-to-use knowledge. Open Source Urbanism, as a new way of urban development, would therefore build on concepts such as Open Source Innovation and Commons-Based Peer Production.

In fact, citizens are keen to be not just consumers, but co-producers of their urban habitats. Some of them already experiment with open-sourcing urban design by collecting, improving, and sharing their Do-It-Yourself design blueprints and manuals on the Internet. The “Nation of Makers” initiative promotes community-driven design, prototyping, and fabrication as well in order to solve local and global challenges by improving lives in local communities around the planet.

Such examples are presently still rare and dispersed, and, therefore, not yet able to shift cities towards more inclusive urban development on a global scale. For this, one would need a socio-technical platform to consolidate and strengthen the nascent movement. Such a platform could promote the exchange of best practices and solutions to frequently occurring problems. The results would be digital commons designed to satisfy citizens’ needs¹⁰.

The proposed approach pushes for a new paradigm of globalisation, which one may call “glocalisation”. It would be based on thinking global, but acting local (and diverse), on experimentation, learning from each other, and mutual support. The approach would be scalable. It would be more diverse and less vulnerable to disruptions. It would promote innovation and collective intelligence, while being compatible with privacy, freedom, participation, democracy, and a high quality of life. If cities would open up and engage in co-creation and sharing, they would quickly become more innovative and efficient. Open Source Urbanism could take our cities and societies to an entirely new level and also help to create better living conditions in developing countries and regions suffering from war more quickly.  

References

1.        Sennett, R. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

2.        Hugel, S. & Hoare, T. Disrupting cities through technology, Wilton Park. (2016).

3.        West, G. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. (Penguin, 2017).

4.        Sassen, S. Open Source Urbanism. Domus (2011). Available at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/2011/06/29/open-source-urbanism.html. (Accessed: 16th November 2016)

5.        Bettencourt, L. M. A. & West, G. A unified theory of urban living. Nature 467, 912–913 (2010).

6.        Batty, M. Cities and complexity: understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals. (The MIT press, 2007).

7.        Barber, B. R. If mayors ruled the world: Dysfunctional nations, rising cities. (Yale University Press, 2013).

8.        Washburn, A. The nature of urban design: A New York perspective on resilience. (Island Press, 2013).

9.        Benkler, Y. Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information. Duke Law J. 52, 1245–1276 (2003).

10.      Schrijver, L. in Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design: Sources, Theory, Values and Application Domains (eds. van den Hoven, J., Vermaas, P. E. & van de Poel, I.) 589–611 (Springer Netherlands, 2015). doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_22

Künstliche Intelligenz kann eine Chance für uns alle sein

Von Dirk Helbing 
(ETH Zürich, TU Delft, Complexity Science Hub Vienna)
 
Es war lange ein Traum des Silicon Valleys, Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) zu bauen, die intelligenter als Menschen ist und die Probleme löst, die uns Menschen über den Kopf gewachsen sind. KI hätte unsere menschlichen Fehler nicht, dachte man. Sie wäre objektiv, fair, und unemotional, könnte viel mehr Wissen überschauen, schneller entscheiden und aus Daten lernen, die in der ganzen Welt gesammelt werden. Städte könnte man mit Mess-Sensoren versehen und automatisieren. Am Ende stünde eine Smarte Gesellschaft, die sich datengetrieben und algorithmen-gesteuert optimal entwickelt. Wir müssten nur tun, was uns das Smartphone sagt. Verhaltenssteuerung durch personalisierte Information und den berühmtberüchtigten chinesischen Citizenscore, ein Punktekonto für das Wohlverhalten des Bürgers, würde für die optimale Gesellschaftssteuerung sorgen. Inzwischen ist da vielerorts Ernüchterung eingekehrt. Was einst als Utopie begann, wird heute oft als Alptraum angesehen.

Damit treten wir in eine neue Phase der Digitalisierung ein. Die Karten werden neu gemischt. Europa hat die Chance, eigene Impulse zu setzen und damit Weltmarktführer zu werden – durch Künstliche Intelligenzsysteme, die Menschen nicht überwachen und kontrollieren, sondern die Menschen befähigen und kreative Aktivitäten koordinieren. Die Rede ist nun vom „werte-sensitiven Design“. Gemeint ist: wir sollten unsere verfassungsrechtlichen, sozialen, ökologischen und kulturellen Werte in die intelligenten Informationsplattformen einbauen, damit sie uns dabei unterstützen, unsere gesellschaftlichen Ziele zu erreichen, aber Freiräume für Kreativität und Innovation lassen.

Wenn es um demokratische Werte geht, so sind etwa die folgenden Aspekte von Bedeutung: Menschenrechte und Menschenwürde, Freiheit, (informationelle) Selbstbestimmung, Pluralismus, Minderheitenschutz, Gewaltenteilung, Checks and Balances, Mitwirkungsmöglichkeiten, Transparenz, Fairness, Gerechtigkeit, Legitimität, anonyme und gleiche Stimmrechte und Privatsphäre im Sinne von Schutz vor Exponierung und Missbrauch einerseits, andererseits im Sinne eines Rechts, in Ruhe gelassen zu werden.

Im globalen Miteinander scheinen überdies folgende Werte eine vielversprechende Basis für eine erfolgreiche und friedliche, vernetze Informationsgesellschaft zu sein: Vielfalt, Respekt, Partizipationschancen, Selbstbestimmung, Verantwortung, Qualität, Awareness, Fairness, Schutz, Resilienz, Nachhaltigkeit und Compliance.

Es ist nicht leicht, diese Eigenschaften in Informationssysteme einzubauen, aber wir können es lernen. Wir können KI-Systeme bauen, welche die Welt und uns alle voranbringen, vorausgesetzt es gibt einen breiten und fairen Zugang zu den Potenzialen dieser Systeme. Stellen Sie sich vor, die KI würde Ihnen nicht sagen, was Sie tun sollen, sondern sie würde Ihnen dabei helfen, Ihre eigenen Talente zu entfalten und Ihre Ziele zu erreichen, und zwar umso mehr, je mehr sie (auch) anderen helfen – sozusagen ein Geist aus der Flasche, der Gutes tut, der uns hilft, uns selbst und anderen zu helfen.

Was sich heute noch wie Utopie oder Science Fiction anhört – schon bald könnte es Realität sein. KI ist eine Chance für die Wirtschaft, für Europa und uns alle, wenn wir nur lernen damit umzugehen – damit es nicht ausgeht wie mit Goethe’s Zauberlehrling. Die Enquete-Kommission „Künstliche Intelligenz – gesellschaftliche Verantwortung und wirtschaftliche Potenziale“ hat jetzt die Chance, die Weichen für eine vielversprechende, bessere Zukunft zu stellen.

Nudging – the Tool of Choice to Steer Consumer Behavior? Or What?

By Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft/Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

Back in 2008, Thaler and Sunstein suggested “nudging” would be a great new way to improve health, wealth and happiness. The method was euphemistically called “liberal paternalism”, i.e. the nudger would be like a caring father, while the nudged one is claimed to have all the freedom to decide as preferred, even though he or she would often not notice he or she was tricked.

People would be helped by companies or the state with subconscious nudges to correct their so-called “misbehaviour”. This earned Richard Thaler the Nobel Prize – but not Cass Sunstein, who had written a critical book in the meantime, entitled “The Ethics of Influence”.

Let me say upfront that I don’t see a problem with putting the ecological energy mix on the top of a choice list or to label it “green energy”. This is pretty harmless. People understand the trick, but they will often anyway agree.

However, nobody ever told us that we would be nudged every day, all the time, with personalized information that is tailored to us with personal data that was collected about us mainly without our knowledge and agreement – effectively by means of mass surveillance.

This “big nudging”, which combines nudging with big (personal) data, must be criticized, as it undermines the very basis of our democracy, self-control, and human dignity.

Let us look back for a moment.

Already in the 60ies, the first climate studies by oil companies pointed out that there is a negative effect of carbon-based energy on climate. But for a long time, it seems nothing was done to change this.

Then, in the early 70ies, the Limits to Growth study warned us that, in a world with limited resources, we would sooner or later run into an economic and population collapse. No matter how the model parameters were changed, the predictions said humanity was doomed.

The Global 2000 study commissioned by then US president Jimmy Carter basically confirmed these predictions. However, it was again assumed that we would not change the system of equations, i.e. the socio-economic system we live in.

Finally, the United Nations established the Agenda 2030, pressing for urgent measures towards a sustainable planet.

So, 50 years after our sustainability problem was diagnosed, is “big nudging” really the best solution to our sustainability problems? Should companies digitally steer the behaviours of the people?

This kind of assumes that companies would be the good guys, who do the right things and should therefore have all conceivable freedoms: in particular, they should develop, produce and sell products as they like. The people, in contrast, would be kind of the bad guys, who show “misbehaviour”, as Richard Thaler would call it, and whose behaviours would therefore have to be corrected and controlled.

What would this mean? Let me give two examples:

• The above approach foresees that producers of sweet lemonades would sell unhealthy products and advertise for more consumption, while our health insurance would give us minus points for buying and drinking lemonades, and charge us higher tariffs. 
• The car industry would go on selling as many cars as they could, but politics or some citizen score would forbid most of us to use them most of the time. The Diesel scandal, which will forbid many car owners to use their cars in central parts of many cities, would be just a glimpse of what is to come.

Does such a model make sense? I am not convinced. Are you?

So, is the proposed solution, which comes under names such as profiling, targeting, neuromarketing, persuasive computing, big nudging, and scoring, really our saviour?

Unfortunately, as advanced as these technologies may be, they tend to be totalitarian in nature.

The Chinese Citizen Score, for example, has been heavily criticized by all major Western media.

But the situation in Western democracies is not so much different. Tristan Harris, who worked in a “control room” at Google, where public discourse was shaped, recently exposed the mind control of billions of people that a few tech companies exert every day.

Moreover, if one traces back the actors and history of the underlying technologies and science, we end up in the 1930ies with their infamous behavioural experiments. This link to fascist times and thinking doesn’t make things better.

How could things come that far?

We are living in a society, which thrives on the combination of two very successful systems: capitalism and democracy.

Unfortunately, this model is not good enough anymore. It hasn’t created a sustainable future, and so, as I have pointed out before, our world is heading for a doomsday scenario, if we don’t change our system.

Unfortunately also, neither the public nor scientists were informed well enough that – in the past 50 years – we should have done nothing else than re-invent society.

Furthermore, unfortunately, democracy and capitalism today do not have aligned goals. Capitalism tries to maximize profit, i.e. a one-dimensional quantity, while democracy should continuously increase human dignity, i.e. strive for multiple goals, including knowledge, health, well-being, empathy, peace, and opportunities to unfold individual talents.

Everyone should have understood that, if we did not manage to align the goals of both systems, one system would sooner or later crush the other system. It recently often appears it is democracy that would be crushed.

Let me shortly talk about the new kind of data-driven society that was created:

We now have a new monetary system, which is based on data. Data is the new oil. This data is mined by what we call “surveillance capitalism”, where people are the product.

We also live in a new kind of economy: the attention economy. People are flooded with information. Attention became a rare good, which is marketed among companies. This allows them to influence people’s consumption, opinions, emotions, decisions and behaviours.

We further have a new legal system: “code is law”. Algorithms decide what we can do and what we can’t. They are the new “laws of our society”. “Precrime” programs are just one example for this. The algorithmic laws, however, are usually not passed by our parliaments.

Altogether, this has also lead to a new political system: where companies such as Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Google manipulate the choices of voters, and thereby undermine democracies and the free, unbiased competition of ideas.  

A digital sceptre, enabled by the combination of big data and nudging, would now allow to steer society and correct the claimed misbehaviours of people, as it is currently tested in China.

This “brave new world” was created without asking the people. It hasn’t been passed by parliament – at least not openly. While these developments have gone on for more than 15 years now, probably for decades, the public media have not informed us well and in advance.

We have been sleep-walking – and for a long time, we have not noticed the silent coup that was going on. But now we are discussing these developments, and that’s why democracy will win.

What do we need to do?

We must build “democratic capitalism”. This means to democratically upgrade capitalism and to digitally upgrade democracy.

We need information platforms and technologies, which have our constitutional, societal, cultural and ecological values in-built. We call this approach “design for values”.

And it’s coming. The IEEE, the biggest international association of engineers, is already working on standards for ethically aligned design.

What does design for values mean for our society? That the democratic principles, i.e. the lessons that we have learned over hundreds of years in terrible wars and bloody revolutions, would have to be built into our technologies.

This includes: human rights and human dignity, freedom and self-determination, pluralism and protection of minorities, the division of power, checks and balances, participatory opportunities, transparency, fairness, justice, legitimacy, anonymous and equal votes, as well as privacy in the sense of protection from misuse and exposure, and a right to be left alone.

How to enable informational self-determination in a big data world? Assume every one of us would have a personal data mailbox, where all the data created about us would have to be sent. The principle to be legally and technologically established would be that, in the future, we decide who is allowed to use what data for what purpose, period of time, and price. An AI-based digital assistant would help us administer our data according to our privacy and other preferences. Uses of personal data, also statistics created for science and for politics, would have to be transparently reported to the data mailbox.

With this approach, all personalized products and services would be possible, but companies would have to ask in advance and gain the trust of the people. This would create a competition for trust and eventually a trust-based digital society, in which we all want to live in.

Furthermore, we would have to upgrade our financial system towards a multi-dimensional real-time feedback system, as it can now be built by means of the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology. Such a multi-dimensional incentive and coordination system is needed to manage complex systems more successfully and also to enable self-organizing, self-regulating systems.

So, assume we would measure – on separate scales – the externalities of our behaviour on the environment and other people, for example, noise, CO2 and waste produced, or knowledge, health, and the re-use of waste created. Suppose also that people would give these externalities a value or price in a subsidiary decision-process. (Some people would call this a tokenization of our world.) Then we could build our value system into our future financial system. I call this system the socio-ecological finance and coordination system (or finance system 4.0+).

People could then earn money with recycling. Companies could earn money for environmental-friendly or socially responsible production. In this way, new market forces would be unleashed that would let a circular and sharing economy emerge over time.

Personally, I don’t think there are not enough resources for everyone in the world. We don’t have an over-population problem. Our problem is rather that the organization of our economy is outdated.

I think we are living in a time, where we have to fundamentally re-organize our society and economy in the spirit of democratic capitalism, based on the values of our society.

I am also convinced that energy won’t be the bottleneck. But we will have to take new avenues. In the past, the focus was often on big solutions, which would produce energy for a lot of people. I propose that we should focus more on solutions, which are oriented at decentralized, local and more democratic energy production.

Modern physics knows that our universe is full of energy. In fact, it is totally made up from energy. It wouldn’t be plausible to assume we could not learn to use it.

I expect that a more democratic production and use of energy, goods and services will lead our society to an entirely new level. It is high time to focus on this transition, and how we can accomplish it together.

The instrument of City Olympics, i.e. of competitions of cities for sustainable and resilient open-source solutions to the world’s pressing problems could help us find the way.