Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel,The city of tomorrow: Sensors,networks,hackers,and the future of urban life

Reviewed by: Antonio Vazquez Brust, School of Government, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina DOI: 10.1177/2399808318781239

The second decade of the 21st century approaches its completion in an atmosphere of techno-pessimism. In 2013, Edward Snowden's revelations alerted us about our society’s vulnerability to complete surveillance afforded by digital technologies. Worldwide, the reaction was a resigned shrug instead of a call for profound change. Fast-forward five years, when Mark Zuckerberg is summoned by the US Congress to answer for the role of Facebook in the latest privacy-violation scandal, after the revelation that tens of millions of users saw their personal data syphoned-off by a shady political consulting firm. While that story unfolds, we are also debating the role of social networks as the prime carriers of “fake news,” weaponized pieces of misinformation designed to corrode the social tissue of democracy. Amazon, the ultra-efficient e-commerce giant, threatens to extinguish all competition, while news stories about its unremitting abuse of warehouse workers continue to break. So much has been written about Google that I find little to add, except that they have created Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary whose business model involves processing and selling back to cities the information they have harvested from their own residents. The great promise of digital connectivity was making humankind get closer together, boosting dialogue and erasing borders. Alas, some of the most powerful countries in the world are opting for some combination of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism. The process is backed by vast swathes of the population that came to fear and resent the effects of technology-driven transformation.

Published only two years ago, Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel’s The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life almost feels like it came from an alternate reality where we never had to deal with these issues. The book serves as a gentle introduction to the novel ways of experiencing, studying, and managing our cities brought about by digital technologies. It is also a celebration of that novelty, as its consequences are barely scrutinized. As chapters progress, the audience gets to read about a number of projects undertaken by the MIT Senseable Cities Lab, the renowned research center that counts the authors among its affiliates (Carlo Ratti is its founder). The Senseable Cities Lab has pioneered experimentation where urbanism and (big) data analytics intersect. Their results are presented with dazzling visualizations that boast undeniable technical and aesthetic flair. All of this contributes to letting our guard drop when appraising the proliferation of sensors, networks, and hackers in our cities.

Although The City of Tomorrow … does mention some of the perils that arose with our digital age, it’s usually in passing; critical sources are rarely quoted. As an example, chapter one introduces the compelling practice of “futurecraft,” the art and science of positing future scenarios to examine their possible outcomes and publicly debate the resulting insights. When acknowledging its antecedents, Ratti and Claudel recognize design science, a practice developed by Buckminster Fuller—also at MIT—in 1956. Fuller’s definition is quoted:

The function of what I call design science is to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artifacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus, coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviors and devices.

That lofty vision, no doubt well-intentioned, today should be read with some apprehension. There’s reason to be careful about unleashing new technologies on an eager society that has, by definition, no basis to assess the impact of the inevitable secondary effects. Philosopher Paul Virilio’s famous quip comes to mind: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” The authors are familiar with Virilio’s work, as they mention him in a later chapter on a different subject. That they have chosen not to invoke him here reveals their preference for an optimistic, and perhaps reductive, outlook.

Bias notwithstanding, the book works well as general introduction to the matter. It’s written with clarity and well organized. Chapters are grouped into four sections. The first one, besides introducing futurecrafting, offers a summary of current ideas regarding the interaction between cities and information, and rightly calls for a human-centered reframing of the smart city debate. The second section describes how digitization is shaping our cities (now “seen” through urban big data), ourselves (as we become a “cyborg society” sprung from the universal adoption of the smartphone) and architectural practice. The third and less inspired glances on the potential of software and networked sensors to improve urban transit, energy management, and economic development. The closing section explores the role of information as a catalyst for citizen action and imagination, shrewdly suggesting that access to information is becoming a basic human right, related to the universal “right to the city” first demanded by Henri Lefebvre.

In times of disillusion with technology and its promises, it's important to remember that we are responsible for setting the rules on how it will be employed. We must reclaim an active, vigilant role to prevent its abuse, all the while we continue to imagine ways of putting it to work for the human cause. In that sense, we may need at least a bit of The City of Tomorrow's optimism. The book begins and ends with the exact same phrase, another quote from tenacious utopian Buckminster Fuller: “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims”. So be it.