Cities across the Valley and around the world are looking to technology to help solve their problems and make life better for their residents. And Rob Walker, author of the book "City Tech," says those cities are paying attention to what others are doing, what’s working and what’s not.
"City Tech" is based on columns of the same name Walker has written for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Walker joined The Show to discuss what he found, starting with how robustly he would say cities across the U.S. are trying to embrace tech to try to solve some of their problems.
Full conversation
ROB WALKER: Well, quite robustly and more so every year. I started doing this research that led to the book in 2015, and I would say year over year we've seen more interest from city governments, more interest from and participation from citizens, and more variety in the ways that they, that cities, you know, use quote unquote technology, what technology means because it's come to encompass, you think of apps and and maps and things like this. It has also come to encompass different materials and different planning strategies and all kinds of things, so, quite a bit is the answer to your original question.
MARK BRODIE: Well, are there particular categories that you're finding cities are really trying to use tech for? Like you mentioned, you know, things like maps or communication or maybe different building materials. Like, are, are there particular things that cities do where they're more likely to look to tech than others?
WALKER: Well, there are a couple of, you know, sort of thematic areas of interest. One that comes up not surprisingly more than once is, let's just say transportation. Broad category, but we've seen experiments with everything from different kinds of technology in the mass transportation space, electric buses.
The book is, is global, so there's a lot of examples of that in Latin America. But also the pandemic caused a big rethink in a lot of cities about managing the curb, they call it, which isn't necessarily the vehicle type, although it can mean different vehicle types, but also just the logistics of how can we get delivery to be coordinated in an efficient way and make efficient use of curb space in a downtown area when traffic patterns are changing rapidly. And one of the interesting things about that was it led to all kinds of, you know, different technologies for parking monitoring and stuff like that, which sounds pretty mundane, but it can make a big difference.
And the pandemic era taught city planners and people who watch city planning, maybe something that planners already knew, but is that cities can be much more nimble than we, than the pop culture version of “Parks and Rec” or whatever would have you believe.
They really can move quite quickly and decisively and, and experimentally, you know. Some of the things in the book didn't work out exactly as planned and that's OK because that's the nature of if you're gonna sort of make progress, you have to take some false steps along the way. And I think we've seen an increasing willingness to do that.
BRODIE: I wanna ask you about that nimbleness because I wonder if in some ways it's easier for cities to experiment with tech or just try something then it would be, for example, for like a county or a state to do something, even if it's the same kind of thing.
WALKER: Well, I would say that's probably, you know, that's gonna differ by municipality, but I think that what we've seen is, I would say across the board in, in various governing structures, more of a willingness to work with private side partners, and then I would flip that around and say that I think that there's been an evolution in private companies. You know, commercial companies that operate in ways that impact city plans and designs, to form partnerships rather than do the kind of cliche version of what we think of with Uber and Airbnb in the early days, just kind of showing up and causing cities to react.
BRODIE: You mentioned the word mundane related to like, you know, parking and parking meters, things like that, but it seems as though some of these things, reading through the book, some of these things that cities have used tech to try to do, yes, they might be kind of run of the mill, mundane things, but many of them have a real practical impact in people's day to day lives.
WALKER: Yeah, well, there are a couple of examples. One of my favorite things in the book is an outfit called Co Urbanize, which uses technology. And this was a pre-pandemic enterprise that's still going strong now, but their focus was getting more civic involvement in city planning because plans for parks and spaces and other development uses will have more favorable outcomes if you get more citizen involvement. So they were pioneering the creation of that, put signage on a, in a physical space and, and have a QR code on it that would let someone go to a site that could see the full plans and weigh in, have consumer, citizen feedback. So on one level that's mundane, on another level that's pretty exciting and it, it really does create involvement.
And then on a different kind of totally different kind of example, some of the things in the book include stuff that honestly when I first wrote about it, I thought would be kind of science fiction, is 3D printed housing that has continued to catch on and there are now there are finished assembled houses being lived in, which addresses a real city crisis these days which is affordable housing.
BRODIE: What are city leaders saying about the use of technology and privacy, especially as it relates to data in terms of making sure that they can use the tech to, you know, achieve what they want to achieve, maybe streamline government, make people's interactions with the city more efficient, but at the same time protecting, you know, the residents data and and the city's data?
WALKER: Well, the big flagship story around this privacy issue was, and it, it is covered in the book when I wrote about it initially, it was still in progress, which was this this partnership between municipal entities in Toronto and Google Sidewalk Labs, which was their sort of tech-forward city of the future enterprise, which had a lot of really fascinating ideas but did depend heavily on sensors and measuring movement and things that really made people squeamish about about their privacy.
And in that case, I think there was kind of a, that was a watershed for realizing we can't just charge ahead without really giving serious thought to privacy or even the most, you know, hyped project will crumble, which that partnership eventually did. And I think that the lesson coming out of that is that there's more of an awareness that, that these entities need to partner with each other and trust each other from the beginning and not try to cobble together that trust late in the game.
