Smart cities

The parking meters in Boston’s hip Seaport district are pretty impressive. Tucked away inside their casings, sensors monitor just under 600 parking bays in order to adjust the per-minute pricing depending on the availability of space, day of the week and time. A few kilometres away in Back Bay, the city is taking a completely different approach to parking problems.

Every day, a programmer armed with a tablet walks up and down the rows of carefully restored brick row villas, recording not only which of the 1650 parking spaces are occupied but also those vehicles that have residents’ parking permits and those that are paid for with a credit card or via smartphone.

The data streams are fed into an app that helps drivers to locate available spots faster. As soon as it gets dark, two plastic bubbles behind the library in South End mysteriously illuminate in either red or blue. By indicating the current groundwater levels, the coloured lights serve as an important yardstick for the city’s environmental health. 

Whether it’s about parking, especially hazardous pedestrian crossings, quick fixes for potholes or even tracking the populations of micro-organisms in urban sewage, Boston has a digital service to tackle (almost) any situation or metropolitan issue. Networked intelligence is being harnessed to assist the 670,000-plus residents and local authorities alike in getting a better, safer and it’s said ‘more delightful’ grip on everyday life in the city. All this and much more besides is part of the smart city concept. 

Cities across the globe are investing in hard- and software to network as much of their public utilities as possible to make them smarter and the New England metropolis stands head and shoulders above the rest for the breadth of its experimentation with new services and data that extend well beyond the realms of mobility. 

“The term smart city is problematic because it implies that technology is always the right solution. But it’s about something completely different – sometimes all it takes is a better design. We should be trying out lots of new approaches for improving the quality of life for more and more people. The answers don’t lie exclusively in more sensors or even more software,” says Nigel Jacob, one of the two co-founders of what is undoubtedly the U.S.’s most offbeat government agency – the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. 

MONUM, for short, intentionally starts small in order to better achieve great things and comprises a motley crew of roughly 12 experts in fields ranging from economics through sociology to game design. Based on their own estimates, the postindustrial ‘mechanics’ have turned their hand to between 300 and 400 projects since 2010.

Founded almost 400 years ago, the harbour city is a picturesque blend of well preserved colonial architecture and a modern skyline. But trade and transformation are not without their drawbacks. You’ll hear a litany of complaints from residents about the permanently gridlocked traffic in downtown’s narrow, winding streets, on the urban highways as well as in the many tunnels which connect, for instance, the city and the airport on its outskirts. Boston has always been a trailblazer in all things new mobility. It was here – and not in New York – that America’s first subway line opened to the public in 1897. 

In Cambridge – Boston’s little sister town on the opposite bank of the Charles River – there’s no shortage of outside-the-box ideas for how networked city life should look. Thomas Matarazzo, for one, had the simple yet ingenious brainwave of harnessing millions of commuters to better monitor a city’s infrastructure.

Smartphones in cars can be used to get a real-time picture of every bridge. “Take, for instance, Longfellow Bridge that’s right on our doorstep,” says Matarazzo.

“Originally built in 1906 and thoroughly overhauled only twice since then, it now has to be repaired for over a quarter of a billion dollars. Regular inspections could have saved 186 million of that cost,” says the young postdoctoral fellow with degrees in philosophy and structural engineering, who before joining Ratti’s team conducted research in earthquake-prone Japan.

Instead of limiting bridge inspections to every two years, he has devised a method of extracting the individual vibration profile of any metropolitan bridge from the thousands of daily trips taken across it. The accelerometer in any contemporary mobile phone can replace expensive stationary sensors. 

“Although a mobile app may not be all that precise,” says Matarazzo, after completing initial tests in Boston, “you can still clearly identify deviations in a bridge’s normal vibration pattern.” If enough citizens share a portion of their daily commute to and from work, crowdsourcing can serve as a fast, affordable way to enhance safety. 

“Cell phones are just the beginning,” continues Matarazzo, his eyes shining. “Autonomous vehicles will be equipped with far more sensors in order to survey their urban environment. As a result, the next step in the evolution of mobility will pave the way to a whole lot of new applications.”

soofa co-founders Sandra Richter and Jutta Friedrichs have already made the leap from the academic world into the startup scene. The two Germans develop networked street furniture that is fun and brings people together, their benches have already found their way into 75 cities from Austin to Los Angeles and there are 40 alone dotted around their hometown of Boston. Placed in parks and squares, each bench has its own solar cells, so passersby can quickly charge their devices by plugging them into the built-in USB ports. It’s a real conversation starter. 

“Some people even regularly clean the solar cells on the benches in their area. Which goes to show that tech for modern cities must always have a social dimension,” says Sandra Richter. 

The units house cutting-edge technology: Sensors scan the surroundings for the MAC addresses of cell phones carried by passersby. This data is bundled anonymously so that, over time, urban planners can keep track of which parks and squares are more heavily frequented and therefore require additional maintenance.

But how will all these ideas for smart cities change everyday life for residents? How can we strike a balance between greater digital convenience and worries about data constantly being collected? Kate Darling explores the positive and negative consequences of networking. With her background in law and robot ethics, the Swiss-American working at the MIT Media Lab probes the complex relationship between (wo)man and machine.

“Science fiction has shown us how we develop emotional relationships with machines, but there are biological reasons for this, too. We tend to anthropomorphise things in our environment. People see faces everywhere – even as babies, we’re already starting to do it. That’s how we learn to get to grips with non-human entities.

“Everyone’s in favour of this technology because of its convenience, although many systems don’t yet have any practical use. Designers still have plenty of work to do.” And a lot of it is happening in Darling’s back yard, in Boston.