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January 26, 2022 Feature

An Equitable Technological Future for Cities

By Elie Bou-Zeid

Will artificial intelligence (AI) corrrect or perpetuate historic discriminatory practices in cities? Will urban heat mitigation strategies and new ecosystem amenities be deployed fairly across all neighborhoods? Will new mobility technologies be accessible to all citizens and localities? Will new policing or security technology deployment have intended or unintended bias? Who will pay to bring urban infrastructure into the twenty-first century? Who owns the data collected by the myriad smart devices in the internet of things, and who is trusted to oversee the use of these data? Who is responsible when technology does not function as intended? As cities begin a deep, but slow, technological transformation, these are some of the questions that emerge and that will require open debate, broad stakeholder engagement, and new legal and policy frameworks. This article provides the broader urban context and some thoughts on this challenge.

Cities and Technology

The prospect of future cities where novel technologies seamlessly act to improve the functioning of urban systems and the wellbeing of their citizens is an appealing vision that has garnered much attention in the past decade.1 The potential is undeniably immense: A city is a system of anthropic technological systems (food, waste and sanitation, recreational public infrastructure, building, transportation, energy, information, water2), and technological advances that would improve how the systems function individually and interact should bring about broad benefits. There are also specific examples of technologies that have improved urban life such as smartphone maps for navigating cities, apps with which citizens can help public work departments locate potholes3 or map urban flood risk,4 bike and e-scooter sharing, and various technologies to manage and reduce energy consumption and that would evolve into the smart grids of the future, to name a few. But challenges to achieving the full potential of technological innovation have also emerged. The barriers can often be political or financial, but even when those are overcome, the route to the technological urban “El Dorado” remains tortuous. Columbus, Ohio, for example has recently emerged as a testbed for smart cities after winning a $50 million grant through the Department of Transportation’s (DoT) Smart City Challenge. The city government was committed to the endeavor, and the DoT funds helped greatly with the financing, but the pace and scale of the technological transformation were modest at the conclusion of the project five years later.5 This is one example of the wider challenge faced by efforts to roll out new technologies and to achieve the full set of expected outcomes. Successful integration of new technologies into existing complex systems requires time and a close partnership among the developers of the technology, its users, and the integrators who will facilitate or regulate its rollout and evaluate its broader repercussions. Recent heightened concerns about the implications of technology for privacy and digital security (due, for example, to the suite of ransomware attacks on sensitive infrastructure) are one example of the techno-skepticism that can emerge when the public and other stakeholders are not fully engaged in the technological integration process.6 Such concerns can often overwhelm techno-optimism about the potential benefits for citizens, who, one must note, are pursuing their lives today without such innovations. Smart urban technology, by and large, remains an intermediate good (derived demand) needed to procure a final good or service (e.g., finding a mode of transportation for citizens or locating an infrastructure malfunction for managers). Therefore, the “smart” in smart cities is the tool, not the final goal. So, what is then the broader social and economic purpose of novel technologies for cities? This becomes a political question because, in most cities, local representatives are elected based on programs that set these socioeconomic objectives. Resilience, livability, healthiness, sustainability, and walkability are some of the final attributes cities and citizens hope technology can help realize, but across all of these aims, achieving equitable outcomes is far from inevitable.

How to Approach the Challenge?

Attaining equitable future cities is a goal of most academic, nongovernmental, and governmental efforts that focus on the coming technological transformation of the urban sphere. Like most of the other attributes listed before, future equity efforts have to be pervasive across all aspects of urban living and governance and are starting from imperfect initial conditions. Today’s cities are neither equitable, nor sustainable, nor resilient, and this reality is partially the result of past technologies and governance. So expecting novel technologies to reverse decades of myopic urban policy, to peel out and improve layers of suboptimal urban design and infrastructure, or to be the silver bullets that solve complex problems that actually require much more intricate efforts to overcome7 sets us up for disappointment. But there are some criteria that can ensure that technological change is moving a city in the right direction, towards its own goals. When it comes to equity, questions such as the following can be examined for an individual technology:

Is the technology equally accessible and beneficial to all citizens? And if not, will people without access be significantly disadvantaged?

The spread of mobile phones, for example, meant that pay phones were no longer a critical public service to provide for a large majority of citizens; their numbers in the US declined from over 2 million in the late 90s to less than 100 thousand by 2018,8 but those who cannot afford a mobile device were left with a limited ability to communicate. New technologies that can replace pay phones (e.g., LinkNYC, which is building slim WiFi and charging kiosks throughout NYC9) are emerging, but slowly. A heavy reliance on mobile phones and associated technologies may also leave citizens who are less tech savvy (or towns that have no means to deploy them or to attract private companies to do so) unable to access (or offer) a broad range of public and private services. What is the alternative? Should all essential services continue to be accessible without new technologies regardless of the cost to cities? If so, should cities pay for the tech alternatives directly or legislate so that private companies that will deploy and profit from services ensure they are equitably accessible?

Another urban system where this question is critical is transportation. New York City has laws preventing cab drivers from declining a trip to any location in the city, but it is much more difficult to hail a cab for a trip starting in many neighborhoods. As a new mobility emerges with autonomous, connected, electric, shared cars and microvehicles, how can a city ensure it serves its population equitably? Will this new mobility be affordable to all? Will it drive a reduction in the investment in public transit that low-income commuters rely on, thus exacerbating inequity? Will the concentrated parking and charging infrastructure needed for these fleets be attracted to cheaper land in lower-income localities or those with a fainter political voice, further stressing their roads and infrastructure?

Could the technology discriminate in its interaction with humans based on race, color, sex and gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, religion, or physical or mental disability?

Recent disconcerting news of AI labeling Black men as primates,10 face recognition technology struggling to recognize people of color,11 or credit limit algorithms discriminating based on gender12 are some examples of the shortfalls that can have serious ethical and equity repercussions. What if that facial recognition algorithm was in an autonomous car faced with the “trolley problem”13—being forced to decide whether to sacrifice one to save many in the hypothetical of a runaway trolley—and could not recognize a subject as human? Who is legally responsible for machine discrimination? The broader problem is that most machine learning approaches rely for training on existing datasets to learn. So, will all the historic discriminatory practices be unintentionally embedded in future AI-based technologies, or can we correct this bias? Could AI decisions result in new data that further reinforce and worsen AI discrimination (e.g., in predictive policing)? How and who can oversee and correct AI decisions? What role will city (local), state, and federal legislation play in regulating the development and deployment of AI decision making?

Is the plan for the deployment of this technology designed to, or does it inadvertently, favor access for certain groups or income levels?

A classic example of current failure to meet this test is the disparity in environmental quality and heat stress between lower- and higher-income neighborhoods in many cities.14 Lower-income neighborhoods at present have a disproportionately high fraction of major traffic arteries causing high pollutant emissions, and a disproportionately low fraction of parks and green infrastructure, which exacerbates air quality and urban overheating. This outcome is not accidental, but rather the result of historical redlining15 and the “legacy of racist federal transportation policies”16 that oftentimes sited major highways through the middle of Black neighborhoods.17 Urban cooling technologies, novel cooler material, and various other innovations will be as crucial for the future of cities as information technologies, so how can cities transition to a planning process that results in an equitable outcome, redressing this inequitable legacy? A number of directly measurable metrics such as the coefficient of variation of the distance between buildings and the nearest park in the city or of the air temperature across neighborhoods can be tracked to monitor the fairness of the present landscape and whether future plans will improve equity.

The Broader Picture

The questions raised above are the minimal starting point to ensure a given urban technology will not exacerbate inequity. In addition to these technology-specific questions, cities should examine their broader efforts to upgrade their systems and infuse novel technologies in them, looking at the whole “smart” portfolio and examining if it addresses the needs of all constituents fairly, or if it favors politically powerful groups whose opinions and needs have a more direct route to decision makers. A fair (equitable) outcome cannot result from spatially homogeneous (equal) deployments,18 given the inequitable starting point. For example, new green infrastructure plans should prioritize neighborhoods that lack it; new mobility solutions ought to target areas that currently have limited access to other transportation modes, public internet or 5G infrastructure can focus on localities with limited broadband access, to provide a few examples. In other words, technological portfolios should aim to redress existing inequalities, not only to avoid aggravating them. Engaging citizens and stakeholders for co-producing technology adoption plans is the slower but most direct route to integration and acceptance of technological change that affects citizens in their everyday life,19 and to reassuring citizens that technological investments are not diverting funds from other critical services. Thus, cities with transparent and trusted governance will have a much easier task in embracing technological solutions with their citizens and ensuring equitable outcomes (compared to efforts led by tech companies20 or those in less democratic cities), but these also tend to be the cities that are most equitable and livable to start with. So, if the ability of technology to enhance equity depends on how equitable a city is to start with, the future may be one where the present divide between world cities could be further accentuated.

Endnotes

1. Jonathan Woetzel et al., Smart Cities: Digital Solutions for a More Livable Future, McKinsey Global Inst. (June 5, 2018), https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/smart-cities-digital-solutions-for-a-more-livable-future.

2. Ann Ramaswami et al., Meta-principles for Developing Smart, Sustainable, and Healthy Cities, 352 Sci. 940 (2015), http://sites.bu.edu/urban/files/2020/06/Ramaswami-etal-16-Meta-principles.pdf.

3. Street Bump, City of Boston (July 1, 2019), https://www.boston.gov/transportation/street-bump.

4. Peta Jakarta, Univ. of Wollongon (Austl.), https://www.uow.edu.au/global-challenges/sustaining-coastal-and-marine-zones/peta-jakarta.

5. Aarian Marshall, America’s “Smart City” Didn’t Get Much Smarter, Wired (June 29, 2021), https://www.wired.com/story/us-smart-city-didnt-get-much-smarter.

6. Madeleine Wattenbarger, The Mexican Town That Refused to Become a Smart City, The Guardian (Oct. 16, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/16/the-mexican-town-that-refused-to-become-a-smart-city#:~:text=Lupita%20Tecual%20Porquillo%20had,three%20hours%20from%20Mexico%20City; Adam Carter & John Rieti, Sidewalk Labs Cancels Plan to Build High-Tech Neighbourhood in Toronto amid COVID-19, CBC News (May 7, 2020), https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-cancels-project-1.5559370.

7. Ben Green, The Smart Enough City (2019), https://smartenoughcity.mitpress.mit.edu/42mg23v9.

8. Nathaniel Meyersohn, There Are Still 100,000 Pay Phones in America, CNN Bus. (Mar. 19, 2018), https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/news/companies/pay-phones/index.html.

9. LinkNYC, https://www.link.nyc/.

10. Dustin Jones, Facebook Apologizes After Its AI Labels Black Men as “Primates,” NPR (Sept. 4, 2021), https://www.npr.org/2021/09/04/1034368231/facebook-apologizes-ai-labels-black-men-primates-racial-bias.

11. Alex Najibi, Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology, Harv. Univ.: SITN Blog (Oct. 24, 2020), https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/?web=1&wdLOR=cAE45F8A8-9B03-654C-A721-2682A4AC76FF.

12. Subrat Patnaik, Apple Co-founder Says Apple Card Algorithm Gave Wife Lower Credit Limit, Reuters (Nov. 10, 2019), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-apple/apple-co-founder-says-apple-card-algorithm-gave-wife-lower-credit-limit-idUSKBN1XL038.

13. Trolley Problem, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem.

14. Viniece Jennings, Cassandra Johnson Gaither & Richard Schulterbrandt Gragg, Promoting Environmental Justice Through Urban Green Space Access: A Synopsis, 5 Env’t Just. 1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2011.0007.

15. Jeremy S. Hoffman, Vivek Shandas & Nicholas Pendleton, The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intr-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas, 8 Climate 12 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3390/cli8010012.

16. Rachael Dottle, Laura Bliss & Pablo Robles, What It Looks Like to Reconnect Black Communities Torn Apart by Highways, Bloomberg CityLab (July 28, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism.

17. However, the Biden administration’s “recently proposed federal budget includes funds to ‘reconnect’ neighbourhoods [sic] severed by such highways throughout the country.” Eric Foner, United States of Amnesia, 43 London Rev. of Books, Sept. 9, 2021, at 13.

18. Ellen Gutoskey, What’s the Difference Between Equity and Equality?, Mental Floss (June 11, 2020), https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/625404/equity-vs-equality-what-is-the-difference.

19. Green, supra note 7.

20. Carter & Rieti, supra note 6.

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By Elie Bou-Zeid

Elie Bou-Zeid is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University and the director of its Metropolis Project, which supports urban technological innovations that make cities more sustainable, resilient, livable, and equitable. The article has benefitted from the comments and insight of Professor Sharon Harlan of Northeastern University and Dr. Dean Chahim, a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities at Princeton University.