2
Complexity is found on the edge of chaos and cities can be dangerous, unpredictable places. There is an odd sensation of being in a crowd, that one is no longer oneself, no longer in control, exposed to the flows and emotions of the throng around you. Throughout history there has been a fear of the mob, a word that was created in the 1680s to describe the mobile vulgaris: the faceless, seething mass that could rise up at any moment.
Since then, writers have revealed the madness of crowds, while others have tried to show how wise the collective can be. As Elias Canetti shows in his book Crowds and Power, those in charge have always looked on the mass with suspicion and fear; the crowd was something to control, break up, bring to heel by any means necessary. This sense of precariousness was brought close to home in August 2011 when riots ignited throughout London. It started like so many riots before in Britain, the US, France and elsewhere: an attack on a young black man at the hands of the authorities.
On 4 August 2011 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot by armed police in Tottenham, north London, and the next three days were filled with rumours: that he had shot at the police first; the bullet had passed through his chest and stuck in the hand radio of the officer behind him; he had a gun down his sock; it was a replica gun; it was a real gun kept in a sock but under the passenger seat of the car. That he was a family man, a loving father of four children; that his uncle was a gangster on the Manchester drugs scene. That he was under surveillance because he was suspected of planning a revenge killing, and was acting suspiciously.
Yet no officials felt it worthwhile to tell the family that their son, husband, father had died, and on Saturday 6 August, they led a peaceful march outside Tottenham police station, hoping to obtain some answers. The protesters stood quietly outside the station all afternoon waiting for an official to explain what had happened. The riot that followed that night and for three nights afterwards was recorded, then beamed around the world.1
The following day, Sunday 7 August, the news began to spread, the contagion infecting the BlackBerry SMS network, Facebook and other mobile technologies. As soon as it got dark, violence erupted once more in Tottenham as well as in Brixton, Islington and even in the centre of the city at Oxford Street. On the Monday night a furniture store in Croydon was burned to the ground, the whole event captured by a hovering helicopter on BBC News24. There were stories of gangs rushing into restaurants and demanding jewellery from diners as they sat at their tables. The robbery of one foreign student was caught on webcam, giving the impression that his assailants had first approached him to see if he was all right. There was dramatic footage of metal shutters on the fronts of shops being peeled back and swarms of looters piling in.
In the aftermath of the 2011 riots, while there was much commentary on the greed and shamelessness of the young, the problems of social exclusion and unemployment, disenfranchisement and trust, there was little discussion of the role of London itself, the ways that the city works, or what happens when it doesn’t. On this occasion, not for the first time, the city turned in on itself with extraordinary violence; the complex system self-destructed. The mayor and politicians, the normal systems of control, were incapable of taking hold of the situation. Yet perhaps we should be asking why these are such uncommon scenes? If the city is as chaotic and lawless as we assume, why are there so few riots?
Consider the beehive.
Throughout history, man has been judged in contrast to the humble bee; since classical times writers, philosophers and politicians have examined the intricate goings-on of the beehive as a metaphor for human society, the intimate relationship between the metabolism of the city and the hive. In Virgil’s elegy to rural life, The Georgics, the beehive was a model of democracy: ‘all’s the state’s; the state provides for all’.2 But how was the state organised? Virgil identified a hierarchy within the commune, governed by an elected male, who could be usurped if found wanting. At the lower rungs of the ladder, each individual bee was a trader, and benefited not just himself but the whole through his honest toil.
In subsequent centuries, the image of the industrious beehive was revived whenever the complexity of human interaction sought explanation. However, the metaphor was a flexible one: for Seneca, the principal bee was an unelected king. In the feudal period, the unquestioning worker bee was a paradigm for the serf or villein who had no right to improve his station in life. The English word ‘bee’ derives from the Dutch name for ‘king’ and so, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the bee was once more imagined as the model for a stable society, everyone happy in their place.3
When revolution was in the air, was the hive a kingdom or a republican commonwealth? Were the workers slaves or stakeholders? And what of the identity of the leader? It was not until improvements in scientific observation, conveniently coinciding with the reign of Elizabeth I, that writers claimed that the hive was ‘an Amazonian or feminine Kingdome’.4
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the cities of the world began rapidly to expand, nurturing protean consumer markets, globalised trade and the twinkling of the Industrial Revolution, the hive became a uniquely urban metaphor. As a result, rather than stand as a symbol for a rigid, ordered hierarchy, the hive became the model for a chaotic scrum of selfishness, industry and profit. This was summed up in Bernard Mandeville’s vituperative poem ‘The Fable of the Bees’, published in 1714.
Mandeville now portrayed the city as a swarm in which all the bees were driven by self-interest. More dangerously, he proposed that without vice – the individual pursuit of material gain – the hive collapsed. London at that time was the greatest city in the world, at the centre of an emerging empire that stretched from the cantons of Calcutta to the sugar plantations of Jamaica, with a banking culture far more advanced than any European rivals. As Mandeville walked around the city, he read the streets, dictating a scene that we recognise today – the modern capital with all its contradictions, perils and paradoxes. However, his poem celebrated the complexity: ‘Thus every Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise’.5 The city itself was the incubator of the deadliest sins yet counterintuitively combined to create a place of virtue.
Was it trade itself that kept the city safe? Did the prospects of business regulate and pacify society? Mandeville offers a vision of the city that did not need mayors, politicians or police, for the market itself was the invisible hand that made a virtuous whole out of the self-interested parts.
Contrast this beehive with a contemporary image from the work of the French street artist JR, who uses his large black and white flyposts to question people’s assumptions about their place in society. In 2011 he was awarded the TED Prize, yet his career began when he found a camera on the Paris Métro and began to plaster around the city vast portraits of people that he knew from the banlieus, the forgotten estates on the periphery of Paris. The exhibition was called Portrait of the Generation and he was determined to use the largest gallery in the world as his canvas: the city itself.
Next, JR started a project in Israel, affixing large portraits of both Israeli and Palestinian residents upon the newly constructed concrete border wall. In 2008 he began a series of projects called Women are Heroes in Brazil, Kenya, India and Cambodia. In Rio de Janeiro, JR visited the oldest favela in the city: Morro da Providencia. There he photographed many of the women he met and then attached large-format portraits of their eyes to the outside of the slum’s buildings, giving the eerie impression of the favela itself looking out over the rest of the city. For JR, this project was a reminder of the role of women at the heart of the community yet it was also a graphic manifestation of how life on the streets itself cannot be ignored.
Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, decorated by JR’s murals
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs shows how the street develops its own equilibrium, which she calls ‘the eyes on the street’: ‘an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves’.6 On Jacobs’s street these include the shopkeepers, the old woman who sometimes sits on the stoop on a warm evening and the regulars at the White Horse Bar. It is through these small meetings and contacts that an ordinary street can be transformed into a self-organising public space. Yet it often takes an artist like JR to remind us of this power, to make this invisible system that balances the everyday life of the city visible once more.
So how does the city work? Is it self-regulated like the beehive or the favela, controlled by the market or the eyes on the street? Both are examples of complexity working within the community, the power of connections as a means of ordering our everyday relationships. But the sense of precariousness never seems far away, that things will fall apart at any moment.
The city is a place of liberty, where we are free to pursue our own individual fortunes, but it is also a place that crams many different people together, threatening conflict and inequality. Today there are places in the world where the slums of the very poorest who cannot afford clean water are within yards of the palaces of the super-rich with crystal-blue swimming pools. As a result we often write the city’s story in terms of the tensions between the top and the bottom, between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the weak. Because of this we assume that inequality is hard-wired into the city – that there has to be those who prosper and those who are desperate, that power will always be in the hands of the few who run the city from above.
This is not the way a beehive works nor is it how Jacobs’s Hudson Street regulates itself, and is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of complexity itself. Despite the importance of the queen bee, her royalty is something that we as human observers have bestowed upon her, not her followers. The beehive is in fact a completely democratic decision-making organism, as Thomas D. Seeley explains: ‘The queen lies at the heart of the whole operation . . . it is also true that thousands of attentive daughters (workers) are all ultimately striving to promote her survival and reproduction. Nevertheless, a colony’s queen is not the royal decider . . . indeed there is no all-knowing central planner . . . the work of a hive is instead governed collectively by the workers themselves.’7
Every complex system – an anthill, beehive or city – is built up from the inside: generated rather than fabricated. In other words, a complex city is created from the bottom up rather than the top down. Thus, although we assume that because the city walls were commissioned by kings and because the political power of the metropolis is enshrined in the stones of the palace, cathedral, banks and parliament, this is where power flows from, think again; it is not that simple. Power emerges and is regulated from the bottom up and can be found in the places where the most people are. The energy of Jacobs’s Hudson Street is, as we have seen, the electricity that drives the city. It is this energy – the life of the street itself – that is the true measure of the vitality of the metropolis.
Yet cities have mayors who claim to have the power of the city in their hands. What is the nature of this relationship between the political muscle of the men in suits, and the quieter self-regulation of the eyes on the streets? We need mayors but we need vibrant streets as well. City hall and the street need to find a way of creating a dialogue. But where does this equilibrium lie? How much of it concerns the personality of the person in charge and his own relationship with the city? Can technology be used to negotiate the distance between parliament and community? Does the Information Age change this relationship, finding a new balance between the two ends of the city?
Part of the answer to these questions can be unearthed in an intellectual debate of the seventeenth century: in the work of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke about the nature of power itself. Hobbes was a mathematician who as a young man spent much time travelling through Europe as a tutor to various young aristocrats. On one such voyage, he was fortunate enough to meet Galileo Galilei. As England was slowly descending into civil war in the 1640s, Hobbes began to think about how to use science to understand human society. In Leviathan, which was published in 1651, he set out a pitiful vision of human nature: that man was driven by his desires, and was constantly at war with his fellow men. As a result:
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.8
Hobbes’s only solution to this vicious state of nature was firm and indissolvable power. Thus in his history of human society, the first society, and the first city, was formed with an unbreakable social contract in which the supreme power was always right, and its methods could never be questioned. This sovereign could take the form of one man – a monarch; a select group – the aristocracy; or a democractic assembly of all. Of these three, only the first was incorruptible. In Hobbes’s city, power came from only one place – from above – and was to be enforced in any way the sovereign saw fit. This authority was not to be questioned, as all protest threatened a return to that vicious state of nature.
John Locke experienced the same civil war as a young boy; his father fought on the side of the Parliamentarians against the Royalists and witnessed horrific atrocities. As a young philosopher in Oxford, following the wars, Locke hoped to formulate a social system that would banish the terrors of his childhood for ever. Like Hobbes, he sought to rewrite the social contract but, instead of fear, Locke thought that trust was at the heart of all relationships and he saw the state of nature as a place of equality, rather than a place of violence.
In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke attempted to describe a harmonious city, one that had found a balance between the people on the streets and the powers of the crown. In this new society, power was not the last redoubt against chaos but the mutual pooling of rights into sovereign hands. The contract that regulated this relationship was a dynamic document setting out the rights, obligations and limits of all signatories. Power flowed between the streets and the citadel. The people were allowed to overthrow a tyrant; the dutiful sovereign had obligations towards his subjects.
These seventeenth-century texts may seem arcane and irrelevant to the complex modern world, but they are not. Imagine two cities: Hobbestown and Lockeville. Both are vibrant, contemporary metropolises, places that people travel far to reach in the hope of making their fortune and calling them home. While each city has many qualities, each encapsulates those of the founding philosophical fathers.
The modern face of Hobbestown can be found around the world: Beijing, the glistening capital of the Republic of China, has transformed since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1990s, yet it still remains a closely regulated city in which the party and the mayor have control over land, business and community. The city showed its best face in 2008, when it staged the most expensive Olympic Games in history, centred around the Bird’s Nest stadium, partly designed by local artist Ai Wei Wei.
Similarly, the rapid rise of Dubai from a dusty Gulf town to a metropolis dedicated to finance, leisure and trade is one of the urban triumphs of the past decades. The city’s initial success was founded on the discovery of oil in 1966, yet in the hands of the Al Maktoum dynasty, the city has diversified its power with ambitious state-initiated projects such as expanding the port, attracting international business, land development and tourism. Dubai is now a mecca for pleasure seekers and businessmen. This is typified by the Burj Khalifa, the largest skyscraper in the world, which rises high above the desert, symbolising the city’s thrusting modernity.
However, all is not as it seems. In August 2011, while under house arrest in China, Ai Wei Wei described the true face of the city that had been hidden from the tourists: ‘A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom . . . Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbours are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation . . . Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.’9 As he continues to be under constant surveillance and harassment from the authorities, he has been accused of economic crimes for tax evasion, as well as crimes of pornography and bigamy. He has been banned from travelling outside China.
Dubai, in theory, is a nation run by a constitutional monarchy but most of the key government roles are in the hands of family members. The city was built by thousands of workers shipped in from the subcontinent who have few rights and no chance to share in the pleasures of the state or citizenship. In both Beijing and Dubai the desires of state, in the person of the party or the Emir, supersede the individual citizen. Rapid urban change has been entirely driven from above. Without a doubt, both places are hugely successful models of what a city can be; but is this the kind of place you would want to live?
Singapore, the world’s most successful city state, on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, is perhaps the paradigmatic Hobbestown. Despite a constitution modelled on the British parliamentary system, with frequent compulsory elections, it has had only one party in power since gaining self-governing status in 1959 and independence in 1963: Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP). Singapore has been called many things, from ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’10 to ‘one of the cleanest, safest, richest and dullest cities in the world’,11 but there is no question that, in its first fifty years, it became one of the great global cities of our times.
This confused picture is reflected in Singapore’s standing within the many rankings that now catalogue the different faces of the world’s cities. In 2011 it ranked first in the Mercer Consulting Best City for Infrastructure and the Ericsson Networked Society list; Forbes magazine called it the ‘World’s Smartest City’; it came third in the ranking for the Euromonitor Top City Destination and fifth in both the Global Power City Index and the Cities of Opportunity.12 Across the board the city had risen into the top five for business; however, in the Economist Liveability rankings, it came an unimpressive fifty-second, brought down by the categories of environment and freedom.
The Singapore waterfront: urban paradise or despotic theme park?
The island state first came to prominence as an Imperial entrepot between Britain and South-east Asia, and in the nineteenth century was developed as a multinational community of Europeans, native Malay and Chinese merchants who set up a bridgehead to the mainland, and Indians who arrived to service the empire. After a failed experiment to unify with Malaysia between 1963 and 1965, independent Singapore set out to establish a new identity alongside an economic policy of renewal, for as Lee Kuan Yew later wrote in his autobiography: ‘We had to create a new kind of economy, try new methods and schemes never tried before anywhere else in the world, because there was no other country like Singapore.’13
The PAP were determined to make Singapore the gateway to Asia, to encourage foreign investment into the city and to make the port the transport and business hub for the region. Lee developed an idiosyncratic method to ensure Singapore’s future: he had been inspired by Japan’s authoritarian control of the island in 1942, as he was starting off his career as a wartime entrepreneur. After 1945 he travelled to Britain and was impressed by the Labour Government efforts to establish the welfare state. On his return, he formulated his own non-ideological pragmatic philosophy on how to get things done, a mixture of authoritarianism and welfare; as he famously told the Strait Times: ‘We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.’14 This approach has proved to be remarkably successful.
From the 1960s, Lee’s strong government nurtured the free market, initiated rapid state-led industrialisation and far-reaching infrastructure schemes such as housing and transport, and imposed strict social policies encouraging savings rather than consumption, as well as a cheap and compliant workforce. As Lee has noted, there was not enough time to engage with the people over a shared vision of the city: ‘close engagement of the mass citizenry was not only unnecessary but would have been a nonstarter’.15 Instead, he ensured that Singapore became the perfect environment for foreign investment. In addition to cheap labour, there was widespread promotion of education to improve the skilled workforce, so that where the average 1960s adult had only three years of schooling, today the city boasts a 95 per cent literacy rate. It was also important to stamp out corruption, so Lee raised civil-service wages while also raising the penalties for being caught.
He then courted the petrochemical industry and electronics firms as well as encouraging multinational corporations to make the island home for their local headquarters, attracted by the low costs of development, a good infrastructure and political stability. By 1980 the economy benefited from $7,072 million in foreign investment. Yet during that decade the city also suffered from its first recession. This was partly due to the rise of neighbours such as Indonesia and Malaysia who also started to offer low labour costs and basic services, forcing Singapore to rethink.
In response Singapore declared another era of redevelopment both to the fabric of the city and the people living there. There was an effort to encourage local entrepreneurship while also attracting more hi-tech and knowledge-based industries, such as Lucas Films and Biopolis, an international bio-tech research centre, to the island. Culture and tourism have also become important, accounting for $5.6 billion by 1999, and exemplified by the new Marina Bay complex, including theatres, a business hub and even more malls in a city that seems dominated by ‘consumptionscapes’, as well as a Formula 1 racetrack.
Singapore now sells itself as the super-charged Asian creative hub. Yet this commitment to the Information Age comes with risks and has altered the relationship between the government and the people, who are now encouraged to be innovative, independent and educated. You cannot encourage innovators and a knowledge economy and then expect them to act like dutiful servants: schools began to teach a new curriculum that encouraged critical thinking rather than learning by rote; the launch of the ‘Singapore One’ initiative guaranteed every citizen a high-speed internet connection while the iN2015 masterplan hopes to develop a new generation of global business leaders.16
This revolution within a revolution – which in time will surely come to question Singapore’s Hobbesian way of life – has nonetheless been dictated from the top down. The appearance of the new regime as a ‘listening government’ that today encourages criticism needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, as commentator Karl Hack notes: it may no longer be ‘just an authoritarian one-way street but rather a two-way street in which the lane travelling towards the government is narrower’.17
Singapore’s Hobbestown may appear to be an unsurpassable example of how to develop a world-beating city, proving that a firm hand and strong government are the only things that can assure the metropolis. This is in extreme contrast to Lockeville, the city where the relationship between the political élite and the streets is a free and fair dialogue. Lockeville itself might never look as impressive or grandiose as Hobbestown; here, centrally planned projects do not get waved through without discussion; the infrastructure will most likely be stretched and in need of repair; the listening city is also a talking city and there are many opinions to take into consideration. One such example can be found just 12 kilometres west of Manhattan.
Having reached its zenith at the beginning of the twentieth century as an industrial powerhouse, port and centre for the insurance industry, downtown Newark still boasts elegant, early-Beaux Art skyscrapers and Art Deco apartment blocks that have only recently been renovated after decades of neglect. The decline began after the Second World War when industry moved on and real estate began to plummet; at the same time the city’s population halved. As the middle classes fled for the suburbs, the inner city was flooded by the great migration of black and Latino migrants moving up from the south in search of work. In the hands of weak politicians, the city soon began to spiral. In 1967, ignited by another instance of police brutality against the black majority, riots tore through the streets. In 1981 the murder rate stood at 161 deaths a year, while a quarter of all families lived below the poverty line. In the 1990s Newark was named ‘the most dangerous city in America’.
Since 2006 Cory A. Booker has been the mayor charged with Newark’s revival and his administration offers fascinating insights into the workings of a hypothetical Lockeville. Booker was born in Washington, DC but grew up in the affluent neighbourhood of Harrington Park, New Jersey. He graduated from Stanford where he excelled as an American football player; he was then awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and finally ended his studies at Yale Law School. His parents were part of the civil-rights generation and the first African-American executives at IBM; he later claimed that they raised him as an idealist, and taught him that ‘we were a country that was formed in perfect ideals but a savagely imperfect reality’.18 Before finishing at Yale he moved into a flat on the sixteenth floor of Brick Towers, central Newark, having been inspired by the story of 78-year-old Virginia Jones, who had refused to leave the building despite the murder of her son in the lobby by a local gang. Booker started to campaign for residents’ rights and stayed living in Brick Tower until it was demolished in 2006.
Booker failed to win the mayorship on his first attempt in 2002, but won with a 72 per cent majority in 2006, when the incumbent Sharpe James stepped down from the race (and two years later was convicted for corruption). Booker’s campaign gained media attention; Oprah Winfrey called him ‘a genius’ and he ran on a ticket of public safety, urban renewal and respect.
While many dismissed the new mayor as ‘all talk’, Booker understands the power of communication. As well as holding regular surgeries to which citizens are invited to bring their worries, Booker often spends his evenings riding alongside the patrolmen on the streets, talking to the people he finds. Following the murders of three young men he even entered the pulpit to spread his message. When Brick Towers was demolished, he moved to a new trouble spot on Hawthorne Avenue in order to keep close to his work.
As he announced in 2006, Newark was to lead the way in urban transformation, and when President Obama requested that Booker join his own team in 2008, Booker refused, preferring to run for a second mayoral term. Newark is now the fastest-growing city in north-east US, and violent crime has been drastically reduced. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, donated $100 million to the city’s schools and many others have started to see Newark as a place worth investing in. This re-emerging Lockeville is on the way to recovery and while it might never achieve the economic might of Singapore, it is anything but a ‘machine without a soul’.
In 2010 Booker won a second term with a slightly lower percentage, on the promise of continuing the fight. It has not always run smoothly. In order to cut costs, he had to make tough decisions on budget spending; some police had to be laid off and crime rates began to rise once again. In 2011 he was forced to testify in the trial of his deputy, who was indicted for extortion. At the same time, Booker had attracted over $700 million in new building contracts, offering jobs for 2,500 locals. Yet the most startling action of his mayoralty came in April 2012, when Booker, refusing to listen to security advice, saved a woman from a burning house in his own neighbourhood of Upper Clinton Hill. In a press conference the following day, after a visit to the hospital for smoke inhalation and minor burns, he observed: ‘I’m a neighbor who did what most neighbors would do.’19
Fortunately, most cities look more like Lockeville rather than Hobbestown, yet they unfortunately lack charismatic politicians like Booker. The image of Booker talking to kids on the street corner, living within one of the more deprived neighbourhoods of his community, is a powerful one that encourages trust amongst Newarkers. For many cities, however, it is more common to judge a mayor by his public works, and whether the trains run on time, rather than his character. Thus throughout history politicians have used architecture to manage and control the relationship between City Hall and the street. For centuries the emphasis was on grandeur, conjuring an awesome power in stone. Consider, for example, the traditional places of power: the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, the Senate House in Washington, the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Despite being beacons of democracy, these are places where the machinations of power are firmly fixed behind closed doors, apart from seats for a handful of invited guests in the public galleries. From the streets outside one cannot see the democratic process being enacted in our name.
In recent decades, however, a number of architects have proposed that there is a relationship between the visibility of democracy and trust; this ‘architecture of transparency’ blows away the cobwebs of secretive government and forces a new openness. In 1992, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Foster + Partners were invited to renovate the historic Reichstag in Berlin; the brief was to create a symbol for the reunification of the whole nation as well as a home for the democratic future of Germany, the Bundestag. The glass dome, which rises above the original 1870s building, stands above the central debating chamber, allowing visitors to look down into the room and observe democracy in action. Foster + Partners repeated the trick in 2002 with the new City Hall in London, home for the recently created Greater London Authority and mayor (who have respectively called the building ‘the glass testicle’ [Ken Livingstone] and more primly ‘the glass gonad’ [Boris Johnson]). The ovoid building was completely created in glass, transparent from all directions.
A more recent, and more radical, experiment in transparency can be found at City Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, designed by the groundbreaking Danish architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), who plan to create a vast periscope within the central council chamber, so that the politicians inside can look up and see the life upon the streets, focusing their minds on what they are supposed to be doing, and who they are supposed to be representing. In reverse, the people on the streets can also see into the chamber and survey the efforts of the people who are supposed to be working in their name. As BIG highlight in their outline: ‘In a traditional tower only the king at the top gets to enjoy the great view. The periscope is a form of democratic tower, where even the average Tallinn citizen on the street gets to enjoy the overview from the top.’20
The Tallinn City Hall offers an image for the new relationship between the politicians and the streets in glass and steel. Yet there is no reason to believe that this will really change the way the city works, or that architecture is as dynamic or immediate as imagined. Could design ever be as effective as the experience of Mayor Booker leaving Newark City Hall and talking to his voters?
The spirit of the city does not come from the civic structures or latest architectural adventures commissioned to mediate urban relations. Instead, its personality and character emerges from the connections and relationships between the many people who come together there. And just as the density and intermeshing of connections nurtures the complexity of a place, so the city becomes a superlinear site for information.
It is information, not architecture, that constitutes the lifeblood of Lockeville. So rather than considering the relationship between City Hall and the street as one of the distance between two places, instead we should consider them as two information sources. It is not enough for City Hall to give the impression of being a listening place; it has to be a place in constant dialogue. Booker clearly understands the value of making personal contact with the people that he represents but he also appreciates the power of technology to connect with them.
Thus, as much as the power of his personality and the will to be on the front line, it is Booker’s use of technology that makes him the mayor of Lockeville. For example, he set up his first blog in August 2008 and later joined Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (currently with over 1.2 million followers). Since then, new media has been at the centre of his listening government. In 2009 he launched the Newark Tech Corps to explore ways of enhancing and harnessing democracy through technology. While this is by no means a replacement for solid policy or effective implementation, it nonetheless changes the power relations within the city.
Booker understands what political blogger Josh Sternberg highlights as the four advantages of new media in the hands of a local politician: create a conversation; report a broader strategy; bring about change; put people at the centre of policy. Booker’s use of inspirational quotes, ‘re-tweeting’ positive messages, invitations to events and notes of encouragement are direct and personal, helping to develop a trusting conversation between city hall and street, and in January 2011 he launched the Get Moving campaign, reporting on his own fitness regime in order to get others to exercise.
Mayor Cory Booker digging in the Snowmaggedon
This use of technology was highlighted during the blizzards of December 2010 when Newark was under a blanket of snow. As the streets ground to a standstill, Booker’s Twitter account began to fill up with requests for help. ‘Can u DM me his phone #?RT @NewNewark: @corybooker rec this text Tell mayor, Mr Lou Jones 224 Richileu ter. He’s disabled needs help.’ The mayor began first by allocating resources and then by going out onto the street himself with a shovel to dig out stranded residents.
On 28 December he was digging until 3 am. While many critics complained that this stunt was the result of a flawed emergency plan, it had a powerful effect upon the community, encouraging other residents to help. One Tweeter, Gustin, announced: ‘I think the lesson that @corybooker taught us is that we’ve got to take responsibility for our own block. I’m heading out.’21
The events of ‘Snowmageddon’ also attracted large media attention that promoted Booker’s message, often comparing his response favourably to New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, as well as the fortunes of Newark itself.
While Mayor Booker has used social media to offer his constituents a very personal relationship, there are also a number of other instances that show the power of sharing information to enhance the city. In 2009 Mayor Bloomberg launched the BigApps competition, offering the relatively small prize of $5,000 to the developer who could come up with the best software to help people ‘use’ New York better. He also opened up to developers the NYC Data Mine, the city’s online data resource for all statistics and government information. The results were astounding. Over eighty new apps were delivered within three months, and among the winners announced in January 2010 were NYC WayFinder, which helps to get you to the nearest subway station; TaxiHack, which allows users to post real-time comments on taxis; and apps that help you find a school, bullying hotspots, the nearest trees, 3D maps for the iPhone, and in which public library you can find a certain book.
A second competition was launched in autumn 2010 with an increased $40,000 prize. The winning ideas included Sportaneous, which facilitates the organisation of pick-up games and sports at public venues using real-time data from the NYC Parks and Recreation Department; Bestparking, which finds out the best places to park in the city and Brooklyn, and was quickly downloaded by over 100,000 urban drivers; and Roadify, which collates all real-time data on public transit and road conditions to help you better plan your journey.
At much the same time as the first BigApps contest, Mayor Johnson launched the London Datastore (www.data.london.gov.uk), filled with information on everything from abandoned cars and education league tables, to the expense-account details of London government members. In time it also was allowed to display real-time data for the tube system, the police and local NHS. Emer Coleman, who launched the Datastore, told me that the demand for information was beyond every expectation, and that Londoners have used it in numerous, sometimes unexpected, ways.
The Datastore is not just a mechanism for transparency. While it is important that the city government proves itself to be open and accountable, establishing a sense of trust between the city and City Hall, the variety of information being offered to general scrutiny has a far more valuable potential in engaging the active citizen. Once data is made available, City Hall loses control of how that information is used, and by whom: hackers, activists, website designers, coders or app entrepreneurs. It can be utilised to start a political campaign or launch a new business. This donation of the control of information by the traditional government powers to whoever has a broadband connection and a special interest is at the heart of a new revolution in politics, Gov 2.0. And once again this new era is being driven by cities.
But as with all transitions, the dawning of the age of Gov 2.0 comes with certain anxieties and unexpected consequences. To date it has been a slow process of acclimatisation in the same way a cautious swimmer dips their toe into the cool water of the pool before deciding to dive in. To begin with there was much investment in the pushing of government services online in the attempt to streamline and make the management of such tasks accessible and convenient. Therefore, from early on, one could apply for a driver’s licence, pay council tax, get involved with polls and surveys, or book a doctor’s appointment. This is a facility that connects government with the citizen through technology but the user is still the customer: there is the possibility of feedback but the user cannot change the way things are done. This is hugely useful but is not the revolution that the web offers.
Many within government quickly understood the web as a sophisticated broadcasting tool – the means to get their message across. Politicians set up websites; government departments told people what they did in blogs, Twitter feeds and podcasts. Once again, however, this innovation encouraged a one-way traffic of information. This was made emphatically clear during the riots of August 2011 when the public-order division of the Metropolitan Police, CO11, set up a Twitter feed allowing them to give real-time information updates (@CO11metpolice); within days they had over 15,000 followers. The social network, therefore, was used as a highly effective communication tool, letting people know where the danger was. It is disappointing to see, however, that the Met team only ever followed eight other feeds, all exclusively public services. In 2012 they changed their address to @metpoliceevents and had 32,800 followers, but still only themselves followed forty-six other feeds, predominantly other branches of the force. In effect, they are talking but not interested in listening; they are happy to ignore over 32,750 potential sources of information, active citizens who could help them do their job.
It is this spontaneous potential of social media to galvanise the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ that stands at the heart of Gov 2.0 and will transform the way cities are run in the future. An indication of this can be seen in the launch of the 311 phone line in New York by Mayor Bloomberg. Before he was mayor, Bloomberg made his fortune developing a financial-data business, and he understands the value of information; as a result 311 has become the cornerstone of his mayoralty. It was started in March 2003 to provide New Yorkers with a single helpline combining all the other services within the city administration (excluding the emergency services), from noise pollution, food stamps and school applications to park maintenance. By May 2010 over 100 million calls had been logged.
By setting up an information line to create a dialogue between city hall and the street, one should be prepared for a huge number of complaints. Few people call 311 to thank the mayor for his work or to congratulate his departments on a good job done. In time Bloomberg also added new services to the line: in 2009 he campaigned for re-election on the ticket of adding real-time information on the transit system; that same year he also launched a stop smoking programme. The line also coordinates with the nyc.gov website and individual queries can be pursued online; there is now a 311 app as well, and questions can be asked via SMS or Skype. The idea has now been adopted by other cities throughout the US.
Yet it is not just the politicians who are driving the initiative forward. Technology also allows the traffic of information to travel from the street to city hall. While schemes like 311 are hugely popular, they are still in the hands of the civic administration.
In contrast, a number of open-source campaigners such as OpenPlans and Code For America have raised funding for projects such as Open311, a programme to develop a universal information line, a platform that is accessible and democratic for all. So far the project has been launched across America and adopted by twenty-four cities, including San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. As open source, this means that anyone can access the data files in any of the participating cities; thus, for example, on 10 July 2012 there were eighty-three logs, from a ‘How’s my driving?’ complaint (and one compliment) to reports of graffiti, parking violations, a missed recycling collection and calls for street repair. Similarly, in the UK, FixMyStreet, launched in 2006, offers a place to make a complaint, which is then sent on to the local council. On any given day, a visit to the site can involve the report of broken play equipment in Alexandra Park, north London, to an anonymous report of fly-tipping in Oxford.
The transition towards Gov 2.0 will not be smooth, particularly for government bodies who have always been wary of sharing too much, or being held too accountable. The difficulties associated with the differences between the old way of doing things and the new should not be underestimated. The story of how the London Datastore was established and how it has operated offers some insights into these difficulties and what the future might look like once such a project is up and running.
From the outset Emer Coleman, the director of digital projects at the Greater London Authority (GLA), believed that open government was not just about making information available but also engaging with the digital community who would be using the data, thus blurring the boundaries between a ‘top-down’ initiative and a ‘bottom-up’ campaign. Instead of hiring a big consultancy firm, a Twitter account was set up and a call for help was put out on 20 October 2009: ‘a chance to get involved in design and build of London’s Datastore – this Sat at City Hall’. Over sixty developers turned up that weekend and the process of breaking down the barriers began, between official reticence about sharing information with the hacker’s natural suspicion of government. As Coleman later observed, bridging this divide was a challenge. On one side, the developers saw themselves as interested citizens, not politicians; as one confessed: ‘I think really my goal in all of this is to make life a little less shit. If you can say, OK, this year I have made things a little less shit for people, then you have had a good year.’22
On the other side the average council worker had little idea of digital politics and an innate fear of letting anything get into the hands of the public. In a 2010 survey 69 per cent of those tasked with developing policy in central London borough councils neither used social media nor were familiar with the term Gov 2.0. This was despite a strong governmental drive as outlined in the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury Report Power in People’s Hands and London mayors, first Ken Livingstone and then Boris Johnson, promoting transparency within London itself. In addition, the large public services were not keen on releasing their data. For some, the fear of losing control of the information and the prospect of painful scrutiny were too much to bear. In the case of much of the transport data, there was also a concern that it was too valuable to give away for free, as it could be used to generate considerable revenues.
Coleman worked alongside developers as well as the media to encourage the state agencies to release their data: ‘they did this by writing, blogging, exerting pressure on their local/central government contacts or more formally in the media’.23 The results are clear: already the free use of the information has inspired creativity and innovation, launching new businesses and apps to help the Londoner. From the outset there was a huge surge of apps transforming the information from the Datastore into useful tools, designed to help with real-time traffic reports, public-transport updates, and locating the ‘Boris bikes’ that are parked around the city. Cromaroma (www.chromaroma.com) uses the Oystercard payment system to devise a game that spans the city. Figurerunning (www.figurerunning.com) is an app that allows you to be creative while jogging with your smartphone. The phone works as a GPS monitor and your movements are then pencilled onto the map so that as you run around you can create shapes, pictures and figures on a huge scale. Some people have been able to jog the figure of a rabbit onto the street pattern.
Eventually, the opening-up of government changes government itself. On a personal level this can be transformative, as noted by Coleman in an interview with a career civil servant: ‘Now I am exposed to a whole bunch of people who are at the cutting edge of the web so it would be really odd if it hadn’t changed me . . . now I communicate through blogs, I never did that before, you know, I am an old-school treasury civil servant, we didn’t tend to do that sort of thing. The biggest shift for me was we saw change by actually going out and presenting the human face of government, turning up at things and going, “Hello, I’m Richard, I’m from the Cabinet Office and I’m not horrible.”’24 In her survey of government workers and developers, Coleman discovered that 51 per cent felt that the release of data would lead to a different form of government and 64 per cent believed that it also encouraged participation in government; only 7 per cent disagreed.
Yet technology is not a panacea, a cure-all that just by its application heals every wound. This was particularly true during the London riots: technology undoubtedly had a powerful impact on the organisation of the rioters: private-group SMS on BlackBerry were used extensively, and once the violence began Twitter and Facebook were used to spread news and images of the looted trophies. At the same time, on 9 August, a Twitter feed (@riotcleanup) was launched with the message:
We’re live. Locations to come very very shortly. #riotcleanup
Within minutes the feed detailed gatherings of local residents who were coming together with brooms and bins to clean up after the previous night’s violence. The feed soon became the information post for clean-up groups throughout London, in Manchester, Wolverhampton, Liverpool and further afield. It became the platform for the collective response to the riots, coordinating efforts, sharing emergency information, launching collections for shopkeepers who had lost everything. Stories soon appeared in newspapers about this spontaneous ‘citizen action’ and in time even the politicians were keen to be seen to be involved: all three leaders of the main political parties were photographed with groups of good-hearted citizens brandishing brooms. Here was an example of how bottom-up politics works and a signal of how things might be in the future.
In the aftermath of the August riots, politicians and journalists fought over who could be the most damning of the generation of ‘feral’ youth who had rampaged through the London streets. It was only once emotions had calmed that anyone had anything useful to say about the social context that sparked three days of violence and destruction: education, housing, the prospects of employment, the systematic betrayal of the young by the authorities who do not understand and instead interpret desperation for criminality.
Yet it is sometimes worthwhile reminding ourselves that riots are rare occasions, proof that we do not live in Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature, and that the city offers a complex self-regulation which emerges from the street, governing our everyday interactions far more than any control from above. New technologies allow us to think about this relationship again, as we are far more in contact with each other than ever before. In time it will change the nature of government itself but first the talking government must also learn the skills of being a listening government. This is a city based on trust.
Meanwhile Mark Duggan’s mother is still waiting for an explanation of what actually happened to her son that night.