In this episode Professor Steve Goldsmith and co-author Betsy Gardner discuss their newest paper, Implementing Digital Infrastructure Responses to Equity, Sustainability, and Safety.
In this episode Professor Goldsmith talks with co-author Betsy Gardner about their newest paper, Implementing Digital Infrastructure Responses to Equity, Sustainability, and Safety. Supported by the Knight Foundation, this work discusses how cities can investment in digital infrastructure to increase equity, reduce life-cycle costing, and implement the Responsive City Cycle.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
About Data-Smart City Solutions
Housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, we work to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
Hi, this is Betsy Gardner, senior editor at the Harvard Kennedy School and producer of The Data-Smart City Pod. Since we started this podcast, we've had great support from our listeners, and to make sure that you don't miss an episode, please find us under the new Data-Smart City Pod channel wherever you listen. Make sure to subscribe so you get each episode, and thanks for listening.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Welcome back to the Data-Smart City Pod. This is Steven Goldsmith, professor of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Bloomberg Center on Cities. In today's episode, I'm joined by my co-author, Betsy Gardner, and we're going to discuss our newest paper, Implementing Digital Infrastructure Responses to Equity, Sustainability, and Safety. Betsy?
Betsy Gardner:
Hi, everyone, I'm Betsy. I'm the editor of Data-Smart City Solutions, and I'm usually on the other side of the microphone as the producer of this podcast.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I'll be careful what I say since you are the producer and the co-author. Betsy, the paper we wrote was sparked by an event held over the summer. It was a working group for Digital Infrastructure, Equity, and Sustainability. It was supported by the Knight Foundation, and we convened key city officials from across the country to talk about policy, data, intelligent infrastructure. We had speakers from the White House, the private sector, leading national universities and research institutions, the non-profit sector, all together on the question of how will digital infrastructure improve engagement, and how will that, in turn, improve physical infrastructure.
Betsy Gardner:
Our goal for this paper was not only to share a lot of the ideas that came out of this convening but to also expand on the topic of digital infrastructure and dive into what kind of governance is necessary to best implement this new infrastructure. Steve, since we're going to be talking about it a lot, how do you define digital infrastructure?
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, digital infrastructure is pretty broad in its meaning. It can include hardware, like IoT devices, sensors, embedded data, software platforms for analysis, collaboration of data captured in the infrastructure. In other words, you can get information flowing to you from these devices, but all that data needs to be protected and anonymized.
In addition, that data can get added onto data platforms that may exist in the city. So an air quality sensor could be attached to a light pole. It could transmit data on toxicity and pollution, but that information is augmented by an analysis of demographics or car patterns, or other information the city may have.
So this digital infrastructure is giving us massively more information. It also includes digital ways that a city can listen to its residents. So how does it do polling or sentiment mining or analysis of comments that communities made? How does it provide augmented reality on planning and then capture the responses? So we use digital infrastructure to mean the ways that a city will reach out and analyze information that comes from its residents.
I should say, finally, Betsy, before formally defining it, we gave some thought to the fact that the way that cities communicate today and engage is inherently inequitable. Only people with a voice, not only, most of the comments to 311 and complaints, are from people who have a voice. Those who don't speak English or don't believe their voice matters, don't call in. So as we think about reaching out, how do we reach to a community and listen to that community that's normally not been involved in solving a public problem? So we have hardware issues in our definition. We have software, we have data platforms, we have the data capabilities of data acquisition, and we have a governance structure. Those things come together to equal digital infrastructure.
Betsy Gardner:
One of the reasons that we're excited about this, so digital infrastructure can help to manage public assets, monitor safety, improve sustainability, and accessibility, and like Steve said, it can prioritize equity. Data-Smart has been around for a decade, and we have done a lot of work researching and publishing stories about what Steve just said, that there's a lot of inequities that are baked into the existing systems, which is why we emphasize in this paper that intelligent or digital infrastructure, it needs to be implemented in an environment, like in a smart government structure, that can manage these tools with the appropriate policies and regulations. We say in the paper, as the physical environment changes, so too must city policy.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, the paper addresses city policy, but let me put that into context. So why do we care? Well, we care because the goal is to deliver more sustainable, more livable, more prosperous, more equitable cities. In doing so, we have to have trust, and trust comes from responsiveness. So you listen better, you act better, you create a responsive city cycle, and that creates trust. So if you broaden the way you listen to a community and they say, "Well, we care about this issue," and the city solves that issue, it builds up these little assets of trust, and those assets then aggregate into more trust which allows a public official to solve more problems. So it's important that, as we think about sensors and digital infrastructure, we think about how that creates a virtuous responsive city cycle, and that, in turn, produces trust.
Betsy Gardner:
The Responsive City Cycle is another paper that we've written together that is almost a precursor to this one. We'll link that in the show notes as well so that you can see these two papers together and see how one builds on the other. One of the reasons that we've been discussing all of this, of course, is the fact that cities now have historic influxes of federal funding with the American Rescue Plan Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. So we're arguing that investing in these technologies now is preventative and it's forward-thinking, but it could also feel overwhelming. So, Steve, let's narrow in on one or two things that we think are important for the audience in terms of what digital infrastructure can do and why it's worth enacting it.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Let's think about physical mobility for a second. You have pedestrians on the sidewalk, you have cars parking, you have outdoor cafes, you have bike shares in the city, and TNC, Uber, Lyfts, and scooters, and whatever else may occur. You could think about each of those using a sidewalk or a curb, and then take your infrastructure money and spend it, or you could say, "We need to create a digital infrastructure that allows and requires each of those users of our city streets to communicate their data to a digital platform so that city planners and city operators can see the density of pedestrians, they can see the bike shares, so they can adjust the usability to fit the needs of the neighborhood." So the digital infrastructure allows the physical infrastructure to be managed better.
Betsy Gardner:
Yeah, and I think that one of the things that is important is this equity and access that Steve is talking about, particularly in terms of physical accessibility. There are a lot of digital tools out there that are being incorporated into physical infrastructure that make aspects of city life more accessible for folks. Some of that comes from polling data on public transit usage.
It's all anonymized, but it can help folks understand, are there gender differences, or racial differences and how folks are using or accessing different pieces of the public transit system, or it could be something as simple as putting in RFID chips to the entrances of certain wheelchair accessible public transit gates, and having a system so that folks who have limited physical mobility don't need to struggle with getting out a card and tapping it against a small card reader. It will recognize, with this RFID chip, and open the gates for long enough that folks can get in and out, which seems simple, but that's a piece of digital infrastructure that still isn't widely implemented. So I think that there's a lot of layers and levels that cities can choose when they're looking at this type of work.
Stephen Goldsmith:
The goal of digital infrastructure is to produce more data, but that data only becomes usable if there's a data culture in city hall, a policy infrastructure combined with data that supports innovation. A lot of digital infrastructure or what comes out as digital infrastructure like the data should produce ideas. Those ideas need to be tested. So, to have a data-driven government, one needs to have the administrative capacity, which could be built or developed, or supported by ARPA funds. They need to have attention to a set of privacy and security rules. These are serious with digital infrastructure. There's a lot of data that needs to be protected.
There needs to be transparency, both transparency on how money is spent, but also transparency in what we're seeing on the curb or the sidewalk of the neighborhood that allows individuals both to see what's collected and to add to it, and that we need to think about digital infrastructure in terms of community engagement. How does polling and surveying and sentiment mining, how do we use digital tools, SMS texting, if you will, as well as smartphone apps, to communicate with City Hall about particular issues? Then, how does all of that prioritize equities? How can we understand equity based on the data, and with all that, I think we can make the progress so long as we're protecting privacy and security.
Betsy Gardner:
Absolutely. It's also important to be flexible about all of those things. We have some stories up on the Data-Smart City Solutions site that talk about cities that are working on these things. Maybe the roadblocks that they've hit, ways they've worked around some of these setbacks, and that's the nature of it. We, in newspaper and on our site, are putting out stories of cities who are taking advantage of, not only this funding, but this moment where people are asking for something new and looking for something that is going to be more equitable, more conscious of privacy, and more transparent.
Steve, I know that you like to say that we don't want to build our fathers' Oldsmobile, which I would add, we don't want to build our moms' wood-paneled station wagon. So now is definitely the time for cities to be looking at this.
Stephen Goldsmith:
That's definitely true. We should step back when we are avoiding building mom's or dad's old station wagon or Oldsmobile and say, "What a shame it would be if we build bridges without sensors, if we build wastewater systems without the ability to manage the water flow, if we looked at sustainability issues without flood monitors." If we fill in the blank, if we built curves and sidewalks without the ability to do sensors on air quality? So now is the time to build in what we can do that will both help us have better life cycle costing for the physical infrastructure, and more engagement by the individuals. All of that will produce as an opportunity to change the way cities operate.
So Betsy, thanks so much for the opportunity to join you. This is Steve Goldsmith and Betsy Gardner, co-authors of the new paper, Implementing Digital Infrastructure Responses to Equity, Sustainability, and Safety. We'll link you to the paper, so please check it out. Thanks for listening, and thanks to Betsy.
Betsy Gardner:
Thank you, Steve.
Betsy Gardner:
If you like this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org or follow us @DataSmartCities on Twitter. And remember to subscribe at the new Data-Smart City Pod channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This podcast was produced by me, Betsy Gardner, and hosted by Professor Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to be the central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.