061: Who's in Charge of Our Cities?

on geospatial data & the case for human-sized tech + Jo Petroni inspires, Doodle Dispatches has a birthday, Aella lights up a new thought galaxy, & Gabrielle Zevin keeps me up all night

When I arrived in Amsterdam last week, the first thing that struck me is that people seemed really happy in a way that seemed like a long-lost memory.

I wanted to draw conclusions about how this is because of cobblestones and good bread and not having a million guns lying around and stuff, but I think that it was mainly because a heat wave had just passed, so everyone was happily not sweltering. Although, there is a way in which the sight of two humans, sitting side by side at a bistro table, looking out on a canal, each with a drink in hand, on a Saturday afternoon, seems rare in the U.S., maybe because we have busy, multiple lane roads bisecting our cities instead of canals?

I’m here for work, but I got here a couple of days early which gave me a chance to do some sightseeing, helpfully curated by this book:

and its map:

Which are both lovely, and which led me to the Stedelijk Museum and to paintings by de Kooning, a quite moody Rothko and Sol LeWitt’s artist books, amongst others, and loads of other modernist works.

I don’t really know why, but art like this fixes me. It rights an almost physical level of psychic pain, like getting my soul-spine aligned. The first time I felt this, I was about 25 and didn’t know anything at all about art, but I was in London and somehow had this idea that I needed to go to the Tate Modern, so I did. There was a Jackson Pollock retrospective going on, and for some unfathomable reason no one was there, which meant I had several galleries hung with abstract expressionist masterpieces all to myself in a great, hallowed, uninterrupted silence.

I was gobsmacked, in no small part, because I had no ‘theory’ or intellect at stake, no idea about how I should ‘appreciate’ a Jackson Pollock painting, or any painting.

I just stood there, looking at those phenomenal, fractal, works and felt the kick of an endemic, but previously unactivated pleasure, or predilection, as it unfurled across my body. And though there is no metric for this, nor any science that I know of that explains it, this is always my experience of a certain kind of painting, every single time I get in front of one.

It is one of a handful of data, alongside how I feel about my kids and how I feel about a handful of people that I love, that support the hypothesis that I have a soul.

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I got lost on the way back from the museum to my hotel, in the way that I almost always do the first few times I’m in a city, because I like to learn how to get around without having to look at a map instead of the scenery. (I wrote about going through cities at ‘footpace’ about this time last summer, too.)

When I did get back, I got a text from a friend of SBB, the architect and philosopher Jo Petroni, with the latest news about a tool designed to help us navigate the complexity of healing our planet. (She and many others have recently launched The Carbon Almanac, and it will matter, so please go and explore it.) What was stunning in this particular moment was the delight she is taking in what she is creating. Her delight—which was something like activated inspiration—looped through my sensorium much like the aesthetic pleasure of the paintings.

It strikes me that this whole day was a form of wayfinding. I was navigating the aesthetic, spiritual, physical, and temporal spaces that comprise my life in an unfamiliar environment and in the presence of new ideas.

Which is why I’m in this city to begin with: to explore how humans get from Point A to Point B and maybe even offer some ideas about how we can do it better.

If you tap the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this email each week, it means more people will find their way to Survival by Book.

I am here to work on a documentary film project about mapmaking, which, as regular readers know, is a recurrent topic for me. My particular corner of the project is helping to coordinate a conversation about the future of cities; we are asking ourselves and a wide array of experts the question: how can we use geospatial and geolocation data to make cities less congested, more sustainable, and much more pleasant places in which to live?

Take a minute to think about where you are right now:

Hopefully you are ensconced on a comfy chair, on a verandah, nicely away from a busy road, but not so far away that you couldn’t slip into your flip-flops and walk over to the corner shop to get an ice cream cone. (Or, maybe you are in a cubicle, or in a bus or air terminal, or hospital room, and if you are, I am sending extra special love to you.) In any case, you’re reading this—which means you’re on a phone or a computer—and that you’re likely logged into between 1 and 5 social media accounts (if it’s 5, please go and touch grass immediately). Also, your car or moped is probably parked nearby, and there are satellites and drones floating around, tracking you and everyone around you, just overhead. Nearby there are likely traffic lights, security cameras, smart watches, smart speakers, and possibly even smart refrigerators and similar.

All of these things are generating data, a lot of it is geospatial and some of it is location-specific.

(If you’re nicely out in the country, don’t even think that this doesn’t pertain, because your tractor is generating this data, and so is the pump in your well, or the meter on your electrical panel, or both, and if you don’t have any of these things, congratulations you’re off the grid, except that you’re reading this so . . . Do not pass Go and do not collect $200 because you’re still generating data.)

And look, it’s ok about the data, I mean, in the abstract, it really is. Data, to me anyway, is just bits and bytes of information floating around like dust motes in the afternoon light.

It’s what we do with the data that matters, which is what my colleagues and I have been looking into vis a vis cities and how we can make them better or, god forbid, worse. There is a lot to be worried about in the area of big data—of any kind—not just geospatial, but there’s also a lot to be excited about, as well. Here are just two of the dozens of examples I dug into this week.

• This whitepaper from the International Transport Forum showcases lots of ways that road safety can be improved. Speaking as a poetically-minded weirdo, I found this report to be unexpectedly charming, because the language used to describe what are essentially municipal roads projects is delightful. In this pleasant PDF, we find phrases like light protection, which is adding low-key barriers to protect pedestrian and cycle lanes since painted on lines don’t work very well; urban play streets, which means super low speed limits; traffic-calming, which means prohibiting most motorized traffic, but sounds like singing a real sweet song to all the cars; and, my favorite, turn calming, in which “slow turn wedges,” placed several meters out from the curb, keep vehicles from veering on to pedestrian space.

• This article, from Politico’s “Living Cities” series, titled “Cities are death traps in extreme heat—but they don’t have to be,” which yeah, that’s depressing, but there are a few interesting, positive case studies. For example, in Paris the city has set up a “cool island” network to help people cool off during summer heat waves.

I also found this paper, which was straight-up horrifying, like something out of Charlie Brookner’s “Black Mirror” series, insofar as I could shovel my way through the academic-speak. For example, this—

As urban big data looks to the future, it does so through the lens of an anticipatory security calculus fixated on identifying and diverting risks of urban anarchy and personal harm against which life in cities must be securitized.

—is not cool. Using data to power “anticipatory security calculus” is surveillance state shit, and diverting “risks of urban anarchy” isn’t what you think it is. Sure, “urban anarchy” sounds very “Fury Road,” but I would just ask, have you, per chance, been to a protest about the US Supreme Court’s decision about Roe V. Wade this summer? Or, one about the murder of George Floyd two summers ago? There are plenty of people who would consider such protests as “urban anarchy.”

The thing is, for good or for ill, we are always here, where we are, wherever that is in the world, and, we are almost always coming from or going to somewhere else and there is a lot of data that describes these states. Whether we are able to do this freely, with access to the information we need, or whether governments or other authorities restrict us, matters materially.

Which means that mapmaking, and the geospatial data that underpins it, matters. So, we had best pay attention to how we use this data because the consequences of getting it wrong are very dire.

Like my friend Boro reminded me this week, by way of quoting Gramsci, the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.

The corollary to this stuff about location data, is that technology, more generally, needs to be made for us to serve our needs as human beings, and not in spite of us, or without regard for us, or, worst of all, to exploit us.

One of the innovators we researched for the documentary this week, Dr. Carlos Moreno of the 15-minute City project, puts it really well when he says that we have to to make sure that technology is not “fracturing us into inhuman bigness and forcing us to adapt.”

Another of the innovators we were researching, Steve Coast, wrote about the importance of right-sized technology—the mechanical kind—in his Substack this week. Which was interesting, given that he is someone who wrote the literal book on how to use mapmaking data in a way that resulted in positive change on a global scale.

This essay, though, is about tech that is more local and human-sized. He tells the story of getting stuck on a mountain, in an electrical storm, and having pretty much everything fail—the windshield wipers, the lights, even the road itself—except the transmission. He writes,

How does a transmission work, entirely mechanically, such that I shift a lever and it will control everything so we go at a constant speed? Whether going up or down? With four wheels? At any probable angle?

It’s a magic piece of engineering. Someone took this thing apart and replaced the engine, wheels, transmission… and it works. Somehow. Before computers…Is it trite to say it was built for humans? When humans built things, which could be repaired by other humans? Maybe.

Reading this, I got to thinking about how the mechanical and the digital are not so different in this context: a Jeep transmission and geographical information systems (GIS) that power on geospatial data are both world-changing technological innovations that can keep human beings safe while they get to where they need to go.

The trick is to remember who we are building these tools for and who should have charge of them—ie, us. You and me. Not governments or NGOs, not banks or global conglomerates, not tech companies or their proxies, not algorithms—but people. Call it “designing for the end-user.” Call it “giving the means of producing the technology to the people.” Call it hyper-local community-building.

Call it anything you want, but somewhere in all of the intellectually thrilling and on-trend conversations about innovation and tech and futurism and AI and big data and all the other cool words, there is a very simple, very important question: will this make the world more beautiful, sustainable, and nourishing to actual human beings?

Will the technological innovation that we use to make our cities more livable make its citizens feel the way a painting by Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock makes me feel? Will the billion dollar initiative that your country or [insert giant tech company name] is selling to you going to bring more beauty to your days and free up time for sitting next to your lover, looking out over a canal on a softly-lit summer afternoon? Do the effects of the technology on your body support the idea that you have a soul?

The answers to these questions really do need to be, unequivocally, yes.

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Cultural Exchange

Judith had a birthday this week, and so I wanted to take a minute to say thank you to her for delivering such fabulous art to me every week, no matter how late or weird my prompt is. Here she is sketching and looking adorable.

Since I know you guys like her sketches, too, I thought you might want to add your own felicitations in the comments.

Have you subscribed to doodledispatches.substack.com yet? What on earth are you waiting for?

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You Might Also Like

Aella’s Knowingless might be boundary-pushing for some, but the intelligence and range that she’s bringing to topics of sex and sexuality is stunning. She doesn’t break paradigms, she just lives in other paradigmatic galaxies. For example, this observation drawn from an elite party in San Francisco:

I’m surprised to find that many people here aren’t very good at thinking. Like, they’re good, but not very good. I have some deep gut-level belief that successful people have precise thoughts and are good at introspection. But it seems like they’re very good at some different kind of skill - good at getting things done in the world. Jungian typology says there’s two types of thinking - internal and external. “Internal thinking” is thinking that’s interested in curiosity “all the way down”, and tends to be precise, very thorough, and interested in puzzles, having fully fleshed out, consistent mental models. “External thinking” is curious to concrete ends - if an intellectual curiosity isn’t directly furthering your goal, you put it to the side. It’s concerned with faster, more effective decision making, provable real-world impacts.

Learning The Elite Class

The 88 comments (!) on this open thread for Summer Reading by fellow book-nerd, Elizabeth Held, gave me a lively sense of connection, an enhanced TBR list, and led me to pick up Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow at the English-language bookseller this week, which kept me up most of two nights in a row because it’s so good. You don’t have to just believe me about this, either, because Elizabeth said it, too.

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Now, About You

Walking around recreationally lost all week, despite having real-time location data on my phone, has got me wondering what other people experience when it comes to modern map technology. The idea of ‘a map’ seems to float between an impossible-to-fold, giant-size pamphlet that used to live in the glove compartment and the thing that we now squint at on our phones. I’m curious, how do you all use maps right now? What works? What doesn’t?

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