Tech-Träume für die Stadt der Zukunft
SAN FRANCISCO — For all the innovation and wealth that are produced here, this city can feel as if it doesn’t work quite right.
The cost of housing has priced out teachers and line cooks. Income inequality is among the widest in America. The homeless crisis never seems to ebb. Traffic is a mess. On bad days, transit is, too.
“It could be so much better,” said Ben Huh, who moved to San Francisco in 2016 after running the Cheezburger blog empire in Seattle.
In the maddening gap between how this place functions and how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks could build cities, too?
Mr. Huh leads a project begun by the startup accelerator Y Combinator to explore the creation of new cities. Last October, Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company, announced it would team up with a government agency in Toronto to redevelop a stretch of the city “from the internet up.”
For others in tech, fantasizing about newly built cities has become a side gig. They dream of utopias with driverless cars, radical property- ownership models, 3-D-printed houses and skyscrapers assembled in days.
“Tech types — as much as people might talk about the parochial way they’re approaching it — deserve credit for thinking bigger than anybody in government right now,” said Paul Romer, the former chief economist at the World Bank, whose ideas (and TED talks) on new “charter cities” have influenced some in tech.
If you take literally the economist Ed Glaeser’s assertion in “Triumph of the City” that cities are our greatest invention, it ought to be possible to reinvent them.
“You now have a lot of people who have seen a lot of success thinking, ‘Well, how can I one-up that? What’s bigger than starting a multibillion- dollar company?’ ” said JD Ross, a founder of Opendoor, a home-buying company. “We have the home screen on our phone, we have the home button in every app. But it really comes down to people’s actual homes — that’s much more important.”
Utopian city schemes have seldom
succeeded. But it is hard to overstate the degree to which tech entrepreneurs are looking at the city in ways almost unrecognizable to anyone already working on urban problems.
An Absence of Rules
On a visit to Dubrovnik, in Croatia, Mr. Huh, like many urban planning students before him, was inspired by the narrow streets and Old World architecture. And the new cities he and others in tech describe are not so different from what many urbanists champion. They want to create walkable neighborhoods, albeit around hyperloop lines traveling faster than a bullet train. They’re focused on affordable housing, although the shortage of it looks to them less like a policy matter than a problem that better construction technology can solve.
“We have not affected the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure and society,” Mr. Huh said. “We’ve made this better,” he added, indicating his laptop. “We’ve made the new things better. We haven’t made the old things better.”
People in technology prize “first principles,” which suggest that historical awareness and traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas. The approach has worked before. Uber wouldn’t exist if Travis Kalanick had begun by researching how taxis were regulated. Uber instead produced a service that violated those rules.
With cities, this means stripping away the histories of other utopias, the political dynamics that block change. “Humans currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip phones,” said Jonathan Swanson, a founder of the company Thumbtack, which connects consumers to professionals like house painters. If someone built a better version of San Francisco two hours away, people here would demand those upgrades, he said. One new city could benefit millions of others who don’t live there.
People and Ideas
“But a city is not at its fundamental level optimizable,” said Nicholas de Monchaux, the author of “Spacesuit,” which describes the failed attempts in the 1960s to apply space-age concepts to cities. A city’s dynamism derives from its inefficiencies, from people and ideas colliding unpredictably.
It’s also unclear what you’d optimize an entire city for. You could optimize for affordable housing, but then you may create a city more crowded than many residents want. You could design so that every home receives sunlight (an idea the Chinese tried), but that might mean the city isn’t dense enough to support diverse restaurants and mass transit.
These trade- offs demand political choices. And so technologists hoping to avoid politics are bound to encounter them again.
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs seems to be closest to creating something. The company, run by the former New York deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, concluded that it needed a not- quiteblank slate to truly innovate.
With too many people or buildings already in place, it could never install an energy grid, or test what happens when you ban private cars. But a stand-alone city in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t work, Mr. Doctoroff said, because people wouldn’t want to move there.
“The smart city movement as a whole has been disappointing in part because it is hard to get stuff done in a traditional urban environment,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “On the other hand, if you’re completely disrespectful of the urbanist tradition, I don’t think it’s particularly replicable. And it’s probably pretty naïve.”
A Lab Experiment in Toronto
Toronto had what Sidewalk Labs had been looking for — roughly 325 hectares of underused waterfront that could be reimagined as a neighborhood, if not a full metropolis, with driverless cars, prefabricated construction and underground channels for robot deliveries and trash collection. The company is in the middle of a year of public meetings around a pilot phase of the project. Sidewalk Labs could become a master planner for the full site, alongside a government organization that manages it.
Mr. Huh would not say what form Y Combinator’s project would ultimately take. The group has announced no plot of land or government partner. But Mr. Huh described the effort as an “ongoing moonshot,” one that’s still trained on the affordable housing problem that Y Combinator believes connects to everything else.
It’s possible that tech’s greatest impact won’t come from the hyperloop, or with new North American cities. It could come in the developing world, where some economists are hoping the would-be city builders will turn their ambitions.
Mr. Glaeser, the economist, poses a question that is less provocative — but perhaps more productive — than how to build a better San Francisco. “The first- order thing,” he said, “is how can we do mass-produced plastic housing for slums in a way that’s sanitary and really, really cheap?”