Will the information technologies save planet USA?
Critical summary of the fourth hearing, December 16, 2009
By Taoufik Souami, scientific coordinator of the program
The information technologies are helping to change perceptions, plans and speculations about the world. As regards mobility, the futurologists and the “technophiles” have predicted significant reductions in mobility as a result of virtual exchanges (tele-working, e-commerce, etc.). The nineties and the noughties seem to have proved these predictions wrong, and put obstacles in the way of attempts to realize them.
This session asked the question slightly differently: can ICT be a form of Cleantech for urban mobility?
Can ICT, a factor in the US’s economic dominance, be used to leverage change? And does it offer appropriate solutions for tackling climate change and reducing CO2 emissions?
Could the new global issue—climate—be a powerful instrument in driving plans to virtualize the city? Could it be the argument that overcomes the difficulties of the 90s and replaces mobility with e-activities, e-uses, e-sociability... or else, without reducing mobility, makes it “cleaner”?
To answer these questions, we invited two American researchers and experts to whom we allocated roles based on our presuppositions and their profile.
Jean-David Margulici is an engineer and assistant director at the California Center for Innovative Transportation. We asked him to explain how—in the light of the priority given to climate change and the pressures on the transportation community in the US—things are (or are not) changing in the specialized world of “smart transportation” and what ICT is now emerging from it.
The architect and IT specialist Carlo Ratti is director of MIT’s SENSEable City lab. For the last five years, this laboratory has been developing experimental projects that lie at the overlap between design, IT and urban planning. We approached him to speak on innovative ICT that offers solutions that constitute a step change from existing approaches. In other words, he was asked to introduce “possible” ICT components for a “conceivable” transformation of the city “imaginable” in 2050.
Preliminary remark: the speakers are “adoptive Americans” of recent vintage. That is no accident. The researchers and experts working on significant ICT approaches to changing mobility in the US are mostly “foreign”. The ability of American universities and companies to attract innovative “brains” remains undiminished. It is perhaps for that reason that a new mobility culture is emerging over there. Moreover, it appears that this US generated dynamic of innovation and change is exported more to the cities of Europe and Asia than tried in American cities, most of which continue to adopt a wait-and-see approach.
The specialized world of transportation is not responding to the pressure of climate change
Transportation specialists in the US remain primarily “manufacturers” of transportation infrastructures, in particular roads. The purpose of ICT developments and functions is to optimize use of the roads and the “mobile objects” that travel on them.
Climate change is not the main driver of innovation: the primary motivating forces are local pollution and traffic congestion. The issue of climate change has been grafted onto existing approaches. Jean-David Margulici explains how different layers of innovation have accumulated in the history of transportation-related ICT. An important factor is the de facto convergence between the old efforts to reduce congestion and pollution and the new goal of controlling CO2 emissions. The solutions developed to tackle the earlier problems seem to correspond to the objective of combating climate change.
However, the solutions devised in the last 20 years or so continue to encounter a key problem: the implementation of technological innovations. A specific process which, according to Jean-David Margulici, continues to be neglected. His lab has specialized in this field on the basis of an observed gap between lab-developed ICT and its implementation in the transportation sector. Given the technologies that researchers and developers show us, we conclude—sometimes hastily—that the US is quick to adopt new technologies and that they spread rapidly to improve mobility across the country.
However, there is in fact strong resistance, and not only because the city is a physical space and innovation requires work on the infrastructures. The problem of implementing innovations is complex because it raises the question of the political, economic and social conditions of their spread. Technological innovation that is most efficient from a technical and environmental point of view is not always in tune with the priorities of political leaders or economic operators. For the latter, large-scale implementation is the essence of business. As a result, their decisions are determined by the ability of a new technology to establish a dominant (even monopolistic) position on the market.
The latest generation of innovations focuses on real-time mass information. The multiplication of portable communication devices makes every user a potential source of information. How can users be utilized as producers of more accurate, more targeted, real-time information? The responses described relate to limited geographical areas (Portland and a few districts in the San Francisco Bay area) and particular segments of the transportation sector (bus routes). Their development takes different formats: a local non-profit runs a website posting member-supplied information on road conditions or bus timetables, small start-ups use cell phone or GPS information to find out about nearby services, cities are gradually beginning to devise more integrated information systems.
Is the world of IT and design revolutionizing approaches to mobility?
The most significant changes tend to come from the world of IT and portable technologies. The specialists in this sector, (re)presented by Carlo Ratti, see the city as a physical space, a medium for digital activity. The information generated by these new technologies is seen as an unexploited potential resource for a different understanding of the city and its materiality. Carlo Ratti reminded us that our urban lives leave continuous electronic traces when we use our credit cards, our transportation cards, our subscriptions, our access cards, etc. So we generate a mass of information that can be useful in “managing” multiple individuals (and their activities) in a single place (the city).
Another particular feature of some of the projects presented by Carlo Ratti is the social benefits they are purported to bring. Cycling or driving becomes a better experience through these portable “communicating” tools, which can tell us when a friend is nearby, or about a service or store that may be of particular interest to us and is recommended by that friend. Are these social benefits genuine? Do they have an impact on the mobility of Americans and their awareness of CO2 emissions? The presentations and discussions in the session didn’t answer these questions. Occasionally, the subject seemed to be touched upon, or even avoided. In his introduction, Christian Licoppe suggested the possibility that if these technologies give us information on the environmental consequences of our urban activities, they could change our behavior. But up to now, no scientific research (is there a taboo?) has been done to check whether information and good intentions influence behavior.
There was another question that elicited few answers: the link with climate change and the effect of these innovations on emissions. For the two speakers, any measures designed to use ICT to make transportation more user-friendly are worth taking. So we don’t know whether the policy of large-scale bicycle use in Copenhagen is expected to reduce CO2 emissions. This is not a question for ICT developers but it is crucial for the municipal council, which has to decide between buying hundreds of “Copenhagen Wheel” type bicycles or improving the information system on mass transit systems.
Limitations of the exercise
This approach, in which the digital traces and the material forms of the city intersect, is still at the development stage with experimental and pilot projects. Will it lead to genuinely new solutions? The session demonstrated its heuristic value. In the city, as an “Internet of things”, will the transportation infrastructures be replaced, as Carlo Ratti predicts, by other ways of achieving mobility?
In methodological terms (for transportation research and decision-making) this approach is not yet producing the expected phase shifts. Observing the movements of thousands of people through their cell phones tells us nothing new, because this information describes travel routines that have already been analyzed. According to Jean-Pierre Orfeuil and Jean-David Margulici, this new mass of information essentially refines what we know. Portability offers the possibility of two-way information, but giving transportation users more information is a relatively old idea. If there is a new field of exploration or a heuristic phase shift, it has not yet been explored scientifically.
Questions of information access and processing: more than a problem of method
As in Europe, access to information is a key question in the US. The ministries and state agencies responsible for these questions are reluctant to give up part of their databases. Paradoxically, there is less inclination to open up information systems in the public sector than in the private sector. Here again, the world of IT is creating small cracks in the monolith through the open source model.
These difficulties are also associated with our ideas about the use of such data. Citizens (and politicians) are keen to control the spread of personal information. For Carlo Ratti, generational differences reveal very rapid changes in perceptions. Whilst the over-45s demand limits on the use of information from their cell phones or Internet connections, the under-25s are signing up in their millions for websites that disclose part of their private lives.
The questions of access to information also raise other questions about their application. Christian Licoppe points out that the dominant approaches in this kind of innovative project tend to perceive the city as an isotropic space. ICT users in this territory are therefore seen as having the same “value” and bearing information of the same kind and validity, but urban reality is more complex.
This then raises the question of potential “inequalities” in access to this information and these tools: cognitive, social or financial difficulties, pursuit of dominance, etc.
Another methodological question received little attention: the processing of this information, the method of aggregation … What programs are running in the black box that produces the transition from thousands of pieces of data on phone calls by Romans on a summer evening in 2006 to the map that links these telephone, bus and taxi users over the same period? What are the algorithms? What are the hypotheses and axioms? What assumptions have been incorporated into these algorithms and axioms?
ICT development in the era of climate change: an organizational problem for research and innovation.
According to Michel Micheau, the development of this type of research in France requires another way of looking at research and innovation. In the US, our guests explain, research funding is a sort of American-style gamble. Public bodies, and particularly private institutions, give labs resources based on an initial idea and wait for results. This process is apparently different from the pre-optimized approach in France, where proof of the value of the research must be provided before it even begins. Risk-taking is lower and more limited (exclusive intellectual). The underlying question is the legitimacy of putting resources into research.
The reason for this difference lies in a dimension that was hardly mentioned in this session: the markets. What are the markets for these innovations? The model that seems to underpin the experiments described by the two speakers is the hedge fund. These funds provide research and development finance on apparently relatively easy terms in return for a share in the commercial profits from an innovation. A further explanation is the reputation of their parent universities (MIT and Berkeley) and the socio-professional networks that influence funding decisions. In any case, the role of these funding bodies in introducing innovations to the market is still to be explored.
