Cities should be for experiment - Hamburg putting digitality at the service of citizens, and Chicago showing architecture how to get close to the people
Two items here that show how much cities can be platforms for experimentation.
First, the interesting new German think-tank The New Institute has put down its PDFs, and decided to get deeply involved with city politics - specifically Hamburg. They’re helping to build a new digital policy for the city called The New Hanse. From their blurb:
The New Hanse has the potential to tell a different story about Europe and create a different European reality. Comparable to the times of the first Hanseatic League, from the late Middle Ages to the early modern age, the city of the early 21st Century is a place of innovation, knowledge, exchange, education, civilization and humanism.
“The New Hanse” could be a starting point for a joint European initiative of progressive cities like Copenhagen and Helsinki promoting a sustainable data-driven democracy and reconnect Hamburg to a tradition and past which could be its future.
Shaping the New Hanse, as programme director, is Francesca Bria - President of the Italian National Innovation Fund, one of Europe’s leading digital policy experts and an innovation economist, working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, economics, and society.
Extracts from an interview with her below
What is the idea of The New Hanse?
The New Hanse wants to build on some of the strengths of the city of Hamburg when it comes to transparency, citizen participation and citizen engagement in the urban planning process – with the goal of ecological transition and sustainable digitization. At the same time, the programme wants to connect what the city of Hamburg is doing with some of the more ambitious projects and programmes in cities around Europe and the world – we aim to put forward a democratic idea for a future digital city.
What is the role of data in this context?
We need to put technology and data at the service of the people and the environment. Central to this is the understanding of data as public infrastructure, as a public good that should help solve some of the big environmental and social challenges the city faces. We will be very much focusing on the net zero city and leveraging the power of data and the collective intelligence of people via democratic participation in order to do that. We are creating a laboratory that wants to test new radical approaches to the democratization of data.
With whom will you work on achieving this?
We will be working with all the city stakeholders, with civil society, with academia, with research centers, with companies small and big. Our ambition is, of course, to expand what Hamburg is doing in this field locally and to create a hub that can become a reference point for a digital sustainable and democratic city in the future. Everything that we create will be open source and be published as a kind of blueprint or toolkit for other policy experiments around Europe. We can learn a lot from best practices – such as those developed in the city of Barcelona, where I worked as CTO for five years.
The European angle is very important to you.
When it comes to the question of data, data sovereignty, data democracy, Europe has a big task ahead with the European digital framework and the data governance act. The goal is to create an alternative to predatory digital capitalism and to give back the power and the value to the people that are producing this data. But in order to do that, we not only need a regulatory framework, we need a bottom-up experimentation capacity – and cities are great places to do this because cities have the right infrastructure.
Digital infrastructure?
Data is like a meta utility, an urban infrastructure on top of which more and more essential services for the city and the citizens run. Here, we can prototype new approaches to data as a public good, on top of which we can share value and create new data-driven or artificial intelligence driven services that will hopefully create a city that is less polluted and offers better quality of life for its citizens.
This connects an old idea of cities as places for progress and exchange of knowledge and goods to a new network of progressive cities in Europe.
Cities are places in which democracy traditionally has been experimented with. And in post-pandemic times, we are seeing how cities continue to pioneer in this regard. In the fight against climate change, the C40 network is very active in international diplomacy. On migration, where national states cannot agree on a solidarity-based approach, cities are at the forefront. In the new digital environment, cities are more and more important in challenging how technology platforms exercise their power.
Can you give examples?
Take Airbnb or Uber or even Amazon with their logistics centers. In cities, we can develop advanced new progressive policy ideas and run a high-level policy discourse – and experiment with working on alternatives. In the digital economy, we need alternatives to work now, and we need a different idea of public private partnerships that are not predatory. We need to treat digital resources, particularly data, as a common in order to avoid negative externalities and the negative impact of data pollution, for example.
What are the main challenges?
Data is a resource that's concentrated in the hands of very few players. Cities face a very big task in showing that democratizing data is possible and how technology can be put at the service of a different type of urban planning. There are imperatives to change the urban environment – with ideas like the “15 minutes city” developed in Paris or the Barcelona Superblocks, which is about removing cars from the city center. These ideas are radically transforming mobility, creating more green areas, pedestrian spaces, giving back public space to citizens. Electrifying mobility and switching to connected mobility is going to be a big challenge, as is the question of how the built environment needs to consume less CO2. How do we monitor that? How do we move to a more circular economy?
How can we get there?
These things require new information technology. We need to integrate the old infrastructure - the big policy and planning that cities do - with connectivity, data and artificial intelligence. There is also a very big space for experimentation with new economic modeling and new planning ideas that could lead to a much more redistributive type of economic thinking. Hamburg is well positioned in terms of urban planning because of the citizen movement of the 1980s. And because of the transparency law of 2015, which really pushed forward new types of policies that foster accountability and public information at the service of all the citizens in Hamburg. In the end, it is about the trust you build vis-à-vis the citizens.
So what does a “bottom-up experimentation capacity” physically look like, to the eye? Let’s sweep over to the Chicago Architecture Bienalle, which is showing how that might be made manifest, architecturally. They’re not amassing their exhibits in one hall, but distributing them across the city, in some of its most challenging neighbourhoods.
Cover the Grid,” from Outpost Office, features a temporary mural on a vacant lot in Chicago’s West Side, far from downtown.Photographer: Dennis Fisher/Chicago Architecture Biennial
Here’s the rationale:
Biennial attendees might find themselves, for example, in places like a school-run food forest in the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale. There, Antonio Torres and Michael Loverich, partners in the design firm The Bittertang Farm, have erected otherworldly wooden pillars, seeded with fungi spores in the hopes of growing mushrooms.
Eventually, the tree canopy overhead will intertwine with these carved totems, coalescing into a chaotic and generative sanctuary of biomass. Unlike most biennial flash-in-the-pans, the installation is meant to be permanent.
“We’re going to see what kinds of things actually begin to emerge out of these natural substrates,” Torres says.
The theme of this biennial is “The Available City,” a long-running inquiry by artistic director David Brown into unleashing design imaginations to re-envision Chicago’s approximately 13,000 vacant lots. By placing installations on these empty or under-utilized spaces, Brown pushes the international design exhibition circuit toward making a material improvement in places that had previously only been offered charitable worry and rousing discourse.
This biennial directly addresses why massive swaths of the South and West Side are so available. “Let’s be clear,” says contributor Paola Aguirre of Chicago-based Borderless Studio, “The ‘Available City’ only exists because of racism. The only reason we have all this vacant land is because resources have been continually extracted from our Black and Brown communities for decades.”