On this episode of Municipal Equation. I think the greater promise of information technology in the urban sphere is not to shortcut government or disrupt it, but rather to make the complexity of urban processes, particularly at the local government level, more legible to citizens so that they can more meaningfully participate.

Getting the whole smart cities thing right can be tricky. We're trying to make the public's life easier through technology and new kinds of analysis, and the mentality of innovation is fast. But what are we doing to be careful about it? And are we being inclusive? My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns and changing times from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode 38. Alright. So let me say really quick, At the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk about this list that you helped me compile of the best fictional mayors, you know, from pop culture, from literature. We got a lot of great submissions. Some were very popular. Then there were a few that I wasn't familiar with. So that'll be at the end. Stick around. Best fictional mares. Alright. So coming up on a year ago, we did an episode that served as a primer on Smart cities. Smart cities. Smart cities.

Smart cities. Smart cities. Smart city. Smart city. You know, a lot a lot of buzz, obviously, about smart cities and Smart city. Smart city. Smart cities.

And it wasn't a brand new conversation or anything at the time. We've been hearing about smart cities for a long time, but there were still a lot of people in the world of local government and in the general public looking for some clarity on what the definition of smart city really is. So we talked with Nicole DuPuy at the National League of Cities who wrote a report explaining it all, a primer. Go back to episode 18 if you wanna catch up on that. Since that time, there's been no slowdown on smart city talk. Innovation, critical theory, private companies popping up to sell their technology, their connected devices and systems that will allow local governments to greatly enhance their collection of data and management of resources. Well, gosh, I mean, we're still catching up on what all of this means and, you know, what we're really actually trying to achieve with the rise of smart cities in The United States. You know, what works? What fails? Does the smart city apparatus in Boston fit the needs of any other town if you scale it down? That's kind of a confusing and problematic question anyway, but maybe that serves the point. If I'm the IT director for a town like Cary, North Carolina, where do I start? Who do I look to? How do I best integrate smart city technology for the government and the people I serve? Well, Cary in particular is being really careful about that. And a while back, they got some attention for how they're doing so. So a few months ago, I went out there. Alright. So I've just pulled into the parking lot of Cary Town Hall. That's Cary, North Carolina. C A R Y. It's in the Triangle Region. A lot of, you know, tech industry out here and Cary is kind of weighing in on that and capitalizing a little bit, knowledge wise. And the reason I'm here is I'm gonna talk to Terry Yates and he's gonna show me how the city is actually getting some attention for having built a simulated smart city. There's all these questions about, you know, rollout of smart city technologies, what kind of hiccups are we gonna see, how are we gonna integrate this into our existing infrastructure. They're very forward thinking in terms of tech and, capitalizing on the knowledge of the area to have created a simulated smart city. So we're gonna check that out, see how it works. Now this isn't in the sense that they're erecting buildings or that they've put together a model city that you can lurch over and watch it work. They realize that their town hall campus, their municipal complex, is kind of built like a city. It's got offices. It's got parking. It's spread out between multiple buildings. It's got roadways that go through it. It's got park space. It's got a museum. It's actually a really pretty campus. So it's all kinds of things kind of collected together that can make up a city. And so they pretended that it was, like a self contained city, and decided to use it like a test kitchen for smart city technology and really study it, the behavior, and how it interacts with the people who come across it. Could you state your name, who you work for, and your title? Okay.

What would be a problem that, that you could solve with smart city, solutions or technologies or or connectivity between devices?

Terry said the response from these private companies was great. One of the benefits of this simulated smart city concept is that it covers a relatively small geographic area at the municipal complex. So they could tell the company, the private company, you know, it's not a big investment. It's not a big area. You can install your solution here and prove its value, prove that it works, that it solves the problem. Like, a try it before you buy it kinda thing for carry. If companies are confident in their products, then this could be a great way to prove it to a potential buyer. Otherwise, it could be This costly

Alright. So like I said earlier, this interview with Terry was recorded a few months ago. And right now, like, as I'm producing this episode, he sent me an updated email that says we've reached our goal of $100,000 in donated services, equipment, and licenses at the simulated smart city. Dollars 100,000 worth of stuff. So, so that's a huge relief on the town's effort to explore the territory of smart cities without going in blind.

One piece of technology they deployed in this simulated smart city is sensors in parking spaces, sensors and companion software provided by private companies. With that, the town configured an app that also went into testing. That app would be for citizen engagement. So they could run all kinds of analytics and, you know, look at usage on lower peak times. They could look at how often people were using their electronic vehicle charging stations. They could look at handicap spaces and when and how often they're used.

And then meanwhile, they got with other private companies about alternative technology that might do the same thing in a different way, you know, hopefully with even better results, like video cameras instead of sensors, video cameras that can look at parking spaces and gather data about them. And so when you find a a solution that does seem to work here on campus in this sort of contained area, is that the plan to kinda scale it across town or phase it across town? Or

One thing they have deployed across town is a data collector for the water system. It's one of those wireless meter reading programs with a public engagement piece. Basically, it provides hourly reads to citizens.

Terry said the town of Cary is making public involvement and dialogue a big piece of this, including a website that captures everything we just talked about, listing the actual vendors they're working with, what they're doing, why, and so on. They wanna be specific about it because transparency is huge, especially when you're talking about data collection and sensors and notifying people when their water usage spikes, for instance. The only way it's gonna work is if the people and their elected officials are comfortable with it and they get to see results. In September, a little bit after this interview, Cary joined What Works Cities. That's the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for better use of data and evidence in local government. The town of Cary's purpose, and I'll just read it right here from the, the press release about it, will be to support the research and development of a citizen contact center by strengthening the collection and analysis of call data, and will also develop an open data policy. And I think this might have been Cary. I can't remember exactly which town it was. But this is just coming back to memory that someone with one of our smart tech focused towns in North Carolina learned that, you know, through their detection systems, that if they registered a spike in bathroom usage, they could predict that the roads were about to be busier. You know, like, gotta hit the restroom before I leave. So it's little analytical things like that that can enable a town to prepare or understand the behavior of that city. And that brings us to another point. You might recall, maybe not, I don't know, that in the show notes to the primer episode on smart cities, I linked to an article titled A City is Not a Computer. It was published in Places Journal and was written by Shannon Mattern, if I'm pronouncing her name right. It's a pretty lengthy piece, and it's farther reaching than just the smart cities thing. But it gets at an angle on smart cities that more and more critics are saying we need to bear in mind. Basically, when we're computerizing a city and making decisions based on new techy collection of data, we shouldn't forget how complex populated areas really are. We have to remember the human elements that don't necessarily translate well through sensors. Here's a quote from the piece. Instead of more gratuitous parametric modeling, we need to think about urban epistemologies that embrace memory and history, that recognize spatial intelligence as sensory and experiential, that consider other species' ways of knowing, that appreciate the wisdom of local crowds and communities, that acknowledge the information embedded in the city's facades, flora, statuary, and stairways, that aim to integrate forms of distributed cognition, paralleling our brains' own distributed cognitive processes, End quote. We've got politics and cultural dynamics and ethics and so on. And, you know, innovation in our cities may be the greatest thing in the world, and it is. But then just the other day in CityLab, you have a piece by Richard Florida, warning of a correlation between urban innovation and economic segregation. This is a bit off topic from what Carey is doing, but they do get applause for the efforts to involve the public as much as they can. So they can catch things in the rollout or deployment or data gathering or application of that data that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise caught. I'm I'm almost mixing topics a little bit, but basically, I'm trying to segue to a talk I had the other day with Qasem Shepherd. He was the founding editor of Urban Omnibus, and he's got a new book out called City Makers, The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism. It's from the Monticelli Press. It's a collection of his writings about cities and the issues or angles they face right now, with a lot of historical context, like civic design and best practices in creating public spaces. Then there's a section on housing and then technology and the smart cities conversation. And this is all stuff I'm really still trying to learn about. So while I was sitting in my car, parked on the street in Wilson, North Carolina, the first gigabit city in the state, I called Qasim to pick his brain a bit about smart cities and technology and data gathering and that human factor.

I mean, I think some of the most interesting technologies, that are deployed and some of the most innovative ones start out as pilots, and then it becomes a question of how do you bring that to scale and how do you distribute that in a way that really is democratizing. I mean, I think a lot of the promise of new technologies is that they are could be engines of greater participation in public life in cities. Mhmm. But then I think there's sort of this veneer of innovation because you can, you know, interact with web based forms or whatever it might be in a little bit more, in an easier way. But at the same time, in some cases, we find that's actually consolidating control behind opaque black boxes and not necessarily increasing participation in meaningful ways. I think too much of the way in which we kind of think technology will will save us and all of our problems really relies on a on a dogma of the the culture of disruption and that technology will enable us to shortcut through complicated bureaucratic, regulatory hurdles, when in fact, I think the greater promise of information technology in the urban sphere is not to shortcut government or disrupt it, but rather to make the complexity of urban processes, particularly at the local government level, more legible to citizens so that they can more meaningfully participate. Sometimes it doesn't mean participate online, but just means explaining the process so that they have the tools and the knowledge necessary to communicate in traditional democratic participation, whether that's community meetings or just voting.

And then we talked about the perception that government may be a slow adopter of technology at times out of an abundance of caution and wanting to be wise with taxpayers' money, like Terry Yates said earlier, you know, you don't just wanna invest in something that and you're not really sure if it works. But between government and the private developers of these technologies, I asked Qasem, where does the public fit in when it comes to participating how these technologies are shaped when it comes to the the quote unquote public good?

It's a really good question. I mean, I think there's lots of different ways for, there are lots of different opportunities for people to kind of vote on where things should go. You see sort of a see, click, fix, idea about public infrastructure that if, you know, people have technological platforms to report a broken streetlight, then that will enable, a more efficient deployment of government services. But I think oftentimes, that comes at the expense of, a strong public sector, which is exactly what we need and what technology should be supporting, not kind of undermining by farming out a lot of those reporting functions, to the public at large. Mhmm. So I think there's a real necessity to also complement, computation and sort of the algorithmic understanding of cities, which is still on the rise, with close observation. I mean, I think there's we're at a moment now where we can measure so much more than we ever thought possible. We have tropes and tropes and bytes and bytes and bytes and exabytes of of data, but how we move through these and how, you know, certain infrastructural systems are run. But if we aren't complementing that with close sort of ethnographic observation and better reasoning about how we live and adapting to sort of the human domain. And we're gonna think that what we can measure is

is a accurate facsimile of how people move through cities, and that's that's just not true. When Kassem said this, my head immediately went back to the episode we did, I think it was episode 17, on civic data and bluegrass, and using bluegrass as a tool for interpreting and reporting civic data to the cultural audience that essentially lives through bluegrass music. Or it could be any kind of music, depending on which cultural value you're speaking to, or any kind of art form. And so these alternative forms of communication are potentially more effective ways of connecting with people than the government charts and graphs are, Which is an interesting concept and something to maybe explore. Can we use technology not to make things more opaque, but more legible? Can we use technology to make things not more opaque, but more legible, he says. There's a sentence in his book that follows right up on that. It says, this potential legibility can empower citizens to practice far more meaningful and informed kinds of democratic participation than the quantification, automation, and disruption that much techno urbanism promises. End quote. And then I'll skip down to this part. It says, as technological readings of the city exert ever increasing influence on urban decision making, new digital tools have a tremendous potential for urbanism. For that potential to be beneficial, democratic, and ethical, however, we need to be a little bit less algorithmic and a little more heuristic. Urban experience is imprecise and unpredictable, encompassing individuals and markets who do not always act rationally. Understanding and improving cities requires human perception, not just computation. End quote. One piece of criticism that we read more and more is that innovation hasn't always unfolded in an inclusive way. We did a whole episode about that with Christopher Gergen. And the question about being equitable and inclusive has definitely slid over to how smart cities are developed.

I think there is a culture within technology that, that almost holds it up as a standard to try and be, a, ethical or amoral and that the data will it needs to be sort of neutral and that then, you know, a bit of that might be able to engage with questions of equity, questions of ethics, but that that'll come at a later stage. And I think that's, wrong, quite frankly. I think, data and data analytics has to have a politics from the get go. And I think it needs to I think we need to announce overtly and not be afraid to sort of take a normative decision on the ethics of the city, specifically around collusion. I start every chapter in this book with kind of an ethical imperative imperative that's drawn from those seven years of reporting on these stories for Erpanometer. And for the technology chapter, that imperative is to think inductively, to complement measurement with close observation, and to support technologies that's that enable rather than disrupt democratic governance. And I think it's really important to state our values upfront, particularly around questions of how technologies are distributed, What is the sort of general position and the subjectivity around what we measure and how we measure things? Are we only measuring, you know, the for example, there's a there's a a huge new development on the West Side Of Manhattan at Cine Yards, which is, sort of a prototypical smart city neighborhood, which is developing all this data but how we live because the apartments are entirely, censored up. Right? There's ubiquitous computing in every aspect of the built environment there from your energy usage to your, you know, trash trail, etcetera, etcetera. Now that's wonderful and important data that could help guide efficiency in future developments. But all of the people who will live in there are primarily incredibly well off professionals, many of whom only live there for part of the year because they're working for corporations and this is their, you know, peer to peer in the city. I mean, there are a lot of other questions that are not built into the data capture that will skew that data set in ways that might not actually be applicable to other communities. And I think we need to ask those kinds of questions upfront so that we know that when we're capturing data, it's for reasons that both both recognize privacy rights, but even more importantly to my mind, can be deployed equitably with the caveats of of the subjectivity of data capture in the first place.

So these conversations will continue to expand, evolve, influence experiments, create additional observations, and we'll try to keep up with them. Of course, we couldn't stuff everything into this episode. It's just too huge of a topic. There are more opinions and different variables, but I'd love to hear your feedback as well as your stories on how your city is doing smart city things the right way. This whole podcast is about sharing ideas about our cities and towns. It doesn't mean any single one is right or wrong. We just want to collect the interesting stuff we're hearing out there and talk about it. Another one to watch. This was just in the news, was the announcement that Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Alphabet, which is Google's parent company, Sidewalk Labs plans to build a mixed use community in Toronto on its Eastern Waterfront. So right off the website for this, again it's called Eastern Waterfront, says it'll be quote, a new type of place that combines the best in urban design with the latest in digital technology to address some of the biggest challenges facing cities including energy use, housing affordability, and transportation. End quote. I'll link to this in the show notes. Also include a link to Qasim Sheppard and his book City Makers. And plenty of info on what the town of Cary is doing with its simulated smart city, which has received some national press. All right So now let's talk about some mayors who don't actually exist So if you listened to our silly Halloween episode and made it all the way to the end, congratulations. You also heard my appeal, for your help in making a list of our favorite fictional mayors. And this started from a conversation I was having with someone I know who works in municipal government in the context of Halloween costumes, like, you know, which mayor would be a good Halloween costume. And purely for fun, I wanted your input on who should be on that list of best fictional mayors. And they got some really great responses on social media and email. For instance, Apex mayor Lance Olive who was a real mayor, suggested Goldie Wilson from Back to the Future, which is definitely one of my personal favorites as well. That whole 1955 scene at the diner is honestly what public motivation is all about. Just when that light bulb goes on and he decides that he wants to be the mayor of Hill Valley and ultimately becomes it. On the flip side, Todd Lewoto submitted red Thomas. And do you know who that is? Keep thinking back to the future. Thomas was the mayor campaigning for reelection when Marty gets to to the 1955 version of Hill Valley, Mayor Red Thomas. And he has the same progress as his middle name slogan. So I looked up Red Thomas for additional info, and here's what Futurpedia has to say. And I guess that's like a Back to the Future Wiki. Quote, it is not shown whether mayor Thomas was unseated or reelected in the nineteen fifty five election. Over twenty years later, mayor Thomas would be succeeded by mayor Wilson in 1979. 1985, Red Thomas had presumably died or retired from politics, end quote. And one more thing it says about mayor Red Thomas. The photo of mayor Red Thomas in 1955, on the side of that van, the campaign van that was driving past, that photo was of the set decorator named Hal Gossman. Thanks to Todd Lewoto for submitting that one. And by the way, I'd like to put in a plug for a podcast that Todd worked on called the Polybius Conspiracy. If you're into creepy stories and nineteen eighties arcade games, please look it up. It's a lot of fun. It's really suspenseful. Polybius Conspiracy. And that's on the showcase podcast from Radiotopia. Alright. So, Sam Olson suggested HR Puff and Stuff, as one of the best fictional mayors. HR Puff and Stuff was a dragon. He was the the title character of the TV show and was the mayor of Living Island. Looks like that's the only vote for HR Puff and stuff. The Maryland Municipal League suggested New York mayor Randall Winston from Spin City, whom they call fun and bumbling. On Twitter, Chris Neto, or NATO. I'm I'm sorry if I got your name wrong. Please correct me if I did. Chris also puts in a vote for mayor Winston. Someone named Boyd, b o y d. I don't know his last name or maybe that is his last name. I don't know. But, he suggested Ben Wyatt, the the parks and rec character who briefly in his teenage years was the mayor of a town that he threw into financial chaos by pursuing a winter sports complex called Ice Town. Subsequently the town goes bankrupt and he gets thrown out of office. And if you remember the news headline, the newspaper headline was Ice Town Costs Ice Clown His Town Crown. As a former newspaper reporter, I appreciate that. By the way, I gotta point out that this is not some sneaky paid promo for that TV show, The Mayor, which I still haven't seen, that he we did talk about it a couple episodes ago. Okay. So Sinatra Damas on Twitter submitted two. One was mayor Larry Vaughn from Jaws, who kind of tries to, you know, he tries to stabilize and spin the situation to keep his town happy while the shark is eating people. Here's a really good quote from him when he's talking to a reporter. He says, quote, I'm pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But as you see, it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means friendship, end quote. Expertly done. Sinatra Damas also suggests one that I'm surprised didn't get more votes, and that's, Springfield mayor Quimby from the Simpsons, obviously. He was actually the first to come to mind for me. You know, that would be a great Halloween costume. Adam Stum, if I'm pronouncing his name right, also submitted mayor Quimby. The other mayor who came to mind just as quickly was submitted by our Canadian friends, Municipal World. That's the monthly, municipal magazine in Canada. It's been around for more than a hundred years, and I'm pleased to announce that they submitted mayor McCheese, the mayor of McDonaldland. He had a big cheeseburger for a head and a top hat and a sash that said mayor. According to, online sources, including Wikipedia, it came about in 1971, and they dropped him from the ads in 1985. The website death and taxes actually does a breakdown of Mayor McCheese's political beliefs, and it analyzes his environmental policy, his views on criminal justice reform, labor, social issues, things like that. And also points out that one of his nicknames is the cheesiest burger in town. Thanks Municipal World for submitting that one. Okay. We've got two submissions from The Wire, the TV crime drama. Christine Edwards submits mayor Clarence Royce. She says, gotta love the drama. Pam Antle, whom we know from the league of women in government from a few episodes ago, she votes for mayor Tommy Carchetti, quote, hands down. Alright. So closer to home, my better half, Ambrose, she suggests the mayor of Townsville from Powerpuff Girls, which she points out was played by Tom Kenny from Mr. Show and SpongeBob. According to the Powerpuff Girls Wiki, he's in love with Pickles and is thought to be a clueless individual. And like mayor McCheese, he also wears a sash that says mayor. Thank you, Ambrose. Okay. So the most votes for a single mayor is mayor Adam West of Quay Hogg, you know, from Family Guy, played by, of course, the real Adam West, whom we lost this past June at age 88. That guy was amazing. By the way, I particularly have to to plug a pilot that he starred in in 1991 called Lookwell. Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel put it together. Please look it up. It's just one episode. It never went anywhere. For me, that's Adam West at, you know, one of his best forms. But back to mayor West from Family Guy. Thanks to Serenaya. Thanks to Steve Stone, Harry Johnson, and others who submitted that one as a tribute to the late Adam West. But one I wasn't familiar with and might be my new favorite comes from young Elizabeth Hinkle. She suggests Mayor Humdinger from Paw Patrol. I've never seen Paw Patrol. Didn't really even know exactly what it was, and everyone says that's just because I don't have kids. But Elizabeth, via her mom, Megan Hinkle, sent over a link to the Paw Patrol Wiki page about Mayor Humdinger, who's the mayor of Foggy Bottom. And it explains that he's the rival of Mayor Goodway of Adventure Bay. The book he says, quote, Mayor Humdinger is rather conceited thinking that his town is better than Adventure Bay in every way possible, end quote. Also says that he's the assembler of the Kitten Catastrophe Crew, a group of mischievous cats who perform heinous deeds to support his effort. And there's a bunch more writing about his unbecoming personality. There's a little sidebar with his stats and assess his likes include winning and his dislikes include losing. But that despite his flaws, he is essentially a good person. I love this one. Thank you, Elizabeth Henkel for making me aware of a very dynamic fictional mayor who I didn't know anything about. This is my favorite out of all the submissions. There were a number of other submissions for some of the same people, some of the same fictional mayors that we've already named. I apologize if you submitted one, and I simply missed it. I'll get you on the next episode, because this list continues. If you have any to submit, please do, And I'll read them off in future episodes. So this will be a standing thing. Alright. I'll let you go. Thanks for listening. Follow on Twitter at muni equation. That's at m u n I equation. You can email me at bbrown@nclm.org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, the historic membership organization that brings you this podcast. Soundcloud.com/municipalequation for all the past episodes. And if you've liked anything you've heard, we'd love to hear why with a short iTunes review. Thank you so much for that. We'll see you again soon. This is Ben Brown.