Could smarter tech really be the cure for Philly's trash woes?

Jan. 02, 2020

Imagine, if you will, a Penns Landing development plan that looks similar this: a community of energy-efficient mixed-income housing, 40 percent below market rate, made from sustainable (and bonny) mass timber manufactured nearby; connected by bicycle and walking lanes, light rail and cloak-and-dagger delivery tunnels, to reduce congestion and pollution; with 44,000 new jobs in the neighborhood.

Spectacular, right? Too bad we're not getting that.

These are some of the elements that brand upwardly Sidewalk Lab'south vision for Toronto'due south Quayside, a development that Toronto and Sidewalk—endemic past Alphabet, the parent company of Google—have started to plan on 12 acres of underutilized waterfront land. The plan—which has its critics, for very skillful reason—offers a utopian view of a "new approach for inclusive growth," and is a pattern for how a tech company, given the run a risk, would build a smart urban center from the ground up.

It'due south scenic in scope; it'due south bold and risky. It's not Philadelphia.

Instead, nearly a year after releasing its Smart City Roadmap, the City's Office of Information Technology last calendar month appear its first public effort: A tech-based "Call for Solutions" to Philly's trash and waste trouble. The then-called "pitch and airplane pilot" program volition grant $34,000 to an organization to test an idea that can aid the city achieve its goal of eliminating the employ of landfills and polluting incinerators by 2035. OIT will take proposals until Jan 16, and work with the winner to implement, manage and track the project over the next several months. (Details of the telephone call for solutions are hither.)

It's a small—minuscule, really—foray into the world of Smart Cities, an overarching term that mostly means using civic-minded technology to make living in cities easier, more than efficient and more than sustainable. Smart Metropolis Manager Emily Yates says OIT plans to release some other call for solutions to another problem in January, and then—hopefully—quarterly after that. Nevertheless, that's a snail'southward pace compared to what Toronto is proposing, or even to other less ambitious cities in the U.S. and the world, which have embraced technology to create modify (sometimes with mixed results) in their urban environments.

Both Yates—who's held the post for two months—and former Smart City Director Ellen Hwang, say that's intentional: After various pilots and kickoff-and-end attempts to launch civic tech, the Metropolis deliberately hitting break in 2017, and took two years—and a $200,000 grant—to develop its Roadmap. It's besides a thing of priority: Afterward Mayor Nutter'due south tech- and data-forward assistants, Mayor Kenney pulled way dorsum on borough tech, to the early dismay of many Philly technologists.

"We want to take the urban borough challenges the city is facing, and instead of having a technologist approaching u.s. with their solutions to problems they identified, we wanted to tell them our problems and have them come up upwardly with a solution," Yates says.

The boring footstep of Philly's civic tech innovation has, perhaps incidentally, coincided with a new wave of thinking around Smart Cities, one that calls for a more customs-centered arroyo to problem-solving. The concept of Smart Cities was created about a decade ago by commercial technologists offering solutions to problems they identified based on innovations they had created. In the early days, this allowed for cities to be tech-forward without much expense: Frequently, companies offered the technology for free, using cities as testing grounds, or selling ad space to pay for their solutions.

Forwards-thinking cities like Barcelona, London and Boston, capitalized on this, embedding the so-called "Internet of Things" into metropolis fixtures similar smart light poles, parking spots and bus kiosks, hoping to make life easier for residents and urban center authorities more than efficient. And for many of these cities, the success has been huge: Barcelona has reportedly saved €75 million of metropolis money and created 47,000 new smart technology jobs (which alone would be a huge benefit to Philadelphia). The industry, meanwhile, is booming: Ane study last jump estimated the market for smart urban center technology will be worth $238 billion in the adjacent 5 years.

At that place are hazards to being outset, every bit Toronto is discovering with its Quayside project: The Globe and Mail last year reported on a secret Sidewalk Labs volume that laid out an alarming scenario for how the company thought well-nigh using its civic tech to farther its bottom line, including issuing its own holding taxes, controlling some public services and using personal data to sell ads, or to requite people points that would allow them access to certain places. The company walked back from those ideas, and the understanding Toronto eventually made with Sidewalk Labs has addressed many of those concerns. Still, Quayside will be a republic of guinea grunter that could prove incredibly lucrative for Google, whether it is fully successful or non.

The tiresome pace of Philly's borough tech innovation has, perchance incidentally, coincided with a new wave of thinking around Smart Cities, i that calls for a more community-centered arroyo to problem-solving.

Philadelphia has stuttered in its attempts to become a Smart Metropolis over the concluding 15 years: From the failed endeavor at citywide broadband in 2004; to Nutter'south now-shuttered Office of New Urban Mechanics, generally considered a boon to Philly; to the metropolis'southward aggressive 2022 projects with Citymart, an international organization with the aim of irresolute the way cities work with companies to solve civic problems; to a subsequent call for Smart City solutions in 2022 that proved unwieldy.

That last effort, a broad call that brought in more than 100 ideas, led OIT to have a footstep back and secure a $200,000 Knight Foundation grant to bring together city departments to create a set of principles to guide the City as it decides what problems to solve and who will solve them: Locally-inspired (so, specific to Philly); innovative; equitable for all Philadelphians; and collaborative among urban center departments, the individual sector and communities. It sounds good, on newspaper, but the real exam will be in how information technology addresses the particulars of Philly, what makes it different than Toronto, or Barcelona: Our 25 pct poverty rate—and what that ways about people being left behind—hovers over everything. Can we afford to spend money and resources on heady innovations—smart parking spots!—when so many residents tin barely afford to pay their hire?

"The thoughtful arroyo is the way to do this," says Dawn McDougall, old director of civic hacking grouping Lawmaking for Philly, said last year. "When someone comes in with a problem and finds a specific gear up, frequently yous're non making the nigh systemic change needed. What the urban center needs is systemic transformation."

Is the Roadmap going to offer that? It's not clear from the efforts and then far. Yates came to Philly two months agone from Charlotte, Due north Carolina, later reading the Roadmap and existence drawn to its principles of a human being- and government-centered approach to civic tech that differs from what programmer-turned-tech journalist Meredith Broussard terms "technochauvinism"—the idea that tech problems and solutions are inherently superior to human problems and solutions. "Nosotros want to take the urban civic challenges the city is facing, and instead of having a technologist approaching us with their solutions to problems they identified, we wanted to tell them our problems and have them come up with a solution," Yates says.

Role of Yates' mandate is recruiting local universities to aid implement tech solutions; already, she says, several have reached out to her to run into how they can help. This first Call for Solutions came out of a 12-member Pitch & Pilot working grouping made upward of city workers, community members and academics, who decided on waste disposal because information technology fit a set of criteria: It aligns with Mayor Kenney'due south priorities, and is something residents intendance about; could benefit from exterior input, from both the community and professionals; and it is measurable.

At $34,000, Yates acknowledges the pilot is inevitably going to exist very limited. That coin, coming from OIT, falls nether the $35,000 limit earlier the legal requirement to issue a formal Request for Proposal, a much more complicated process that often leaves smaller local companies at a disadvantage. (Voters approved a election measure that will raise that threshold to $75,000 for out of town companies and $100,000 for local organizations starting July 1, 2020.)

The purse is intended to be plenty for a test project, with project management, community engagement and other back up—including evaluation—provided past the Streets Department and OIT. If successful, the City will so decide if and how to aggrandize the project, where the funds will come from and other details. Then far, anyway, that'due south the level of risk the administration seems ready to have. "We're going to put forward the coin, project manage the pilot and collect data to see if information technology's successful or non," Yates says. "If it fails, we learn from that, as well."

Header photo: J.Fusco, for Visit Philly

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/smart-tech-trash-philadelphia/

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