The Future Is Now

Broadway and Houston Street in 1884. Note the high-tech infrastructure: telegraph poles above the street, streetcars, and cast-iron facades.

Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction writer of some deserved fame, has a good piece up at The Atlantic on the craze for conflating digital technology for basic changes in urban infrastructure. Interestingly, the magazine’s headline is ‘Stop Saying ‘Smart Cities’ while the URL slug is “stupid cities.” I suspect that the latter was Sterling’s working title and the published title came from an editor with more tact.

My interpretation of Sterling’s point is that there is no qualitative difference between digital technology and all the other technologies – and it is a very ling list – that have been absorbed into cities over thousands of years. Romans proved over 2000 years ago that a large city could be supplied with fresh water and have its sewage removed efficiently. Later technologies were adopted by many cities more or less simultaneously but with differing degrees of success. Intracity rail came along in the nineteenth century as did electric power and the beginning of the wired world in the form of telephones and telegraphs. Yes, the technologies that enable me to type this piece, link it to the NYC Building Code and the program of a conference last year, and send it out where to can be read by anyone (anyone with a computer and internet connection) are fantastic, but they are not inherently different from previous technologies, just faster, cheaper, and easier to use.

Like all new technologies, the latest crazes in online technology will be adopted at varying speeds and to varying degrees in different places. This, again, is nothing new. To quote another science fiction writer, William Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Technologies can also fade away, as the futuristic pneumatic tubes of the early twentieth century did.

Last year, at the Future of Design NYC symposium, a fellow from Google explained how his company was re-imagining the city. For all I know, maybe he was right on target and everything he mentioned will come to pass. But I doubt it. His illustrations showed a neighborhood of buildings that look futuristic (whatever that means at this date) but could not be constructed under any building code I know of. A lot of people, especially those who are not in the AEC fields, like to deride building codes as overly-complex regulation, but in reality they represent decades and in some cases centuries of hard-won knowledge about what is safe to build and what is not. The people who invented revolving doors did not realize that they were creating a hazard for fire egress, but the Cocoanut Grove fire among others proved that they had. Section 1008.1.4.1 of the New York City Building Code (section 1010.1.4.1 in the IBC) is the distilled message of how to be sure that revolving doors are safe. It seems obscure until you think of how many public bidding have revolving doors. It’s hard to believe that a clean-slate approach to building will save this code section and the thousand others like it that keep us safe. It is, therefore, hard to believe that a clean-slate approach makes sense.