#54: Crosseyed and Dockless
However you perceive the contemporary American urban zeitgeist, it's hard to argue that the Bay Area isn't its spiritual home. The city increasingly displays an exaggerated mixture of success and failure that couldn't exist without its highly specific confluence of geography, economic boom conditions, Prop 13, and countless other factors. The problems of New York, that other familiar zeitgeist capital, never generalized easily to the rest of the United States, at least not when they emerged: New York always seemed like a laboratory for what would eventually disseminate everywhere else. San Francisco, as befits its West Coast location, feels like the opposite, the place where the rest of the country's problems finally end up, aligning in constructive interference and reaching new, absurd heights. Right now, the Bay Area's two most visible battlegrounds are housing and scooters—entirely different domains that share a root cause: a shortage of space for living and moving, respectively. Two entrenched groups—homeowners and drivers—have exacerbated those shortages, causing rampant homelessness on one hand and a proliferation of non-automotive, dockless vehicles on the other. Neither is a solution to the underlying problem, obviously, but each is a direct result of the shortage.
In 2013 I gave a talk at this "unconference" (which was called "Jailbreaking the City") about how cities have two broad categories of problems: hardware problems and software problems. Hardware is the physical built environment—housing, roadways, transit infrastructure, bridges—while software is the culture, politics, information, money, and literal code that flows through that space or "runs on top of it." The hardware is, by definition, less adaptable than the software. A city's built environment can never stay perfectly adapted to its economy and culture—the fastest construction cycle will always lag the speed of information—and the internet (and then smartphones) unlocked massive opportunities to re-optimize and rewire our dumb urban hardware using better, more fluid data (Waze, Foursquare, ridesharing, and Airbnb are some of the best examples of this).
Five years ago, we were still solving urban software problems so fast that it felt like they were the only problems cities still had, but in places like San Francisco we're hitting a wall. It turns out we still need to build stuff. We're running iOS 11 on an iPhone 4. You can hail a taxi faster than ever but it's still stuck in traffic once you get in; scooters are a way to extract slightly more value from the infrastructure that exists. Bruce Sterling, in this amazing talk (which you should watch when you have a spare hour), coined the term "favela chic," a software-rich/hardware-poor condition where "you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills and really big on Facebook." The stranglehold that drivers and long-time homeowners continue to exercise over their respective territories leaves little remaining space to solve the problems they've created, which is why that space continues to fill with homeless encampments and dockless transportation paraphernelia. Today, in too many cities, that's what public space is: the messy floodplain for what our oversubscribed private zones can't accommodate. Don't assume that smaller cities with peacefully empty, uncluttered streetscapes are doing better than San Francisco. They just haven't flooded yet.
Reads:
Researchers used smartphone location data to estimate the lengths of Thanksgiving dinners in 2016, finding that dinners were shorter among families with mixed political views.
Tim Hwang launched a cool project called Trade Journal Cooperative, a subscription service that sends you a different niche trade journal every quarter.
The entire country of Papua New Guinea is disconnecting Facebook for a month so the government can study the site's impact on users.
Until next time,
Drew