Solutionism in the Digital Age — Smart??- Beware!
Mike Dobbins, with contributions from Jeb Dobbins
A question for our moment is: How can city planners and designers support people-driven strategies to advance equity in developing the places we live and work in, from the neighborhood scale to the city?
City planning is a field that claims a long-held commitment to seek racial equality and economic justice. Our frame of reference here is to redress the imbalances between the quality of place and the quality of life, prioritizing meeting the needs and aspirations of those people whose needs are greatest. Presently, the usual private and even some public development practices either ignore or actively compound those needs. Put simply, if the goal is to meet these priorities — why we plan — three questions must be asked to evaluate any development initiative, public or private:
· Who gains from the development”?
· Who loses from the development?
· Does the result narrow or widen the wealth gap, the race gap, the life expectancy gap, or other indicators of inequity?
In terms of process:
· How do we avoid “solutionism” that, in past forms, addressed some problems, but left the people out, resulting in inequities that destroyed cultures and social cohesion?
· How do we modulate AI/big data/social media to serve our place-building aspirations?
Among the many process factors that bear on creating places that work for everyone is the dialectic between problem and solution. We live in a culture where people, even many planners, want to get to a solution, a magic bullet, more than they want to know whether it addresses the problem….until it’s too late: the solution didn’t solve the problem and may have made it worse. In these situations, the two sides of this problem/solution coin often do not interact properly to inform best courses for either understanding or acting on a problem. Yet they should.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail,” paraphrasing Abraham Maslow from 1966
Now, starting with the solution may work okay for well-defined problems, where the variables are limited, generally known and accepted. Such solutions generally take a linear analysis track: a to b, b to c, etc., as in from “I have a headache,” a couple of options, to “I’ll take an aspirin.” No brainer problems lead to workable solutions.
Building places, however, requires thinking of the whole place across time, both the three-dimensional and the four-dimensional. Under these circumstances, the variables in the interactions between problem and solution are infinite and ever-changing, thus Ill-suited to starting with a solution and thinking that it addresses the problem.
It’s important to note here that all kinds of ideas emerge in the search for solutions to place- building problems. It’s really good to have ideas, even grand visions, but not good to prematurely fall in love with any of them. Sound practice runs ideas back and forth through a reality filter, testing the idea against the problems it’s aimed at, comparing results, honing its relevance, a process out of which operable ideas — solutions — might emerge.
The territory of design at the civic scale, however, is littered with solutions that presumed rather than investigated the problems and then failed to make things better. Indeed, starting with the “solution” absent due consideration of the problems is likely to exacerbate the underlying mix of problems that prompted the ill thought-out solution in the first place.
Further muddying the waters is solutionist thinking at the scale of the individual disciplines that actually build places, making coordination, cooperation, and collaboration hard to come by. Each brings its particular skillset, rulebook, and mindset to the table, more or less oblivious to the effect their “solution” might have on the myriad of other problems. Reflecting on my experience, for example,
“The gas company discovers a gas leak and sets about replacing a couple of hundred feet of pipe. Then the water company says oho, they’re disrupting traffic and business anyway, this is a good time to replace a couple of thousand feet of water main that’s leaking in our trench. Then the fiber optic people, seeing these successive activities, figures we’ve got paying customers who are clamoring for an upgrade — we can trench the line now. Then the public works people say hmmm, we can use this opportunity to solve some or our inflow and infiltration problems with our piping. Then the traffic engineers see the opportunity to widen the roadway, narrowing the sidewalk and removing a row of pesky trees. Then the power company sees the opportunity to install a new pole in the new narrowed sidewalk, where their dimensional metrics determine that the best place would be in the wheelchair ramp. Then the businesses close because a month or so of disruption has turned into a year. Then longer term investors, who had been eyeing investment along this delightful tree-lined street, look elsewhere. Then the architects they had hired to explore possibilities get terminated. Then the surrounding neighborhood begins to decline.”
No wonder that places “designed” like this, each discipline hewing to its rule book, are so often a mishmash, both in physical functionality and in terms of responding to human behavioral needs and priorities. This disconnectedness cries out for planning and building practices that listen to and respect the value of each, enhancing the prospects for collaboration.
The French have a term for this phenomenon, “deformation professionelle,” which translates to “professional delusion,” or looking at things only from the point of view of one’s discipline
To be effective, then, processes must incorporate problem analyses driven by understanding that the forces and factors interacting with each other in place design are complex, unpredictable, and subject to continuous change. Addressing any one of these many factors by itself changes that factor and alters its relationship to the other factors with which it interacts. Sort of a place-building version of the Heisenberg effect. Remember too that if we leave out the questions of why we are we even doing this, and for whom, may set the process off in the wrong direction, diminishing rather than enhancing the voices of community people most affected by the outcome.
Presently, looking at the profound impacts of leaving people out and thus degrading the quality of their places, we see growing resistance, rage, and mounting will to do something about it. The ongoing devaluation of people of color and poor people more generally shows itself in places where they live and work across the country, where the lack of civic investment intentionally neglects and degrades neighborhoods, homes, schools, health and other basic infrastructure. There’s plenty of money in this richest of countries to redress and reverse these ever more apparent disparities. The few people who own this wealth, however, (almost all of whom are white), are fighting, successfully so far, to maintain and even expand control over all those institutions that in a democratic society might otherwise oblige them to give it up to meet the challenge. Now, prompted by yet more senseless and brutal murders of black men and women, the rage is boiling over and spreading to all quarters of an ever more unequal society, measured both in dollars and in race. Black Lives Matter, building for years in response to white supremacist and police violence, is becoming an important force, among many, to shape the restructuring of our society toward honoring the Constitution premise that we are all created equal.
In other places and times, where top-down institutions have left people out of their decision-making, “solutionism” has also held sway in place and city-building policies and practices. We need to look at the primary actors and the political and economic structures in which they operated. Famously, Baron von Haussmann in Paris in the 1870s bashed through the medieval cityscape with broad, straight boulevards enabling massive improvements in the water supply and storm and sanitary sewer system, a top-down solution, nominally a good thing. The resulting dislocation and disruption of community culture and cohesion, however, paved the way for major new real estate development initiatives, all benefitting the haves at the expense of the displaced have-nots, a bad thing if you care about the whole people. The boulevards further underscored the sharp divide between Napoleon III’s elites and ordinary people by facilitating troop movements to suppress people protesting their marginalization. From the value set of Haussmann’s overlords, the “solution” may have done more good than harm, justifying future elites’ adoption of the solutionist approach, however decoupled it might be from the fullness of place-building problems.
Later, in Chicago in the 1890s, an organization of business elites succeeded in securing Congressional approval to mount an international fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. One of its architects, Daniel Burnham, in 1891 enunciated the solutionist’s mantra:
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.“
This event signaled a reform movement aimed at improving the lot of the little guy through civic infrastructure, like museums, libraries, parks, boulevards, and other public amenities. These were at least gestures toward inclusion, a good thing. Generally held to be the birthplace of the City Beautiful movement, this effort projected its influence worldwide. In Chicago it culminated in the 1909 Plan for Chicago, put together by Burnham and fellow architect Edward Bennett for the same business elites. Burnham’s earlier pronouncement set the tone for architects and other policy makers to embrace its message for decades to come, elevating “solutionism” as the way to go. While the plan had merit for creating an organizing framework for the core city, it lacked most of the other factors and forces that make up the city, starting with leaving out the people.
Similarly, after World War I modernist architects recast the business of city building into a few technologically driven rules, putting forward simplistic precepts of how cities should be — auto-centric, better water, sewer, and energy infrastructure, and spatially — “machines for living in” — as Le Corbusier defined the ideal house. The water and sewer improvements, like Haussmann’s 50 years earlier, undeniably improved and extended these basic infrastructural needs. But the top down “solutions” put forward by a few great minds became de facto rules that left most people out of the equation. Design driven by a technological aesthetic, modernist architects created eye-catching individual buildings, but failed miserably when scaled up to city design. Cool house, grim city.
Modernist city design, then, the shiny object of the day, destroyed neighborhoods, social cohesion, and cultures, replacing them with spirit-numbing housing and office blocks, storage silos for most of their inhabitants. That scourge unleashed development activities worldwide, playing well into the hands of whoever held political and economic power, but devaluing the life of those millions who didn’t. In the U.S., “urban renewal,” the somehow accepted “solution” to all manner of perceived urban ills, shredded into oblivion the rich urban fabric that had fostered human capability and dignity for centuries.
“Urban Renewal….Means Negro Removal.” James Baldwin, 1963
Bottom line, for lack of considering problems holistically, thus ignoring the myriad of interacting factors in play over time, solutionism as a strategy fails in most place-building applications. Even where it does work, for example, like in an occasional people-serving commercial, residential, or transportation initiative where problem analysis got it right, its very success then puts the solution forward as a model for everywhere. While beneficial as a marketing tool for planning consultancies, the serendipity of success in one setting usually falls short elsewhere, again for lack of full problem-solution analyses of the different circumstances. Solutionism’s shortcomings as a process, then, are fundamental and twofold:
· It leaves real people out of the equation.
· Its equations necessarily must select from limitless variables those few that fit its methodology, in which are embedded its values, including bottom line return.
Thus, who makes the choices becomes the driving question in defining the problem and then selecting choices that reinforce the evolving “solution.” This method leads to actions unlikely to succeed in improving places for most people. To reiterate, who gains and who loses? Does the result narrow or widen the wealth gap? This latter becomes increasingly important, as even top-level private sector executives and a smattering of billionaires, the few who are looking beyond their noses, fear the existential and now real threat of social strife.
On the whole, the answers to these questions are mostly bad news. Those with the political and/or the economic power overwhelmingly win, whether in power or monetary measure or both. Those who lose are everyone else in varying degrees, from just getting along to suffering. As is well documented, the wealth gap continues to widen in the U.S. and most other places as the vicious cycle spirals ever downward.
Now, we have “smart” cities, fueled by two groups: true believers in the ideology of technology who, like the modernists, are certain that they have the “solution” for better meeting human need (according to their values); and the corporations and investors, whose driving purpose and presently unparalleled success is measured in dollars and power.
This ideology is the safe haven for those who, craving solutions, have blind trust that in big data and artificial intelligence (AI) all answers lie. Unfortunately, they often do lie. Once again, echoing the long run of modernism’s dominance in city building, simplistic smart city initiatives increasingly dominate the conversation about serious, complicated, always interacting and constantly changing issues. This dominance needs to be counterbalanced with a human behavior driven, more intuitive, more commonsense set of constructs for place building. Just as Jane Jacobs in the ’60s succeeded in laying bare the heretofore unseen but obvious failures of modernism and urban renewal, so now do we need a force to put big data and AI in their places, as tools, not ends, and in no way by themselves solutions.
To be sure, big data/AI is really valuable for what it’s good for, but is severely limited for looking forward. It lacks utility for dealing with the array of complicated, volatile, and unknown uncertainties that lie ahead. The main real achievements of the “smart” movement is to make what we already have work better, mainly in infrastructure. It shows promise, for example, in facilitating and smoothing over the blockades to coordination and collaboration mentioned earlier as “deformations professionelle.” Smart can and has begun to notably improve the efficiency and effectiveness of provision of water, sewer, energy, some forms of communication, human health, security, distribution, and other key areas important to people’s lives.
However, being able to pick your favorite song remotely so that it will play when the digital device opens your door and turns on your A/C while monitoring your heart rate and blood pressure might verge into the area of diminishing returns, unless marketing has lifted that technology into “gotta have” territory.
And there have been great advances at the building design level in using “smart” technologies, like Building Information Modelling (BIM), to better coordinate design and construction of a building’s multiple infrastructure systems. But because of the explosion of variables that occur in scaling up, much like modernist building design, such platforms don’t work at the larger scales — and won’t.
Where “smart” fails, like modernism and so often the case with solutionism generally, is by omitting people. Dominated by computer science and systems engineering, “smart” addresses mainly the what and the how of systems, the numeric, ignoring or suppressing the why and the who questions. Part of this flaw stems from the very narrowing that smart technologies require to solve for one or another of its wheelhouse issues. Problems are dumbed down to fit what smart methodologies have to offer.
A bigger problem is ignorance about, thus ignoring, how cities actually work and for whom. Here are the messy and constantly changing inter-mixings of technical, organizational, political, financial, and cultural factors that determine whether a place might work better for everyone or for just a few.
The best “smart” can do to account for the often-inconvenient realities of implementation processes, along with variations in human behavior, is to make assumptions that fit into its models. The people who create these may be really smart and well-intended. Yet a relative few individuals have the necessary skillsets to generate and manage this field. They may be light on life experience and history, less familiar with commonsense, and so inescapably reflect their values in their work. Whatever these are, they are but a tiny slice of the human experience and its range of aspiration, even wonderment, potential, and priority across the spectrum from hardship to sufficiency.
Accordingly, the utility of “smart” models, fueled by big data and AI, is limited to the particular problem to which it applies, generally not taking into account its interactive impacts with other city-building factors over time. There are fundamental and perhaps grave risks looking forward that might arise as smart “solutions” more and more dominate dialogues about futures from place building to city building. The risks are threefold.
First, “smart” depends on data, unfortunately almost entirely on quantitative data. Thus human potential and human behavior, always in unpredictable flux from the individual to the community level, don’t fit into the models. Data scientists must then characterize, classify, and narrow this and other “soft” information to corral it into numeric models.
Second, it’s not possible to “research” the future with any reliability. Thus the models as described above, some called “scenario planning,” no matter how energetically data scientists try, are pallid at best, almost like cardboard cutouts of a smattering of hypothetical futures. The problem, again, is no accounting for people coupled with little cognizance of the full range of factors in play and their interactions with each other over time.
“Nostradamus may have been closer to the mark”
Third, and perhaps scariest, is contemplating the kind of political and economic delivery structure it would take to impose a scenario so constructed onto a society. Most people who look toward data science as the “solution” focus on its potential for doing good, for considering the needs of people, all people, and for overall improving the places we live in, be they cities, neighborhoods, or homes. These people are usually laudably optimistic. Yet a “solution” scenario developed this way, based on superficial understandings of how places actually function and absent consideration of the range of real human needs and potentials, would require a top-down, anti-democratic authority to implement it.
“To Save Everything, Click Here: the Folly of Technological Solutionism,” Yevgeni Morozov, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2014
“Smart,” in terms of hardware and implemented software, already is dominated and owned by a few large corporations and their investors, for whom what has to matter the most is profit. This inescapable motivation is unlikely to put forward the values of believers in positive technological potential. Indeed, ideas that are continuously bubbling up from creative data scientists are routinely bought out and reshaped, or they are suppressed for their very threat to the bottom line, short term and long term.
So, where do we go from here?
City planners, more than most fields in the place-building world, look forward. While joked at for producing “plans that sit on the shelf,” planners’ future-oriented training and practice actually does play a significant part in framing that future, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Furthermore, people at the local level most immediately feel planners’ effects, whether in the layout of streets, blocks, and building types and sizes or in shaping districts, like neighborhoods and business or institutional centers of different kinds. So the building blocks are local, and strategies to improve them need a local base, especially now as many states and certainly the federal government have punted.
Beginning here with the premise that improving our places means for everyone, redirecting “solutions” to incorporate measures that actually do that is a first step. This begins to answer the “why” question — why we are doing this? Including people representing the full range of cultures, needs, and aspirations to guide the formation of those measures is the starting point. This will broaden the understanding and the range of actions needed to answer the “who gains, who loses” question more fairly from the get-go. This begins, too, the process of generating a values system that veers away from monetary wealth as the only measure of human success.
Then, move the dialogue away from desperately seeking “the solution” toward welcoming all ideas, the prenatal font for what might actually lead toward a viable solution. Paralleling idea generation, develop screening devices that array ideas according to their promise for advancing the goal: better places for all. Such a process involves continuous interactions between the startup idea and the underlying problem. These interactions are likely to re-form both the problem and the idea along the way. This process includes a rich range of people’s perspectives. Accordingly, it broadens information, coalesces the vision, reveals the strengths in the idea, and the opportunities in the problem. It has a good chance to result in actionable strategies.
The emergent menu of strategies, as suggested above, goes through a reality check, which a few of my students call a “truth filter,” aimed at testing their feasibility for achieving the goal. At a minimum: is the idea implementable technically, organizationally, politically, financially, and culturally? These five factors in turn are in continuous interaction with each other, altering their content from their starting points, again the Heisenberg effect.
If anything like this kind of problem-solution process had taken place before the wholesale adoption of urban renewal as “the solution,” the nation and many parts of the world would have been spared its ravages on human life and soul. Jane Jacobs might have had to find something else useful to expose and write about.
At this point, the value of “smart” might take its proper place. Yes, big data as needed would feed into the process at the appropriate points, interacting with qualitative values along the way. A key useful application, for example, would be targeting resources where needs are greatest across the span of housing, health, education, jobs, travel, and livable environments, all areas where quantitative measures of inequity of places already show most disgracefully.
Such an interactive process welcomes, listens to, and incorporates people’s ideas from all quarters. This balances the growing tendency among professionals to fear ideas until there are mountains of data, often of diminishing utility, which may even obstruct getting things done. Smart’s proper role, then, is one tool joining with other tools to address problems, to support useful ideas, to expand possibilities, and to arrive at people-driven solutions that work.
What might be the qualitative platform to interact with the big data/AI platform? Social media, properly regulated and aimed at achieving an equity agenda, could provide a piece of that counterpoint in the interactive framework to produce broader and more balanced understandings of place-building problems. Messy and unreliable as it is, where again profit is its owners’ baseline motive, social media is broadly accessible. Ordinary people can and do have some influence over content and distribution, for better or worse, while a relative handful of corporation experts, with academic support, hold the whip hand over big data and AI.
If we were to build such balanced problem-solving methodologies, what kind of leadership structure might it take to restore some balance in the process? Unfortunately, civic leadership, itself compromised by the concentrated wealth and power of owners of both the big data/AI and the social media platforms, does not hold them accountable to any broad-based, public-serving set of values. Instead, particularly with social media, the general public finds itself increasingly addicted to the distractions endlessly and artfully put forth, whether it’s the constant upping of the outrage videos on Youtube or the addictive, bubble-enclosing recommendations on Facebook, tailored to your individual dataset. The purpose for these corporations is, again, profit by targeting its advertisers’ products for maximum gain.
As a result, compounded by the many divides that characterize present American society and with civic institutions themselves becoming less accountable to democratic oversight, trust is in short supply. At the same time, both platforms themselves are dangerously vulnerable to manipulation from sources within and beyond. Since both platforms present some material that is incorrect or incomplete, people have to be on their toes to not be victims of the occasional digital malefactor. In this environment, accountable civic leadership, as noted above, has to be found locally, whether in the neighborhood or in a well-run local government.
In the case of social media, a localized strategy may guide better use and the establishment of community-serving rules for social media as well. Social media is only as good and useful as the people you trust in your network, your personal network, not the network that includes the world of the platform. You have to place some sort of limit, numeric, geographic, demographic, the number of your contributors, in short, you need to be in control. Otherwise, as now, the dynamic of the platform will bury the good in blankets of case specific but irrelevant anecdotes and shred the best ideas and initiatives with diatribes that will spin out of control. Social media as a tool for building an equitable society, at this point in its evolution, is a purposefully addictive distraction, a failure, a coal-fired automobile.
Hope for people to gain control may lie in the blossoming of citizen engagement practices and techniques since the days of urban renewal. From the federal level and then unevenly on down, provisions for some sort of structured citizen participation process conditioned access to funding, like the Community Development Block Grant program and others. Birmingham and Atlanta were two cities that placed neighborhood-based citizen participation requirements into their charters, both with the express intent of broadening democracy in planning and other municipal processes into their charters. The use of digital media has grown to become the centerpiece for this engagement. These technologies have the potential to listen to people in contemplating any particular plan and development initiative and to accept their guidance in shaping goals and strategies.
Bringing this down to ground, then, at the level of either place building or city building, the prospect brightens for finding some confluence of interests, some level of trust, neighbor to neighbor, or in interests held in common. The best starting points are local, where people are more likely to agree on problems in common, find ways forward to resolve differences, where a can-do attitude propels actions to meet local needs with solutions that work. Here, communication, collaboration, and cooperation cut across whatever are people’s skillsets, where a commonsense screen might balance specialized knowledge.
These values particularly shine in facing crises, whether in recovering from storms or, as now, with all-in and all-inclusive commitment to non-violent strategies and tactics to respond to the coming out party of the unjust state and the calls for its fundamental structural change. Whether it’s place-based deficiencies, like the lack of well-lit sidewalks or public schools at one end, or at the other the big stuff, like the right to vote and the right to equal justice under the law, unremitting racist policies and practices magnify the divide.
It is in responses to these kinds of needs, whether immediate or long-simmering, where people, individual humans, initiate actions, cooperate with each other, persist in pushing them forward, or of necessity simply do it on their own. This is the level at which problem-borne creativity rises, from good samaritan, to community organizations, to the occasionally well-run local government. This is the cauldron for leadership development, where young people in particular are testing themselves as leaders against the emerging frontiers. Now the COVID-19 shift toward remote communication and collaboration may usher in new tools to act on old problems. Here is where solutions, however imperfect, originate to meet a need that more formalized hierarchies higher up the line may be slow or indifferent about meeting. Indeed, as one moves up in scale to many state and federal levels, so compromised are the institutions of government by their private sector takeover that meaningful support for listening to and meeting immediate needs isn’t happening. What does come down from on high invariably skews toward the already rich and powerful.
To summarize, then, big data has its place. But we planners must keep it there, serving its purpose as a tool for improving the lot of individual humans and their networks, as they define their needs. Why do we build places? Whom do we build for? In a democratically committed world, the answer is for everyone. Yet, in these uncertain and troubling times, the ever-widening wealth divide goes beyond neglect and becomes an attack on almost everyone. The relationship between the haves and the have-nots has fallen perilously out of balance. Civil society is falling away as democracy erodes. Planners and place builders, as people who must look forward, have an obligation to step up and find ways to restore a balance that builds toward a society that recognizes all people to be of equal value . We need to create a framework for understanding the range of problems, their interactions, and ways for dealing with them effectively. In such a framework for inquiry, the search for solutions that work will be greatly improved and the results more productive, timely, and reliable.
On the other hand, if your premise is that the world is better off if it marginalizes most of its people, does not value them equally, impoverishes them both in body and spirit, squanders their potential, yet “makes the trains run on time” per Mussolini or builds the autobahns per Hitler, then current conditions spiraling that way are probably just fine.
END OF STORY
