Tech Envisions the Ultimate Start-Up: An Entire City
Tech Envisions the Ultimate Start-Up: An Entire City
Silicon Valley wants to save cities. What could go wrong?
By Emily Badger Feb. 24, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — For all the optimism, innovation and
wealth that are produced here, the Bay Area can also feel like a place that
doesn’t work quite right.
The cost of housing has priced out teachers and line
cooks. Income inequality is among the widest in the nation. The homeless crisis
never seems to ebb. Traffic is a mess. On bad days, transit is, too. And local
governments are locked in conflict.
Clearly, the region has not been optimized.
“It could be so much better,” said Ben Huh, who moved to
San Francisco in 2016 after running the Cheezburger blog empire in Seattle.
“There’s so much wealth. There’s so much opportunity.”
In the maddening gap between how this place functions and
how inventors and engineers here think it should, many have become enamored
with the same idea: What if the people who build circuits and social networks
could build cities, too? Wholly new places, designed from scratch and freed
from broken policies.
Mr. Huh leads a project begun by the start-up accelerator
Y Combinator to explore the creation of new cities. Hundreds applied to work on
what looked like “the ultimate full-stack start-up.” Last October, Sidewalk
Labs, an Alphabet company, announced it would team up with a government agency
in Toronto to redevelop a stretch of the city “from the internet up.”
For others in tech — intrigued by word of a proposed
smart city in Arizona, a big Bitcoin land grab in Nevada, a special economic
zone in Honduras — fantasizing about newly built cities has become a side gig.
They dream of utopias with driverless cars, radical property-ownership models,
3-D-printed houses and skyscrapers assembled in days.
While some urban planners roll their eyes, it is true
that America’s cities have always been built on someone’s hubris, whether the
characters who plotted Manhattan’s street grid, or those who imagined the
Golden Gate Bridge.
“Who were these guys who were thinking so big? Then the
question is, where are those people now?” said Paul Romer, the former chief
economist at the World Bank, whose ideas (and TED talks) on new “charter
cities” have influenced some in tech. “Tech types — as much as people might
talk about the parochial way they’re approaching it — deserve credit for
thinking bigger than anybody in government right now.”
Their interest has an internal logic to it. The tech
industry tries to produce better versions of familiar things — cheaper phones,
smaller computers, faster chips. But cities like San Francisco don’t seem to be
evolving into more efficient versions of themselves. And if you take literally
the economist Ed Glaeser’s assertion in “Triumph of the City” that cities are
our greatest invention, it ought to be possible to reinvent them.
The idea isn’t such a stretch, the dreamers say, when
Elon Musk is already shooting rockets into space and trying to bore tunnels for
a transit “hyperloop.”
“You now have a lot of people who have seen a lot of
success thinking, ‘Well, how can I one-up that? What’s bigger than starting a
multibillion-dollar company?’ ” said JD Ross, the 27-year-old co-founder of
Opendoor, a home-buying company that has been valued by investors at more than
$1 billion. “We have the home screen on our phone, we have the home button in
every app. But it really comes down to people’s actual homes — that’s much more
important.”
To planners and architects, all of this sounds like the
naïveté of newcomers who are mistaking political problems for engineering
puzzles.
Utopian city-building schemes have seldom succeeded. What
we really need, they say, is to fix the cities we already have, not to set off
in search of new ones.
But it is hard to overstate the degree to which these
tech entrepreneurs are looking at the world in ways that would be almost
unrecognizable to anyone already working on urban problems.
The Idealized City: An Absence of Rules
After Mr. Huh stepped down from Cheezburger in 2015, he
took a sabbatical abroad that brought him to the Croatian port city of
Dubrovnik. In the old city there, he watched Americans debarking from a cruise
ship coo over the Old World architecture and narrow streets.
Mr. Huh had the same epiphany that many urban planning
students have brought back from study abroad: Americans love these
environments, but we make it impossible to build them here. Instead, we
encourage sprawl, outlaw density and design around cars. And we’ve exported
that paradigm around the world.
The model cities Mr. Huh and others in tech describe are
not so different from what many urbanists want. They aspire to tame NIMBYism
and private cars. They want to create walkable neighborhoods, albeit around
hyperloop lines that would travel faster than any bullet train. They’re focused
on affordable housing, although the shortage of it looks to them less like a
matter of policy than a problem that better construction technology can solve.
“We have not affected the fundamental building blocks of
infrastructure and society,” Mr. Huh said. “We’ve made this better,” he added,
gesturing to his laptop. “We’ve made the new things better. We haven’t made the
old things better.”
In thinking about how to do that, people in tech prize
“first principles,” a concept that suggests that historical awareness and
traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas.
The approach has worked before. Uber wouldn’t exist if
Travis Kalanick had begun by researching how taxis were regulated around the
world. Uber instead produced a service that violated those rules, and changed
how millions of people travel.
With cities, this means stripping away the histories of
other utopias, the building codes that shape San Francisco, the political
dynamics that block change. The tabula rasa is alluring not just for the lack
of buildings, but also the absence of rules.
Mr. Huh and others proudly say this leads them to
odd-sounding questions: How much does a city cost? Why can’t you construct a
skyscraper in days? Could you fit a city’s rule book into a hundred pages?
This in turn leads to very different conclusions.
“Humans currently live in cities that are the equivalent
of flip phones,” said Jonathan Swanson, a co-founder of the company Thumbtack,
which connects consumers to professionals like house painters and wedding
officiants. If someone built a better version of San Francisco — the iPhone X
of cities — two hours away, people here would demand those upgrades, he said.
One new city could benefit millions of others who don’t live there.
“When you have competition, you get iOS versus Android or
Lyft versus Uber,” Mr. Swanson said. Without competition, we get cities that
are like Comcast or the D.M.V.
A Collision of People and Ideas Is Sort of the Point
There is a thread running through the past, however, that
is not just about urban history, but also tech’s own history. In the 1960s,
people were equally convinced, as Hubert Humphrey put it, that “the techniques
that are going to put a man on the moon are going to be exactly the techniques
that we are going to need to clean up our cities.”
At the time, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development collaborated on ideas for “urban control systems.” Lunar landing
simulators were used to study city environments. Companies promised space-age
cities built from scratch.
“It’s very easy to get a sense of déjà vu,” said Nicholas
de Monchaux, a designer and Berkeley professor who describes this history in
his book “Spacesuit.”
Technologically optimized cities, he says, failed then
for the same reason they would be unsuccessful now. Technology can help reduce
traffic, or connect you faster to a ride home. “But a city is not at its
fundamental level optimizable,” he said. A city’s dynamism derives from its
inefficiencies, from people and ideas colliding unpredictably.
It’s also unclear what you’d optimize an entire city for.
Technologists describe noble aspirations like “human flourishing” or “quality
of life.” But noble goals come into conflict within cities. You could optimize
for affordable housing, but then you may create a more crowded city than many
residents want. You could design a city so that every home receives sunlight
(an idea the Chinese tried). But that might mean the city isn’t dense enough to
support diverse restaurants and mass transit.
These trade-offs demand political choices. And so
technologists hoping to avoid politics are bound to encounter them again.
Of the techno-urbanists, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs seems
to be closest to actually creating something. The company, run out of New York
City by the former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, concluded after a year of study
that it needed a not-quite-blank slate to truly innovate.
With too many people or buildings already in place, it
could never install an energy grid, or test what happens when you ban private
cars. But a stand-alone city in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t work, Mr.
Doctoroff said, because people wouldn’t want to move there.
“The smart city movement as a whole has been
disappointing in part because it is hard to get stuff done in a traditional
urban environment,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “On the other hand, if you’re
completely disrespectful of the urbanist tradition, I don’t think it’s
particularly replicable. And it’s probably pretty naïve.”
A Lab Experiment in Toronto
Toronto had what Sidewalk Labs had been looking for —
roughly 800 acres of underused waterfront that could be reimagined as a
neighborhood, if not a full metropolis, with driverless cars, prefabricated
construction and underground channels for robot deliveries and trash
collection. The company is in the middle of a year of public meetings around a
pilot phase of the project. Sidewalk Labs could ultimately become the co-master
planner for the full site, alongside a government organization that manages it.
Mr. Huh would not say what form Y Combinator’s project
would ultimately take. The group has announced no plot of land or government
partner. But Mr. Huh described the effort as an “ongoing moonshot,” one that’s
still trained on the affordable housing problem that Y Combinator believes connects
to everything else.
It’s possible that tech’s greatest impact won’t come from
anything like the hyperloop, or with new North American cities. It could come
in the developing world, where some economists who have inspired the would-be
city builders are hoping tech will turn its ambition.
Mr. Glaeser poses a question that is less provocative —
but perhaps more productive — than how to build a better San Francisco. “The
first-order thing,” he said, “is how can we do mass-produced plastic housing
for slums in a way that’s sanitary and really, really cheap?”
Mr. Ross, the 27-year-old entrepreneur, is still
pondering the right target.
“I’m going to put $100 million into this as soon as I can
figure out how,” he said, sitting in a coffee shop at a loud corner of San
Francisco full of construction cranes, where the city is reinventing itself
more slowly than he would like.
“It’s better,” he said, “than buying a Bugatti.”
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