As a model city denizen, you are attentive to the challenges facing your city: sitting in a café discussing gentrification, broken-windows, rent control, and guerrilla urbanism with your buddies is your primary mode of social interaction. You are wondering what your city will look like tomorrow. Today’s American cities are undergoing many of the demographic, spatial, and economic shifts suggested by Alan Ehrenhalt in his work, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. Hordes of young and educated people are flocking to the city center and prompting an inversion, seeking to escape the complacency of the suburbs and benefit from the cultural wealth and unexpected encounter offered by the city. (Ehrenhalt 2013) Increasingly, city populations are seeing the street as part of the public realm and are contesting the state’s role as city planner.

In this dynamic context, the emergence of tech will shape the future urban fabric, posing questions that challenge our conception of the American city. This article presents four technologies that are — or have the potential to — radically alter the form, function, and character of the urban landscape in America. Will the changing social and demographic urban landscape jive or lock horns with the relentlessness of the tech industry? What will be the role of the urban planner in reconciling these differences? Do these technologies present unrealistic utopian visions or will they come to alter the vitality of our urban spaces?

Part I. The ‘Sharing Economy’: Airbnb, Uber, and Gentrification

At an event in San Francisco, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, said to his audience of website users: “There are laws for people and there are laws for business, but you are a new category, a third category, people as businesses.” (Streitfeld 2014) Airbnb is a website that connects homeowners hoping to generate some revenue from a spare bedroom or while away from home, with individuals looking for an unconventional place to stay while traveling (i.e. not a hotel), for instance. What Chesky’s statement suggests, and why his words are problematic for city planners, is that the traditional customer-to-business relationship is moot. Rather, Airbnb facilitates ‘Peer-to-Peer’ deals, suggesting both consumer and producer (in this case the homeowner) benefit from employing unused capital — in this case, a bedroom or vacant lodging.

What are the implications of these short-term residential rentals? Recently, short-term residential rentals have become a fixture in some metropolitan housing markets. While this behavior may appear benign, these “microentrepreneurs,” as Chesky likes to refer to his customers, are stressing the boundaries of rent control policies and regulations for controlling short-term rentals in cities. (Streitfeld 2014) Some of these “microentrepreneurs” are purchasing homes with no intention of living in the home, opting to rent the property through Airbnb to transient residents. These property owners often fetch multiples times the market rate of renting their property. In cities such as San Francisco and New York City, these rentals account for an increasing share of the total housing stock, exacerbating the already grave shortage of affordable housing available to prospective residents. Moreover, the opportunity cost of renting to a long-term tenant may be spurring evictions (thanks to policies such as the Ellis Act, in San Francisco) and gentrification, as well as greatly increasing property values in these metropolitan areas and thereby decreasing affordability. (Chum 2015) San Francisco and New York City both have policies requiring that rental periods must be longer than thirty days, to prevent this kind of short-term residential renting from taking place. As a result, city governments are in the precarious position of encouraging growth — bolstering the coveted tech sector — while having to simultaneously police private sector hubris. Following the ‘No’ result of Proposition F — a ballot measure in San Francisco aimed to regulate the activities of Airbnb in its encouragement of short-term residential rentals — the home-sharing company pointed to its clout and considerable constituency of homeowners and renters. (Alba 2015)

The $8.5 Airbnb invested in anti-prop-F advertising points suggests the sharing economy will be fighting to remain a fixture in the contemporary American city. (Ember, Isaac 2015)

Ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft are challenging conceptions of public transportation and the century-long trend of automobile-centered American cities. Similarly to Airbnb, Uber frames itself as service creating peer-to-peer connections to facilitate the ‘sharing’ of underutilized capital, in this case cars, rather than homes. In practice, however, Uber cars are more reminiscent of taxis than penny-pinching Good Samaritans. As a result, taxis are suffering, as the hotel industry is with Airbnb. (Zervas, Proserpio, Byers 2015) In Upstate New York, Uber is framing itself as a force of for urban “revitalization,” after its successful battle with mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. (McKinley, Fitzsimmons 2015) This narrative of the private sector as force for good is prompting a renegotiation of the relationship between state and private sector. Again, urban planners face the question of how to regulate the increasingly contested role of tech companies in the urban landscape, if and how the urban form should be reshaped to accommodate this new activity, and how the demographic makeup of cities will respond to this shift. At least for now, the sharing economy is here to stay and will be a critical actor in the American city’s future.

As noted above, the presence of these ‘sharing economy’ companies appears to be partly responsible for symptoms of gentrification in San Francisco and New York City. For example in San Francisco, an influx of tech industry workers hoping to live in the city and commute to their jobs in the South Bay has helped spur enormous increases in home values in certain areas, reducing affordability. As Susan S. Fainstein’s work, Cities and Diversity, is useful in understanding how space becomes contested in situations where there is racial and socioeconomic heterogeneity: “Sometimes exposure to ‘the other’ evokes greater understanding, but if lifestyles are too incompatible, it only heightens prejudice.” (Fainstein 2005) Fainstein continues, arguing: “the competitive advantage of cities, and thus the most promising approach to attaining economic success, lies in enhancing diversity within the society, economic base, and built environment.” (Fainstein 2005) If and when the ‘sharing economy’ grows to occupy a more central place within the functioning of U.S. cities, the role of the urban planner will increasingly be in weighing factors of growth and affordability, diversity and gentrification; Fainstein’s argument may come in handy.

Part II. Personal Privacy, Drones, Technology as a Public Good, and the Future Role of Autonomous Transportation Systems in U.S. Cities

Continuing with the theme of the private sector’s relationship with the city government and its increasing role as an actor in the contemporary city, Google is seeking to provide two innovations, one a good and the other a service, which have the potential of transforming the shape of the urban environment.

First, Google expects to have a road-ready fully autonomous vehicle by 2020. (Davies) This plan to “eliminate human driving,” provides an opportunity to reconfigure transportation infrastructure in the city. This shift would not be without some costs: despite the purported savings (in labor and in vehicle cost), the jobs of bus-drivers across the country are in a position of uncertainty. In the event of an automated public transportation system, the city will be forced to provide a means of sustenance for a new horde of unemployed. (Not to mention the millions of other public and private sector employees who’s jobs are being replaced by automation; that, however, is a topic for another article.) Furthermore, both the historic significance and the huge investment in public transportation made by cities are put in jeopardy by this potential development. Google’s self-driving car also raises question regarding the public regulation of risk. By all current measures, self-driving cars are far safer than humans behind the wheel. However, as the Wired article, “Google’s Plan to Eliminate Human Driving in 5 Years,” points out: humans as a back-up system may be problematic, as “it takes an average of 3 to 7 seconds, and as long as 10, for a driver to snap to attention and take control, even when prompted by flashing lights and verbal warnings.” I posit that city planners be prompted to consider the merits and drawbacks of this emerging technology, not only in its potential ontological implementation, but also in the formulation of policies regulating this technology. In defining a ‘self-driving car,’ urban planners and city policy makers will have to differentiate between assistive technologies already in cars like assisted-braking and truly autonomous vehicles.

The emergence of drones as a consumer good poses questions of personal privacy and policing in the city. A new technology developed by Ross McNutt, an ex-military engineer, could provide the city a novel means of policing crime: an airplane with a 44 mega-pixel camera continuously orbiting a city continuously taking aerial photos. (RadioLab 2015) The time-lapse of the city this technology produces has allowed the police in Dayton, Ohio to fight crime. For instance, using this technology the police in Dayton were able to recover stolen vehicles: all you need to know is where the vehicle was stolen and you can scroll rewind through the time-lapse until the theft occurs, and the play the time-lapse, following the moving vehicle all the way to its new location. The potential application of this tool in cities, mapping transportation networks, for instance, goes beyond this technology being a powerful tool in the police’s arsenal. City planners, in turn, may be pushed to examine the benefits of this technology, an others like it, weighed against the public’s perception of this tool — one that challenges our valuation (moral and financial) of personal privacy over the ‘greater good.’

Another one of Google’s projects having the potential to change the physical form of the urban landscape is its project to bring free public Wi-Fi to the streets of New York City, and in time to the cities of the world. Google’s start-up, Sidewalk Labs, is working on a project called LinkNYC, which would replace existing pay phones in the city with sleek Wi-Fi providing hubs sporting free public emergency phones and digital advertising space. In the Wired article, “Google’s Next Moonshot: Lining City Streets With Wi-Fi Hubs,” Don Doctoroff (Sidewalk Labs’ head) is quoted as saying: “The vision really is to make cities connected places where you can walk down any street and have access to free ultra high speed Wi-Fi. […] The possibilities from there are just endless.” (Lapowski 2015)

In the event that LinkNYC is successful, the urban fabric of the city may change radically. I would conjecture that property values could rise significantly in the areas having access these hubs, and local businesses may be prompted to relocate. As with the services provided by home- and ride- sharing businesses, the potential implications for the gentrifying of urban cores is at hand. This potential technology places Sidewalk Labs and Google in a position not usually held by companies, being able to alter the urban form on the scale of the neighborhood, the borough, and the city as a whole. Once again, the city government and the urban planner will need to assess the democratic implications of the private sector as an agent with the ability to shape the urban form through the medium of technology. I posit that the historic precedent of regulating this relationship may not be a sufficient model for the city of New York to formulate its response. Moreover, driverless cars could have tremendous social and economic externalities, as Thomas Frey points out in his article “Driverless Highways: Creating Cars that Talk to the Roads”: “Driverless technologies will be blamed for destroying countless jobs – truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, limo drivers, traffic cops, parking lot attendants, ambulance drivers, first responders, doctors, and nurses will all see their careers impacted. / If done correctly, driverless vehicles may even deal a fatal blow to the auto insurance industry.” (Frey 2012) These implications are sure to agitate urbanites and urban planners alike, as the question of employing this workforce arises.

Concluding Thoughts:

As the tech industry races forward, the physical form of the American city will likely be placed in a position of flux. Now more than ever, informed and intelligent urban planning will need to envision the American city’s future in the context of a technological era and a return to top-down rational planning practices relying on increasingly complex data processing tools. These technologies augur good and bad. As technologies continue to penetrate the cityscape, urbanites may have the opportunity to be increasingly entrepreneurial, unused capital can be put into use, novel solutions to issues of transportation planning are increasingly viable, the policing of crime could be facilitated and enhanced, and exciting new opportunities exist to vitalize public space. However, possible eventualities also include the abandonment of the traditional organization of the labor force, the stressing of individual liberties concerning privacy, or gentrification and the displacement of disadvantaged urban populations. The future role of tech in the city is multi-faceted and rife with contradictions and opportunities. The certainty that tech will significantly alter the urban landscape in the short timeframe should also be called into question, nevertheless. The physical and demographic transformation of cities can often be slow; it should not be assumed that the transfiguration of the urban form would occur at the same rate as that of the tech industry. However, despite this caveat, these four technologies may well become fixtures of the future American urban landscape. As a concerned citizen, you may want to pay close attention to the future developments suggested above, and envision what your city should look like in the future.

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