(upbeat music) - Hello, hello, Reza, how are you? - Good, Shae, how are you doing? - I am good, I am good. We are about to dive into future forward again. How do you feel? - Man, another one, it's exciting. (laughing) - Great, great, yes. This episode is all about the autonomous city. We don't want to call it smart city 'cause we know what problematic that phrase is, but calling it the autonomous city and it is a most recent episode in our exploration of the future of cities. - Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to talk about this one, Shae. As we always start our episode, if you're a new listener, this is a conversation that Shae and I have been having for years, welcome to our show. It's really about the future of cities, strategic foresight on technology, community, where cities are going. And this one's an interesting episode because implied in its topic is the future. - Yes. - And in it are a host of problems that we will explore. (laughing) So Shae, how about we start with some history on these visions of smart or futuristic cities? - Absolutely, yeah, so as we mentioned on, I think our third or fourth episode, this whole idea of smart cities and the framing is problematic, but it's not new. We started having conversations about the smart city in the 1930s and it was these ideas of modernist buildings, sleek technology in these environments that were sort of future forward as fine the future as they could think in 1930. So back then we had some grand ambitions from specific individuals and I'll touch on a few here. Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect, he had this idea for Brodeka City, which he exhibited April 15th, 1935 in New York and was well received because everything Frank Lloyd Wright did was well received. But even in its visionary status, lacked everything beyond the, this should serve everyone, not just the homes, these buildings were beautiful, but that was it. Really wasn't a practical city in that sense. But then we swing to the far end of what was a practical vision for a smart of futuristic city in the form of, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Le Corbacier's Radiant City. We all know him for his utilitarian, almost like the expense of the humans in the city. The city was supposed to do what it needed to do. And in his mind, it was to house and move people from home to work. There was no warmth about his cities. And then we had the Wild, Wacky, Buckminster Fuller, Glass Structure, Utopia, where we would all live in bubbles, ice bubbles, glass bubbles, which in practical, but when has that been a consideration for Buckminster Fuller, you know? So. - Yeah. - And what's the highlights? - Yeah. And what that highlights for us though is that the ideals and the philosophy of the people who were proposing the cities was what was getting played out in the cities. And so the two most recent examples that one failed, well, two failed, and one is failing before our very eyes. We had sidewalk labs, the Google funded, the city focused sort of incubator/ideal lab, got into an agreement with the city of Toronto to make the Keysight area of Toronto a city I love. We've been to Toronto and it's just such a, despite all that is happening in terms of just property speculation. Keysight was this part of the city that had been neglected but had so much potential because it was facing the water in the city. Sidewalk Labs came and the proposition, honestly, my summary of the proposition was, Toronto, give us your land, we'll build this digitally, Utopia, we'll sell ads to corporate partners, so you won't have to pay us much for us building what we want. We will sell ads to fund the city, and oh, by the way, the ads will be based on people's data. That was the proposition. Unsurprisingly, the people of Toronto were like, what is this nonsense? And this was one of those beautiful exhibitions of Jane Jacobs' approach to making sure the city serves its people. No coincidence, she moved from New York to Toronto, and she led a lot of movements in Toronto, so that spirit was still there, and the people immediately shut it down. The next one, a few years ago, Cisco, Google, and a few of these tech companies were trying to make Kansas City a smart city. That one failed as well, was a lot of money spent, that one failed as well. But the biggest and most elaborate idea here is Neon, which is in Saudi Arabia. And my goodness, is it a smart city that was doomed to fail from the beginning, or what? I'll give you some stats. This line, it's supposed to be almost like one through line, going through, yeah. And it is causing 1.5 trillion to build this. That's crazy. 1.5 trillion, and the project is supposedly moving full steam ahead. It probably won't be successful. It is supposed to stretch for 105 miles across the desert with a length, so stretching 105 miles for the length of just 1.5 meters. Oh, sorry, 1.5 miles. And as you can imagine, the problems with that, you won't have to drive is what they claim. It's a smart city, but it is failing before I said, yeah. - That's crazy. One comment, sidewalk labs, everything. All the promise with it, I love the name, just the name sort of like a sidewalk lab. Sidewalk, yes, like so human. I was so excited about it. I've never heard about the Kansas City One, probably discounted at the moment I read about it, so it's a waste for my memory. Beyond the scenes, incredibly ambitious, just misguided in its vision of just slurging money to overbuild something in a place that just doesn't seem sustainable. - Yes, yes. - But the interesting thing, Jay, that I see in these, you give these examples of Frank Lloyd Wright, my dad's favorite architect, Lick, Lick, VCA, and Buckminster Fuller. And then these current sidewalk labs and neon, and the distinction that I see is, back then in the '30s, the vision was driven by an individual that had this idea of using architecture and building to create with the technology of the bay, these smart cities to speak. And what we have today is we have either tech companies or government trying to drive it. They're just, I see a lack of vision in those. Like what those architects did, they had a vision, it was coherent, it was probably wrong, but there was some coherence to what they were trying to do. And these ones are just like trying to jam technology into a city in a way that isn't coherent and then for the both of them, the statement, the common thing is neither of them actually think about the humans living in the city. You have kind of pointed that out as you talked about it, but I think that's like the fundamental thing is neither of them addressed. The core problem is that cities are for people, for humans to live in. - Yes. - I think we were changing a text this week about it. - We were, we were. And I love that you constantly pull out these distinctions. One, a slightly successful smart city in South Korea, I believe it's called Somdo. I say slightly successful because it was a combination of two things you're talking about here. It was sort of a clear vision, the government was involved, but they worked with visionaries to try to address the needs of communities. - Interesting. - The problem with that though is what you get when a government is involved in visions like this, it becomes how does it serve the government's needs? And it became a mess because there was so much surveillance of the residents. - Really? - You really, it was, what is that till there's a Stallone movie that was where you ended up with just one fast food restaurant and it was Taco Bell. Any of our listeners who, who remember the movie, something man, any of our listeners who remember the movie, please reach out and let us know, but it was that. It was a smart city, started off with good intentions, but then became super problematic because the government's intention straight away from community, or probably wasn't even better with community in the first place. In that movie, you got fined for kissing, for just the kissing public. I thought you were getting the name of the movie, but. - Yeah, I don't remember either. Yeah, I see kind of, you know, misaligned incentives, government sort of, you know, doing it for their own needs and then you end up with, you know, almost sort of dystopian state as opposed to something that's beneficial for the people there. - Exactly. And I just found it, it was Demolition Man. It was Demolition Man, yeah, Demolition Man. That was the whole point. But I love your point that this is, it should be about what needs to the people in these cities or in the communities, what needs do they have that we're trying to solve. And yes, the ideals or the philosophies of the visionaries will come to play in whatever we end up building in autonomous or smart cities or intelligent cities as they're trying to rebrand them as now. But it really fundamentally has to come back to what problems have been solved for the people who live in the cities. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, so, as you say that, you know, what problems are to be solved, you know, you have taken some time to sort of think about what are the elements that make up in autonomous city and what problems can it solve? So are we ready to sort of dive into that now that we've surveyed the past and the present? - The past, yeah, let's dive into that. And you won't surprise our regular listeners that these buckets of need fall under some of the topics we've already covered in previous episodes. Please go listen to those. But it falls into a few buckets. And we start from what does a city do for the residents of the city? - Mm-hmm. - The city is a place people come to, to come for, I'd say, sort of self-fulfillment, build a family, find a job, move from one place to the other to achieve those things you're trying to achieve. And you hope that your government provides you with the amenities that allow you to live a fulfilled life in community with other people. And so the buckets, as a result of sort of that definition of what a city does for people, they fall under things like shelter, obviously, transportation, water, energy, waste. So I'll just turn those as utilities. And public safety is a big one, 'cause we want to know we're safe and secure with our families and cities. And then healthcare is a big part. But wrapping all of those is sort of this community engagement thing. So we'll dive into each one. And what I'll share is, I'll start with transportation, whereas I'd love you to when I share and share some ideas of how the future of transportation in cities look like. I'd love your always deep comments. Anybody who talks about transportation in future cities, they immediately go to things like autonomous vehicles. The idea being there will be no more traffic jams, no more road rage, where reading in cars or sleeping as we go to work. It almost ignores the need for transportation by supplanting it with the benefits of some futuristic technology. But I'd love your thoughts on that. I'm talking about it a little bit, yeah. - Yeah, this one is like, I'm most excited about transportation and what potential could be. - I think like one of the challenges that I see with sort of autonomous vehicles, it's like a complex problem to solve. I think the transition between autonomous and non-autonomous is gonna be really difficult. Like humans are still driving in and in the mix. There are autonomous cars that just seems like a, you know, difficult transition to make. So I'm curious to know how that transition will occur. I would love to be, you know, of vehicle that is autonomous. And it's taking me where I need to go. You see some of these sort of futuristic cars with sort of large back seats, where you can sort of, you know, just relax and read as the car is taking new places. Obviously all of this sort of is just another variation of public transportation. It's private transportation, if you want to call it that, right? We'll private it on this transportation, that's both of public transportation, where you're not doing anything. So, and I know that we talked about public transportation and how public transportation could be part of solving the future of transportation. And in this week's episode, I wanna kind of push back a little bit on that. I don't know. And I think about, you know, I think about cities like Austin and how difficult it is for us to push forward things that we want to do with public transportation. And the costs of doing it, any city that doesn't have public transportation infrastructure that's trying to build it now, super hard. So, I am very curious to see if that money that goes into public transportation can go into solving, you know, through the private market in partnership with the government, some of this sort of, I don't know, private autonomous transportation, some of these solutions that we don't haven't like considered. - Yeah, no, it will have to be. And I love when you push back because it makes us stretch some of what we might have, maybe in my mind anyway, concluded on, but there's still room for some debate there. And I think the middle ground is maybe a solution in the short term here. What do I mean by middle ground? It is government defined area, sort of this geographic region that a city is, the mallebo bounds of a city. And we break it down into smaller areas within that city where we can have a combination of public and private transportation that recognizes the needs of the communities that live there. I'll use an example. There are some parts of Austin where you cannot get a bus. But the people who live in those parts of Austin probably we're never going to get on a bus anyway, you know? It's that idea. So how do we enable in some parts of Austin where there's a higher concentration and larger density of people and we build in some cases, maybe private, in some cases, maybe government built transportation, multi-modal transportation systems that cater to those small pockets within the city and then the overarching transport system is built by the city to connect those small micro areas. So you almost want to have buses in those micro areas but trains that go across in almost the same way we have these three major thoroughfares in the city. You put rail lines beside them and then sort of this nodal structure that I always go back to where there's no one failure point or a network of functions, yeah. - I like that, I like that. - Yeah, great, great. So the next one, we've also touched on this and it is the energy system, the future of energy in cities, the autonomous future of energy. It always comes back to clean energy, smart grids and what do I mean by smart grids? These are just information technology laid on top of assets that generate, distribute and help us track the usage of energy. It's this autonomous grid that matches demand with supply and it ensures every home has electricity needs to do what it needs to do and we can even tap into individual homes or community solar platforms, for example, to address the needs of the people in the city. And every time I've heard that definition of what the autonomous or smart grid for energy is, I have no reason to disagree with it personally. (laughing) - Me either, I think this one's also, maybe it's taken longer for it to realize itself but we are now beginning to see the realization of what the potential of the smart grid or an intelligent grid could be that could increase resilience for cities. - Yeah, it's a sort of straightforward one and actually had in thought about the fact that it's been delayed. This has been promised for a while. So yeah, that is a good point. The next one I touch on is waste management and I know you had some comments about this one but the future of waste management is this, the garbage trucks show up autonomously driven on a route that they've always optimized because they know how we all generate trash in our homes and you almost have composting and separation on the same truck, for example. We're so far away from that. It's kind of wild because the most we've seen, or I've seen in terms of some automation of the garbage trucks are these electric hands that grab your trash can, dump it in the back. Hopefully it all gets in and puts it back but that's the most in terms of autonomy I've seen for the waste disposal systems but we do need a better future for that, yeah. - Yeah, I have two comments on this. Like one, you and I growing up in developed countries like India and Nigeria, we generated so little waste. Like waste was such a, like always on our mind, like don't waste things, don't throw things away, reuse things. It was like we were recycling and reusing for, there was a need to just because of the constraints of the lifestyle that we had. I think this is a very underserved area and I don't know if it's because it's waste that is underserved, but I can imagine that computer vision and robotics could do a lot for recycling. Recycling has such a, it has such a great desire for recycling to be more than it actually is but there's so much, you know, contamination that goes into our recycling process, you know, even though we put plastic in our recycling bins, it never gets recycled. - Does it? - Yeah, that's just the shocking things like plastic is rarely recycled, there's just, there's so much potential here. And I think it's just staggering how much waste we create, you know, I'm curious, like this was the question that I had for you is like, could you kind of give us an idea of like in a, you know, a country like ours in the US, like how much waste do we generate? - Do we generate, it blew my mind, I pulled this up and the idea here being, let's go with a city of one million people, a US city that has one million people, there are a few cities in the US that are above that. And what it translates to in just normal terms is that we generate about one million bags of trash every day for the one million people. - Whoa. - One million bags of trash, it's nuts. And over the course of a year, we fill up 15,000 to about 20,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools with garbage every year. - It just blows my mind, it's sad. - It's so sad, it's so sad. And the last point, the last point here is that each American, and the average American generates about 800 pounds of trash a year, which is about the size of a small car. It's so sad. - God. - It's so horribly sad. - Yeah, this needs better solutions. And I think it's the fact that it's wasted, you know, you're just like throwing it away. - Yeah. - You know, maybe that's the reason. - Yeah. - Yeah. - We gotta move on from that one. - We have to move on from that one. It's the one that the future hasn't quite lived up to. - Nothing. - There's nothing, sadly. And if you're listening and you're on this, listening to this podcast and you're working on a solution, absolutely reach out. 'Cause right there, we wanna hear from you for sure. The next one I touch on here is Public Safety. And this is a fraught one because every vision of a safe city, Hongdong had this problem. Sidewalk Labs was going to have this problem. It was autonomous cameras capturing images of everybody as we did our thing in our cities, drones patrolling the skies, capturing every activity. And as Demolition Man showed us, anything that was considered a public spectacle, worthy of a fine, you would get caught and fined by a robot immediately. And I don't know if Public Safety is the word that comes to mind when I think of drones and autonomous cameras. Reza, please help me out here. - No, I don't either, you know, it's just two words. Public, that's us, the community, safety, feeling safe. I don't know how safe I feel when there's drones and robots around. It's a very dystopian vision. You know, Demolition Man Square. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think the core problem that I had with it is that Public Safety is built on trust. - Yes. - So we have to venture into this area with a lot of care and trepidation. There can be so many unintended consequences of facial recognition and drones and all these other technologies that are being used. It all has to come down to, does it help public safety officials build trust with the communities that they are serving? And I feel that things like drones and robots and cameras create separation to where they become even more distant from the community and the communities like, you know, there's this faceless thing that's trying to keep us safe, but I feel unsafe even more because of it. So that's my impression when I hear your description of what the future could be. - Yes, the trust element is the biggest part of this. And it actually ties to one of the other elements here that I want us to touch on, even though it wasn't supposed to be the next one, but it's this community and community engagement element. You, when you know your neighbors, when you know your neighbor's kids, I grew up in a place where from the outside looking in, everyone would say, oh, it's Lagos, it's crazy, it's chaotic, but we had so much communal trust that if anyone, any kid, any young adult or anyone was starting to stray and start to put everybody else in this, was losing the trust of the community, the community would speak up. And things would start getting addressed even before we got like the policing ball. And I think that is what you're speaking to here. - Yes. - The shame of breaking communal trust was what kept all of us safe within those communities. - Ah, that's brilliant, the shame, the shame. Like, you want to keep that community spirit. You don't want it to be like, oh, I just screwed something up. Everyone looks at me like, hey, man, why'd you do that? - Yeah, exactly, I guess you had people who did break their trust, but. - Yeah, I think we touched on this, like as we were going back and forth on community engagement, I brought up the example of Next Door. You know, Next Door was supposed to be this platform for community engagement because, you know, it's supposed to bring the community together. And I disagree, like, I don't think that brings a community together until you first make eye contact with that person. - Absolutely. - Yeah, it might be helpful to get an alert about, you know, something that happened in the community. And all those things are helpful, but if I hadn't laid eyes and shook hands and had a, you know, conversation with someone in the community, then, you know, I'm not going to be more engaged with my neighbor to a digital platform. - Absolutely, this, in our conversation, we realized this was tied into this whole idea of the micro-sociology. These behaviors that we exhibit in person, which cannot be replicated on digital platforms. And you're absolutely correct. We try to mimic engagement online in our neighborhoods. And I don't think any digital platform can allow us to do that because this whole idea of micro-sociology means that you behave a certain way because you know you're interacting with a fellow human and you will tamp down your extreme tendencies face-to-face to not break trust, even though you might not know the person very well, but you start to behave a certain way. And I have ring alarms and cameras, but the community side of the ring app is one of the worst inventions similar to next door. The only things they share are the problems in the neighborhood. And so we really, we really, and let's touch on the last sort of last one here. And then we'll dive to what I think you and I are coming to as a theme here. And this one, it's termed health care, but I think it's more around wellbeing, rather wellbeing in your home. And if you go back to the future of buildings, as we discussed before, it is this idea of you. You are healthy and well. And there's some technology like telemedicine can help ensure any issues can be addressed almost in real time or near real time because of doctors on the phone that you can engage with. And hospitals are just more able to deal with people who show up because fewer people show up having engaged with their doctors for some of the issues that we might not need to go to hospitals for, but we end up doing. And then we all have these devices on ourselves now that track how we're feeling and say what you will. I actually listened to my wearables. Like I didn't sleep well and I see the hours. Okay, I'm going to bed at pick a time that is earlier than the last few nights just to get back on track. So the future of healthcare and cities and wellbeing in cities, I think is one we already experienced into a certain extent, what's your take? - Yeah, yeah, I think there's, so there's some disconnection I see in this. I like how you term this wellbeing, not just healthcare. So if I put it, this is the buckets. There's an aspect of public health that cities need to do a better job at. And that's made complex by healthcare systems in the countries like the US, where you're not in where in other countries is a better public healthcare infrastructure in the US. I don't think it's very good. And it makes it difficult for cities to really care for their residents in a way that avoids the worst consequences. 'Cause you never want to go to the hospital. That's the last thing that you want. I believe telemedicine could diminish some of the inequities of access to healthcare. I don't have enough data to say whether it has done that yet. I also think that wearables are still an inequitable solution. I don't think that's accessible to every individual in the city to wear, and I don't see like, I have a wearable, and it's for me as an individual that's not really connected with my doctor or my broader child, but there's potential there. Like it is moving in a particular direction. I'm curious to see if it will erase some of the access or inequities of health. The last thing that I would say, and I would love to explore this as an episode, is if you think about wellbeing, if you think about health, one aspect of it is creating public spaces and parks for people to commune, because that is part of health. And I'm gonna bring up something in mailbag related to this that one of our listeners sent us, but I think there's something there. How do you prevent people needing to have health care by putting them in social contact and forming that human connection to where they have that wellbeing? So I love that term, she wellbeing. I'm glad that you brought it up that way. - Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. And I found, I read a word that ties in by a male Durkheim. And it's that in cities, the social contact and the experience of being with a community, a collective of people, is this collective, a further sense that we build up that keep us well. I was reading that and I thought, that absolutely captures what we miss when technology mediates the experiences we have in your cities. Yeah. - Yes, yeah, exactly. - Yeah, so that was the last bucket. And the through line here, and I love your comments on this as well, Reza. The through line here is that while the idea of cities improving in the future has always been the case. What tends to be missing is that we let the ideals of whoever is, or the philosophy of whoever is maybe in charge or the visionary, remove the humanity and the community that cities are naturally built, organically built up to help foster. And so even as more future smart, autonomous, intelligent, calling what you will, cities are envisioned or executed on, what needs to be maintained is that what does this do for the residents of our city? Beyond the tools for expressing that, what does it do for the collective community? - Yeah, I love that. I love how you put it that way. They absolutely agree that that process is very messy. - Yeah. - You know, involving the community is a critical and messy part of evolving a city to become more intelligent. Because if you don't involve the people, the humans that are served by it, you can miss out. Like you're gonna have either visionaries that aren't considering it or government or tech entities that have different motives or motivations for what they wanna do. So yeah, I couldn't put it a better way. - I love it. I love it. Cities are messy and the compressed culture you experience in a city is organic and messy. So you better increase that in how you build the future of cities. (laughs) - Exactly, exactly. - That's awesome. - Yeah, so, you know, someone I know that I made a few years ago, I'll pay. She sent me, he listened to one of the episodes where we mentioned third spaces. And so he sent me a YouTube of Simon Sinek. I think some people know him. He's pretty well known and talking about what's your why and things like that. But he sent me this little segment where Simon Sinek was talking about, as a human, what are three parts of your body that you should try to keep healthy and why? And he said, your brain, your heart, those are obvious. I'm gonna keep my brain healthy so that I can continue to operate. My heart healthy keeps my body working. But the third one, which was so interesting was your thighs. - Wow. - Yeah, so I was like, wow, why should my thighs remain strong or healthy? And it's because your thighs are the part of your body that helps you walk. And if you can walk, you can go and meet people and you can connect with them and that keeps you healthy. So your heart and your thighs. And so that was his take on-- - That is so cool. - Isn't it cool? I mean, it just sort of ties in so well so thank you all for sending that because it ties in so well with, we want people to humanly connect. I think that the pieces of this episode was just that. You know, you want to get out, connect with people for relationships and that's what makes a city what it is. You know, not some 105 mile building through the desert. (laughing) - My goodness, that was, thank you for sharing that and thanks for reaching out. That was pretty, I will think about that for a while 'cause it is true. It is true. And on that note, anybody else listening today, please share your thoughts, share your ideas. We want really genius concepts like what Reza just shared coming to us. And thanks as always for listening. We are very appreciative of you spending time with us. - Yeah, thank you everyone. Take a minute to obviously like and subscribe, great interview, but more important. Take a minute to share this directly to the friend, that connection and you know, keep the good vibes going. - Thank you. - 'Til next time, bye. - All right, bye everyone. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
