City as Software

Definition

Seeing a city as software would allow "people a fundamentally new way to engage and co-author the environment they inhabit."

Excerpts from Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism

“You provide citizens with a variety of congenial ways to initiate trouble tickets, whether they’re most comfortable using the phone, a mobile application or website, or a text message. You display currently open cases, and gather resolved tickets in a permanent archive or resource. You use an algorithm to assign priority to open issues on a three-axis metric:

“(a) Scale. How many people are affected by the issue? Does this concern just me, me and my immediate neighbors, our whole block, the neighborhood, or the entire city?

“(b) Severity. How serious is the issue? In descending order, will it result in imminent loss of life, injury or the destruction of property? Is this, rather, an aesthetic hazard, or even simply a suggestion for improvement?

“(c) Urgency. How long has the tag been open?

“Because a great many urban issues are going to crop up repeatedly, routinely, perennially, perhaps you offer the kinds of tools content-management software for discussion sites has had to evolve over the years: ways to moderate tickets up or down, or mark their resolution as particularly impactful.

“You assign tickets to specified agents.

“Then, of course, (((yes, of course Adam, do go on))) you apply the usual variety of visualizations to the live data, allowing patterns to jump right out. Which city department has the best record for closing out tickets most quickly, and with the highest approval rating? What kind of issues generally take longest to address to everyone’s satisfaction?

“So. To reiterate. As I see it, a contemporary framework for citizen responsiveness suited for big cities would offer most if not all of the following features…”

Related Reading

• Adam Greenfield
• Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism