Benchmark 3

“What If City Streetlights Brightened and Signs Spoke As You Passed?”

by Heather Hansman

1 Ross Atkin spent a lot of time following people through the streets of London before he figured out how to make those streets more welcoming for people with physical impairments. He worked for the cities of York and Bath, and the U.K. government, to trace their movement so planners could see how they interact with city infrastructure  and what gives them trouble.

2 Atkin is an engineer and designer who looks at how people with disabilities use public space. He’s helped cities evaluate their infrastructure to accommodate aging populations or people with disabilities, modeling how tactile pavement and road work barriers with raised dots on them could be used in various situations to direct those with sight loss.

3 The designer’s latest vision is to have pieces of street furniture in cities that can adapt in the moment to fit a pedestrian’s particular need. Responsive traffic signals could give the elderly more time to navigate crosswalks. People with mobility impairments often need places to sit down, so he has designed bollards, or short posts that line sidewalks, which convert into seats. He also wants streetlights to become brighter and street signs to audibly give information about the buildings, businesses, and services that are in front of them to help the visually impaired.

4 The “responsive street furniture,” as Atkin calls it, could have other applications too, with various populations standing to benefit. Maintenance workers could get alerts from full trash cans that needed emptying. Non-English-speaking visitors could get directions in their own languages from lampposts.

5 Most pieces of infrastructure today are designed based on averages—for instance, how long it takes someone to cross the street. They are also based on convenience—benches tend to be clustered in wider sections of sidewalk. There’s not much regard for how people on the tail end of the physical bell curve might move through those urban landscapes. It might just be a small sliver of the population who struggle with a lack of seating or low lighting, but these design choices have a big impact on those people. Atkin talked to people who didn’t leave their homes alone, because navigating the city was intimidating.

6 “A dream of mine is that I can travel independently and feel safe wherever I’m traveling,” Steve Tyler has said. He is the head of solutions, strategy, and planning at the Royal National Institute for Blind People, who worked with Atkin.

7 “I realized that loads of the design decisions were tradeoffs between impairments groups,” he says. For instance, ramps, which are necessary for people in wheelchairs or other rolling devices, can be hazardous for people with vision impairments, who use curbs to navigate.

8 A year and a half ago, Atkin decided he wanted to turn his research into something actionable. In addition to urban planning, the Nottingham University-educated engineer is also interested in the Internet of things. This is the idea that inanimate objects will be able to communicate digitally with each other. He figured he could combine the two and use digital connections to trigger parts of the urban landscape to respond to individuals.

9 Users would log into an app and check off the kinds of assistance they require. A sensor in their phone, key fob, or fitness tracker would then signal to the lights or bollards that they were coming, and the structures would respond to their specific needs. People who don’t need a place to sit down won’t have to deal with benches taking up sidewalk space, because they’ll slide back into the bollards when they’re not in use. And, instead of having a walk light that pings loudly all the time, it’ll only make noise when someone with a visual impairment is nearby. That will make it less intrusive on the neighborhood.

10 Atkin worked with landscaping manufacturer Marshalls to develop the system. He says the technology is ready to go and relatively easy to implement. The challenge is getting cities to change their infrastructure, whether that be adding bollards or adjusting traffic flow, which can incur costs that aren’t built into municipal budgets.

11 Some of the changes, like the variable traffic crossings, are particularly tricky because they have cascading effects on the flow of traffic. Those crossings will likely have the biggest impact, but some of the smaller pieces, such as the bollards that turn into benches, are being implemented first. “It’s to do with what we can easily get our fingers into,” he says. “Technically connecting these things up is pretty easy.”

12 Atkin has been working on this project for a year and a half. He prototyped the bollards last March at a Landscape Institute event to see how they functioned in the wild and to dial in the range of the sensors. He then developed final versions in October. The first ones have been installed in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London as part of an exhibition put on by New London Architecture.

13 “There’s a lot of talk currently about smart cities, age-friendly communities and intelligent street furniture to help older and disabled people get around,” says Jeremy Myerson, a professor at the Royal College of Art in London. “This project is a real, practical manifestation of this thinking.”

14 The London Design Museum selected Atkin’s responsive street furniture as one of its Designs of the Year for 2015, after Myserson nominated the project for the award. The bollards, light posts, and traffic crossings are on display there until August 23 for visitors, even the ablebodied, to try out.

15 Now, the system just needs to be stress-tested in the real world. rd Language Arts - 8th Grade Do Not Reproduce

16 “Everyone seems quite excited about it, the challenge is figuring out who is actually going to implement it,” Atkin says. “Even if we only have one crossing connected, it can impact a lot of people in the area.”

infrastructure: systems of public works in a region, such as roads, bridges, electricity, water treatment, or public transportation Excerpt from “What If City Streetlights Brightened and Signs Spoke As You Passed?” by Heather Hansman, Smithsonian Institution, from SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, April 27, 2015.

“The case for... making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones”

by Amy Fleming

1 Ever since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can’t get enough of the notion of smart-washing  their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business. What’s not to love about whizzkids streamlining your responsibilities for running services, optimizing efficiency, and keeping citizens safe into a bunch of fun apps?

2 There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract.” U.S. tech investor Roger McNamee warned companies can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism.”

3 There are practical considerations too, as Shoshanna Saxe of the University of Toronto has highlighted. Smart cities, she wrote in The New York Times in July, “will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities.” Tech products age fast: what happens when the sensors fail? And can cities afford expensive new teams of tech staff, as well as keeping the ground workers they’ll still need? “If smart data identifies a road that needs paving,” she writes, “it still needs people to show up with asphalt and a steamroller.”

4 Saxe pithily calls for redirecting some of our energy toward building “excellent dumb cities.” She’s not anti-technology, it’s just that she thinks smart cities may be unnecessary. “For many of our challenges, we don’t need new technologies or new ideas; we need the will, foresight, and courage to use the best of the old ideas,” she says.

5 Saxe is right. In fact, she could go further. There’s old, and then there’s old. For urban landscapes increasingly vulnerable to floods, adverse weather, carbon overload, choking pollution, and an unhealthy disconnect between humans and nature, there’s a strong case for looking beyond old technologies to ancient technologies.

6 It is eminently possible to weave ancient knowledge of how to live symbiotically with nature into how we shape the cities of the future, before this wisdom is lost forever. We can rewild our urban landscapes. We can apply low-tech ecological solutions to drainage, wastewater processing, flood survival, local agriculture, and pollution that have worked for indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with no need for electronic sensors, computer servers, or extra IT support.

7 This month, Julia Watson, a lecturer in urban design at Harvard and Columbia Universities, launched her book Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism, with publisher Taschen. It’s the result of more than 20 years of traveling to research the original smart settlements, through an architect’s lens.

8 She visited the Ma’dan people in Iraq, who weave buildings and floating islands from reeds. She visited the Zuni people in New Mexico, who create “waffle gardens” to capture, store, and manipulate water for desert crop farming. She visited the subak rice terraces of Bali. Watson walked the living tree-root bridges that can withstand adverse weather better than any human-made structure. They allow the Khasi hill tribe in Northern India to travel between villages during the monsoon floods.

9 “There are so many different ways you can rewild cities,” says Watson. It’s not just a case of plonking an ancient system in a city, but rather adapting complex ecosystems for different types of places with their own unique requirements. Take a current proposal she is working on for the high-rise city of Shenzhen on the Pearl River estuary by Hong Kong. It was once a fishing village, then a textile town, “and it just skyrocketed,” says Watson. “All of the fishponds and polders and dykes and wetlands that absorb all the water in that delta landscape are being erased. So the city is developing in a way that’s erasing the indigenous resilience in the landscape.”

10 But you don’t have to erase to go forwards, she says. “You can leapfrog and embed local intelligence, using a nature-based traditional Chinese technology that’s climate resilient, ecologically resilient, and culturally resilient. And we can make beautiful urban spaces with them as well.”

11 Kongjian Yu, a design professor at Peking University, agrees with this philosophy. Known as the “sponge cities” architect, Yu creates urban landscapes in China that passively absorb rainwater. He uses permeable pavements, green roofs, and terraced wetland parks that flood during monsoon. If wetlands are situated upriver of the buildings, they will flood before the water reaches the city proper.

12 The parks have brought fish and birds back to cities, says Yu, “and people love it.” The projects, he says, “are performing well, and many of them have been tested for over 10 years and can certainly be replicable in other parts of the world.” In fact, this month he has visited Bangladesh, ironically, “helping their ‘smart city’ project.” He has convinced “the minister in charge that nature is smart, and our ancient wisdom tells us how to live with nature in a smart way.”

13 Copenhagen, too, has opted for a dumb—or, as local planners call it, “a green and blue”— solution to their increasing flood risks: namely, a series of parks that can become lakes during storms. The city estimated they would cost a third less than building levees and new sewers and come with the added ecological benefits of rewilding. An abandoned military site was cleaned up in 2010 and rewilded into a nature reserve and common for grazing animals, the Amager Nature Centre. It is a vast park with not only happy people meandering and cycling around, but insects, protected amphibians, rare birds, and deer.

14 And there’s a dumb solution to the spread of air conditioning, one of the greatest urban energy guzzlers: more plants. A study in Madison, Wisconsin found that urban temperatures can be 5% cooler with 40% tree cover. Green roofs with high vegetation density can cool buildings by up to 60%. Or you could just think like a bug: architects are mimicking the natural cooling airflows of termite burrows. Mick Pearce’s 350,000 sq ft Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, completed in the 1990s, is still held up as a paragon  of dumb air conditioning. All it needs are fans, and it uses a tenth of the energy of the buildings next door.

15 The idea of smart cities is born of what Watson describes as “the same human superioritycomplex that thinks nature should be controlled.” What’s missing is symbiosis. “Life on Earth is based upon symbiosis,” Watson says. She suggests we replace the saying “survival of the fittest” with “survival of the most symbiotic.” Not as catchy, perhaps. But smarter. 

smart-washing: advertising a widespread adoption of smart technology

paragon: model of excellence or perfection.

Excerpt from “The case for... making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones” by Amy Fleming. ©2020 by The Guardian. Used by permission.

1. On-Demand Writing Directions: Carefully read the prompt below. Then read the provided texts. Enter your essay in the space provided.

Smart Cities Write a well-organized essay arguing whether it is more beneficial for cities to invest in “smart” technology or to use ancient practices and rewilding in their infrastructures. Support your argument with evidence from both texts.