What is urban tech? More ambitious, and a bit messier than it first appears.
By Anthony Townsend
At least once a week, someone asks me a simple, but challenging question. “What is urban tech?”
I confronted this question for the first time in the summer of 2020, when I arrived at Cornell Tech to help Michael Samuelian get the Urban Tech Hub off the ground. As I dug in, I soon found that a number of keen observers had already taken a swipe at defining the term. For scholars like Richard Florida, investors like Shaun Abrahamson at Urban.Us (now Third Sphere), and policymakers at New York City Economic Development Corporation, “urban tech” represented an entirely new, investable sector of the innovation economy with tremendous opportunity for cities.
Coming hot off the decade that saw Uber and AirBnb grow to become some of the biggest tech companies around, I found these visions inspiring. Moreover, the delivery sector was soaring during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and New York was its capital-fueled epicenter of speculation. It was hard not to feel the sense of possibility.
But as I thought more about it, I also found these definitions lacking in two key ways. They didn’t clearly articulate what was different about urban tech than the smart cities movement that had swept the globe since the mid-2000s. I spent the summer of 2020 writing a white paper, “What is urban tech? Definitions, aims, and ethical tensions” that tried to synthesize all of these optimistic assessments while arguing that the urban tech boom had surfaced a number of ethical tensions that, left unresolved, would limit its future potential.
Let’s start with the distinguishing characteristics of urban tech. What makes it different from the broader tech sector, and how did it depart from some of the key aspects of the smart cities movement?
Urban tech seeks scale. It addresses challenges posed by urbanization at the city-wide level, requiring many participants or entire systems to produce valuable results. AirBnB and Uber are classic examples of urban tech innovations that really only work above a certain scale, and get better as they get bigger.
Urban tech creates value through orchestration. Unlike the smart cities movement's focus on incremental optimization, urban tech aims for fully coordinated, predictive management of the built environment through deep cross-linking of various systems.
City dwellers drive urban tech. While smart cities focus on government and infrastructure operators, urban tech creates value by solving problems for people first. Smart cities were basically a B2G business. Urban tech is B2C, with government acting as an enabler, regulator, or competitor.
Urban tech is big business with social aspirations. Between 2016-2018, urban tech attracted 22% of global venture capital—some $76.8 billion. Most urban tech startups were founded with a double bottom line, aiming for both financial returns and positive social impact, though these goals can become compromised over time. I think of urban tech startups as “social-ish” enterprises.
Urban tech requires collaboration across sectors. Even though urban tech focuses more on end users and less on government as an enterprise customer, the sector’s ongoing development involves vast networks of stakeholders across industry, government, and civil society. This diversity stems from both the complexity of urban challenges and the public interest in urban tech outcomes. You can’t throw urban tech over the wall, you have to have boots on the ground.
From there, I took liberty to speculate a bit, and lay out what I thought these definitions and the trends pointed to as the aims of urban tech—what did this emerging sector, and the affiliated academic field that we and fellow travelers like Richard Florida, and Bryan Boyer at the University of Michigan were trying to establish, want to achieve?
Here’s the manifesto of urban tech’s aims from 2020:
Measurable: Quantifying all aspects of its operation and verifiable impact on human well-being. Urban tech is about results.
Universal: Reaching everyone without redlining or exclusion. Urban tech is for everyone.
Public: Focusing on shared spaces and communally-governed resources. Urban tech is about what happens outside.
Legible: Making data and technology understandable to non-specialists. Urban tech is a tool for understanding the city better, not obscuring it.
Gentle: Pursuing reform rather than disruption, sensitive to potential negative impacts. Urban tech proves itself as it goes along.
Governed: Working within democratic oversight rather than circumventing it. Urban tech knows its place.
Generative: Creating capacity for future problem-solving through shared tools and data. Urban tech reinforces the civic sphere rather than undermining it.
At the time, I felt like this list struck a good balance of reflecting the enthusiasm around urban tech, but also pointing to some places we might need to pump the brakes.
Because the history of using computers to “help” cities is never far from my mind. And it is, to say, a checkered history. It was clear back then that urban tech threatened to repeat many past misuses, scale them up as rapidly as possible, and embed them more thoroughly in the city. And so, the final section of the paper pointed out the ethical tensions ahead for urban tech:
Legitimacy versus expediency: How do urban tech practitioners establish legitimacy and obtain permission to intervene in public spaces? Failed projects like Sidewalk Toronto demonstrated the consequences of inadequate public engagement.
Equity versus efficiency: Market-based urban tech solutions often "cherry pick" profitable segments, excluding difficult-to-serve groups. Can these approaches be redesigned to be both equitable and economically viable?
Opportunism versus oversight: Global-scale urban tech companies often enter markets before regulators can respond, piggybacking on public infrastructure without acknowledging their reliance on it.
Public good versus private harm: The rapid deployment of technologies that alter traditional relationships between public and private interests has been destabilizing, with inadequate protection for individual privacy.
I think these tensions pointed to the places that the urban tech sector of 2020 needed to be challenged most forcefully, and it was the most prescient piece of my analysis. The ongoing metastasis of AI throughout the digital world, and soon enough into the physical world as well, has only intensified them.
Putting these ethical tensions front and center has been core to how we approach research at the Urban Tech Hub. In my next Concrete + Code post, I’ll share how we have strived to shed light on responsible ways to understand and address them in our work over the last five years.