I first became aware of it while waiting for a friend who was running late on a corner in a redeveloped area of east Toronto. Near the curb, a tiny grey pole that was no taller than a parking meter hummed softly. Air quality sensor, pedestrian counter, and something else I couldn’t figure out. Without looking, a woman pushing a stroller passed by. Presumably, the pole saw her.
This is the more subdued aspect of what planners refer to as the “quantified neighborhood.” Not Sidewalk Labs’ doomed Quayside pitch, nor the glossy Songdo renderings from ten years ago, but something more modest and enduring. Benches are equipped with sensors. Wi-Fi nodes that serve as foot traffic detectors. No resident has ever logged into the municipal dashboards that receive aggregated movement data from doorbell cameras. The architecture is interconnected. The question of whether the community is meaningful in any way is still up for debate.
The industry’s pitch is simple and not totally pessimistic. Nowadays, loneliness is a quantifiable public health issue rather than a sentimental cultural grievance. A wave of urban designers have taken the NIH’s research from last year, which identified social disconnection as a contributing factor to mortality along with smoking and obesity. Why not entire blocks if buildings can be designed with biophilic details and daylight to improve mood? To promote chance encounters, sensor networks could subtly reroute foot traffic, flag benches that aren’t being used, or nudge people toward common areas. The kind of small, unintentional sociability that created historic neighborhoods before anyone had the idea to plan them.
That has a certain allure, but it’s also a little strange. The public areas in one of Helsinki’s more recent neighborhoods truly feel calibrated in the soft Nordic manner. Benches are positioned in opposition to one another. After dusk, the lighting gets warmer. A tiny screen next to the tram stop glows with air quality readings that are more comforting than informative. The locals appear happy. However, contentment and connection are not the same, and it’s unclear which of these the devices are measuring.
Who owns the data is the more serious issue. An exceptional trail is created by a connected neighborhood. The rhythm of who lingers and who rushes past, movement patterns, and dwell times. That information, in theory, makes the place better. In reality, it typically travels to a vendor in a different city or occasionally a different nation, where the locals only ever see the finished product and never the raw feed. Speaking with residents of these areas gives me the impression that they value the improved lighting and cleaner air and would prefer not to give the other areas much thought.
Although that worry is legitimate, the model’s detractors point to something more subtle than surveillance. They contend that the characteristics that give neighborhoods their distinct identity are often undermined by engineered sociability. The corner store was a little disorganized. Someone painted the bench without permission. In a community that is optimized for quantifiable well-being, there may be less conflict that has historically kept people together and more contentment per square meter. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that a city’s most popular streets are rarely the easiest for a sensor to read.
However, the course seems predetermined. Line items for what is politely referred to as “civic infrastructure intelligence” are now included in municipal budgets in Singapore, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and an increasing number of mid-sized American cities. There is a consolidation of vendors. The organizations that set standards are catching up. We won’t know for ten or fifteen years whether all of this results in neighborhoods that people genuinely want to live in or just neighborhoods that score highly on dashboards that no resident reads. The poles on the corners won’t be visible by then. To be honest, the majority of them already are.
