wrythings

Chicago proposes to become one of the Greenest cities in the world. Meanwhile, we’ve been in a holding pattern with respect to addressing the digital divide let along promoting digital excellence citywide. Chicago’s Digital Access Alliance placed environmentalism among the core platform. we need to be innovative with regard to green IT. It’s not just recycling and refurbishing. There’s some interesting thinking up in Canada. Here’s a set of links:

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/

I’m thinking ahead for a moment. Knowledge workers could more readily work from home with reliable high speed communications networks, allowing audio/video, shared desktops, multimedia conference calling… and any number of undeveloped applications. None of this is new. What would be new would be commitment to network capacity and workforce policies that encouraged this. Instead we’re looking at the networks as a consumption driven amenity, and even there the public doesn’t get much bandwidth bang (or reliability) for the buck.

Think also what we’d be doing for neighborhood economies if more people worked locally?

Robin Chase (ZipCar, GoLoCo) is great! In this 2007 TED talk Robin addresses Carbon Emissions and the Digital Divide.

(The video was only just released.)

To start: there isn’t enough of it, of decent quality, interconnected and given priority.

Is that blunt enough?

Some problems require a collective response, but too often we accept those problems as intractable, because as individuals the issue is overwhelming in scale. How do we get ourselves to the point where we can even begin to explore the collective option?

Traffic and Transit

We’ve privileged the unsustainable. We have refused to invest in a truly public infrastructure. If we consider all the costs involved with traffic how would that compare with a reconstruction of public transit worthy of the public? That is, a system that is well-interconnected, efficient, (sufficiently frequent in service), reliable, comfortable and clean?

We can begin with the cost of traffic. This is not intended to be exhaustive. This is just to get us started on the critical path. Leaving the Chicago Green Festival this was brought home to me … Lake Shore Drive looked like a parking lot. Many urban thoroughfares look like that twice a day. With cars backed up as far as the eye can see you have to wonder at the fuel consumed and the value of our time as we sit waiting to get through the traffic and on to our destination. This does not even begin to address the cost of road maintenance (or construction), nor those of pollution.

What are the aggregate costs on these and other measures we may come up with, for traffic and transit, for any city on any given day?

We choose traffic over transit because transit doesn’t satisfactorily meet our needs, and we have each adjusted to the situation from an individualized frame of reference. We believe the extent of our impact on the situation is limited to that frame. We’ve bought in to consumerism as opposed to collectivism. This is not a question of a free-market versus a communistic system, but it is a question of how we can better live together. We need to be able to explore the characteristics of network and public aggregated solutions without having to defend against such simplistic rhetoric. This applies to questions of transit, as much as other public services and utilities, including communications networks such as broadband or citywide wireless. Each of these is a matter of infrastructure and capacity and demands public discourse and deliberation.

Urban myths of impossibility vs. Amenities in historical context

Our practices and attitudes towards the possible in the several sectors of urban socio-economic life reveal fundamental contradictions. Some behaviors are accepted as the domain of a natural monopoly (or duopoly for an illusion of market), some are left to individual patterns of consumption and behavior and others are the domain of government, governance and patronage. Looking at how the work and life of a city functions on a day to day basis we find no explanation for organizing the different infrastructures as we do other than the historical context of the interests that fought for the current state of affairs. Tracing the history of these domains of our economic life we also see considerable variety - oscillations between private interests, markets, collective responses, monopoly-utility and government driven approaches. There is also plenty of blending and interaction across these categories. In principle we should not allow rhetoric or ideology to foreclose options in our collective response, especially the option of a collective response.