Looking over there for solutions for problems here – Part 1

The University of Toronto is considering establishing a School of the Cosmic Future*.  The idea is that techniques, knowledge, and equipment used in space research may help us with the climate crisis.  Similar proposals are being made elsewhere.  There is a history to this that calls for reconsideration.

More people are becoming alarmed at the potential of artificial intelligence, as well as the climate crisis, to bring frightening problems to our present and future. We should reconsider how we have built our world up to now, find our basic values, and discern what low-tech solutions may already be available to us.  This is not to say that we must solve all our problems at the same time.  This post will discuss one small area of endeavor: urban blight, crime, and violence.

The nature of urban difficulties

When news of the university proposal arrived, I was reading John Lorinc’s Dream States:  Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias.  Lorinc critiques the Google Sidewalk Labs proposal at Toronto’s Quayside on Lake Ontario, which proposed that gathering a great deal of digital information and monitoring pedestrian and vehicle traffic and movement, would make for better living within a specific area of the city. His critique is that the desire to collect information and greatly digitize the to-be-developed community had few if any demonstrable benefits for those living there, but it would transfer to Google a great deal of information about people’s daily lives.   (Toronto withdrew from the project.) From this very recent event he looks back at the history of the development of urban infrastructure, with particular attention to roads, gas lines, communication lines, water and sewer, and electricity.  It is a fascinating study of what actually goes into making a city work. A great help in reconsidering the very idea of the city.

During his review, he refers to another book, From Warfare to Welfare : Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America by Jennifer S. Light.  She writes that the idea, early forms, and potential uses of digital and analogue communications and calculations technology were available and considered long ago.  Beginning in the 1940s but particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, military and space research technology and methods of problem-solving were recruited to deal with the problems of urban physical blight, crime and violence.  She provides a great deal of information about this. 

The idea began with the anticipated need to disperse urban areas to make them less susceptible to air bombing.  This model was quickly absorbed into the analogy of cities as communications structures, which then led to the ideas of using TV, radio, telephone, and cable communications to enable people who were distant physically and socially from the centres of power, to better communicate with schools, libraries, government offices, and politicians. It is encouraging and astonishing to realize that by the 1960s there were proposals to use cable TV to effect that better two-way communication. 

As we leave the COVID era (somewhat), we in the Toronto area of Canada reflect on how radical and new it seemed to have on-line elementary education and secondary education, along with universities, and employment, be carried on remotely.  Yet the ideas and early technology for this were considered and available sixty years ago.  Light records that in the U.S. this potential radical use of cable was delayed by a six-year freeze on cable expansion imposed by the Federal Communications Commission at the behest of the broadcast industry.  By the time the freeze was lifted, corporations saw the benefits of cable primarily in entertainment. Using it to include the disadvantaged in more of the civic functions, was abandoned.  This makes me reconsider whether commercial activities should be depended upon to provide, or allowed to inhibit, socially beneficial activities, or whether there should be more government initiative, funding, and planning, perhaps working through commerce to everyone’s benefit, or perhaps going it alone.  Familiar are the arguments that the free market should pretty much determine matters, and that government should do only what the free market cannot or will not.  But reconsidering these specific examples suggests that more government action might have been more beneficial in the long run.

Light asserts that much of the interest in space-age methods to solve earthly problems were based on ideas of national security which morphed from protecting cities from air bombing, to making cities secure from unrest and violence both criminal and political.  Whatever the history of thought, federal funding for various military and space projects and associated academic efforts began to decline.  The people and organizations involved saw urban development as the future source of their funding and continued legitimacy.

It just didn’t work out.  For example, experiments with satellite technology failed. After some trials, cities returned to simple aerial photography to map.  While satellites could identify degraded urban areas (physical blight perceived by infrared photography), only neighbourhoods, not individual buildings, could be identified; whereas lower-altitude photography could get better pictures close-up.  (Today’s satellites might do better.)  Also, the top-down management of the military could not be applied to urban citizens’ problems because grass-roots consultations were needed to explain the unrest.

All these — high technology and information-gathering in a city area, systems applications rather than local consultations, high-altitude problem solving, –are examples of trying to solve a problem here by looking at something over there.  A similar example could be the recent dramatic increase in public transit violence in the Toronto area.  The first words out of politicians’ mouths to explain the problem, were “mental health”.  This ignores the simple facts of homelessness which led people sleep  on the public transit vehicles and/or at enclosed stops and stations. The “mental health” red herring ignores the drug addiction problems as well.  The city, politicians say, cannot be responsible for mental health treatments – medical professionals should be dealing with them — but there should also be a national conference about the mental health problems (look over there to solve the problem here).

*Scientists envision the School of Cosmic Future to aid a planet on the brink – The Globe and Mail