by Cristiano Gatti | Oct 20, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
We all agree with the idea that cloud computing technology benefits people and enterprises thanks to its innovative potential both technological and economic. But, going deeper with the analysis, it is clear that there are some social problems that we need to discuss, especially about the relation between small centers and over-the-top companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.
As Quentin Hardy reported in New York Times, the small town of Boydton, VA is now facing this kind of issue because, here, Microsoft is building six hangars with thousands of computer servers (the program is about other 21 buildings in the area). This run of building networks in local area to provide services over the internet, a technology trend known as cloud computing is still increasing among technology giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Google indeed started building in eastern Oregon to be near cheap hydroelectric power on the Columbia River, and most recently it has focused on Iowa, Alabama and Tennessee. Furthermore. Microsoft has a center in Wyoming, and it bought a nine-hole golf course as part of a complex near West Des Moines, Iowa. Amazon recently built similar giant facilities on the outer reaches of Columbus, Ohio, and Dulles, Va.
Local people, along with many economists and officials, often think these data centers are a key to an industrial revival, but the situation is not so simple. Let’s try to explain it.
The companies come to places like Boydton for basics like land, water and electricity. Even with low local wages, people are a high-cost item. According to E. W. Gregory, the head of the local electrical workers’ union, this is hard for local people to find long-term position at the data center. It is a problem because in the past, textile and furniture industry created a big power grid in the area but nowadays those jobs have gone. In Boydton, for example, the prison closed in 2012 and Burlington Industries textile plant shut in 2002 and it was razed in 2012 (2,000 jobs lost). In Clarksivlle a Russell Stover candy factory (700 jobs lost) closed in 2001 and now here there is a data center for the Department of Homeland Security.
The development of cloud computing industry in the area is related to South Virginia tobacco economy collapse. With vision, the state of Virginia used money received in a settlement with cigarette makers to build high-speed fiber-optic lines throughout the region. So, the development of broadband infrastructure and fiscal aid called Microsoft to Virginia (Apple also was interested in building a big cloud center for consumers’ photos and music in Boydton site but it went across the border to North Carolina, a state with tax breaks on data center equipment): Wayne Carter, the county administrator says that Microsoft obtained 350 acres by Mecklenburg County and other tax concessions. This policy should have help the country because, in his words, “even temporary workers rent houses, stay in hotels and eat in local restaurants”.
In return for this advantages Microsoft promised that “an average, data centers employ tens to several dozen people” between corporate and contracted positions. Mr. Thomas C. Coleman III, the mayor of Boydton, is more pessimistic: he says that “it’s a slow process” and “we can provide a place to live, but all those contractors will move on to the next town where they’re building,”. In fact, construction workers on the data centers rent houses and eat in local restaurants, but the economic boost is temporary.
Moreover, new jobs are too few or low-wage to cover the demand: unemployment is likely to hundreds of applicants because they look for a work as digging ditches, laying pipe, wiring starting at few dollars an hour. Although working as a security guard or testing the wires inside the data center is better paid, there are not many position. In addition to this, Microsoft prefers to not hire people who have worked for its competitors, so the situation is truly complex also for the fact that this business is very profitable.It has been estimated that business in cloud-computing is worth $1 trillion or more and the biggest three companies are trying to extend it globally. To achieve the goal, they spend more than $2 billion annually.
Also Professor Erik Brynjolfsson from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) admits that the phenomenon is growing rapidly because “it is the key enabler of all kinds of technology advances, starting with the things companies do now, but lots cheaper, including outsourcing tech jobs”. In his opinion for towns like Boydton people are going to have to move to new places. This prediction is quite incredible if we think that Boydton is the quintessential quaint courthouse town. The challenge of the future might be how ensure that this huge value created by cloud computing technology creates shared value among people.
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Il cloud computing è visto come un fattore innovativo, sia dal punto di vista economico che tecnologico. Non sempre, però, si calcola l’impatto sociale che l’installazione di questo tipo di infrastrutture ha sul territorio che le ospita.
by Cristiano Gatti | Oct 5, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
For a very long time, communities and cities were divided into “digital haves” and “have nots” by whether or not they had “broadband”. Nowadays, although cables and DLS networks cover a large part of urban communities, a new divide has emerged, the gigabit divide (basic vs developed broadband connectivity). Then, according to Internet Association, a national trade group representing leading Internet companies including Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Paypal and Twitter “Access to the Internet is today the modern equivalent to access to railroads, electricity, highways and telephony in previous eras. And just as the federal government recognized and executed its role in encouraging, promoting, and facilitating universal access to those services, the federal government today similarly recognizes its role in promoting and facilitating access to broadband services.” All these factors lead more and more communities to searching for an active role in shaping the future of local next-generation Internet access.
According to this idea and, given that building such networks is extremely expensive, a growing number of municipalities are turning to public-private partnerships to finance and build broadband networks. The problem is that this kind of deals can also fail. An important paper about that is the new report “Successful Strategies for Broadband Public-Private Partnerships”. The paper studies successful deals and, on the contrary, what causes them to fail. The report is written by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a group that works with urban actors to provide them with innovative strategies and working models that support environmentally sound and equitable economic policies and community development.
First of all, in order to create a true partnership between public and private sector, ILSR report clarifies that public entities and private companies must both have “skin in the game”, i.d. both need to take on the same level of risk. Thus, fully public – for example: Chattanoga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana and Wilson, North Carolina – and fully private systems – such as US Internet in Minneapolis and Ting in Charlottesville, Virginia – are not considered PPPs because they merely involve both the public and the private sector and they should not be considered a partnership.
ILSR identifies three types of public-private cooperation that get very close to true balanced partnership.
- Private-Led Investment with Public Support is, in fact, dominated by the private sector and the public sector’s involvement and control is very limited. Google Fiber is an example of this private-led cooperation. In this case, Google Fiber network is designed, owned and operated totally independent of public sector partners.
- Public-Led Contracting concerns local network projects where the public actor has most of the project’s responsibilities: financing, constructing and owning the network infrastructure. Unlike the Private-Led Investment pattern, here the private sector engagement is generally limited to specific tasks. An example is Leverett, Massachusetts.
- Public Assets and Open Access. The network may have some components owned by the public sector and some by the private sector. For example Huntsville, Alabama.
Anyway, the central focus of the report is on true, balanced partnership where public and private sectors share their risk and reward fairly evenly. Although private companies and municipalities have different goals (municipalities can afford a longer payback period in order to meet social goals, private companies are looking for a faster return of investment), yet it is possible to create balanced PPPs. There is no “magic bullet” but it is crucial the result of honest and respectful negotiation. According to Westminster City Council President Dr. Robert Wack: “There has to be a shared sentiment that ‘we are in this together. We will fail together or we will succeed together.’ Whether it is the debt service guarantee or some other thing, the specific detail is not as important as shared willingness to make sacrifices to reach this common goal. That is the key of a successful public-private partnership”.
Then the report explains why those communities have preferred to seek partners:
- Share Costs: PPPs can spread project’s costs across the partners.
- Address Risk: no PPP is entirely risk-free and it should not be used merely for the public sector to hide risk from voters. PPPs can introduce new risks that are not present in fully public models, for example to forego some public goals.
- Digital Self-Determination: PPP can be a way to promote important public interest outcomes that may not occur under private projects such as universal access to high-quality infrastructure Indeed, advocates of municipal broadband argue it’s necessary to ensure cities’ networks reach all residents at an affordable price.
- Building Expertise: Communities that do not have expertise could develop it or embrace models that require less in-house skills.
An example of municipality that has implemented successfully this kind of deal, is Westminster, Maryland. First of all, the municipality partner with a new fiber company called Ting to connect every home and business using fiber. Secondly, the city owns the infrastructure and Ting has an exclusive contract for an initial period. Risk is shared between public and private sector because Westminster and Ting share the burden if revenue does not match the debt to build out the network ($21 million general obligation bond). Lastly, universal access to the infrastructure is provided by the city and Ting is protected if the city decides to sell the network.
On the contrary, not all P3s projects are successful. Wireless Philadelphia was an agreement to purchase bulk discounted internet subscriptions for low-income areas n Philadelphia. The system was shut down in four years later, after cost overruns, lack of community support and poor service because Wireless Philadelphia selected a partnership model that was not balanced.
A key lesson from the paper is that PPPs are increasingly viable but are not a panacea, which is why we discuss some failed PPPs. Partnerships can introduce additional risks while minimizing others. This is precisely for this reason that any PPP has risks and communities should be extremely wary of any potential partner that claims there are no risks with their preferred approach.
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Il futuro della diffusione di Internet nelle città dipenderà in gran parte dalla capacità dei governi locali di saper costruire partnership con gli attori privati in modo da giungere ad uno sviluppo locale co-progettato che tenga contro delle esigenze di tutti coloro che vivono nella città. Il report dell’Institute for Local Self-Reliance cerca di fare luce su questo tema.
by Cristiano Gatti | Aug 24, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
The problem of neighborhood change, due to movement of people, public policies, investments, and flows of private capital mediated by conceptions of race, class, place and scale is a fundamental factor affecting the development of modern cities. Scholars from University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles, have studied this phenomenon and its consequences, such as gentrification and displacement related to urban renewal, and they have identified some important findings:
- Neighborhoods change slowly, but over time are becoming more segregated by income, due in part to macro-level increases in income inequality.
- Neighborhood decline results from the interaction of demographic shifts, public policy, and entrenched segregation, and is shaped by metropolitan context.
- Gentrification results from both flows of capital and people. The extent to which gentrification is linked to racial transition differs across neighborhood contexts.
- Cultural strategies can transform places, creating new economic value but at the same time displacing existing meanings.
- Displacement takes many different forms—direct and indirect, physical or economic, and exclusionary—and may result from either investment or disinvestment.
These results show us how complex the situation is in terms of economic differences, racial transition, cultural displacement and public policies. Moreover, on the subject of affordable housing, an important study is the Report on The Effects of Neighborhood Change on New York City Housing Authority Residents, prepared for NYC Center for Economic Opportunity and published in 2015.
According to the Report, New York City and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) have maintained the traditional public housing model of 100 percent low-income developments. Nonetheless, many residents of traditional public housing in New York City may experience mixed-income environments. The most relevant issues are:
- Two thirds of NYCHA residents live in public housing developments surrounded by census blocks with an average income that is greater than the NYC median.
- Developments surrounded by persistently low-income neighborhoods have higher violent crime rates and are zoned to attend schools with lower standardized test scores than developments with increasing- and persistently high-income surrounding neighborhoods.
- A lack of opportunities for young people is a theme. In particular, residents feel that their communities have lost after-school enrichment and skill-building programs for youth, and offer few opportunities for youth employment.
These evidences show the problem with the traditional paradigm in urban planning because, today, this model doesn’t satisfy the real needs of citizens. At this point, new solutions are welcomed because it is clear that urban planning traditional approach is inefficient and doesn’t fix problems. The solution can be seen in a statement written in the Report: “Community-based organizations can play a critical role in improving resident’s lives and building connections to the broader neighborhood”. Hence, a possible solution should concern a new paradigm in urban planning: according to “Linee Guida per la predisposizione di un documento programmatico di indirizzo delle politiche urbanistiche di Battipaglia“, we are talking about collaborative urban planning based on an “institutional mending”, namely an alliance between public, private and plural sector or a polycentric governance of urban, territorial and local commons.
According to this perspective, East Harlem community-led initiative expresses a community-oriented approach in urban planning which is consistent with the aim of promoting a new institutional and economic system based on the model of collaborative urban governance. A similar community-based approach was also implemented in Italy in Bologna in the project called Bolognina. Bolognina’s main purpose is acting as a link between the different planning actors already existing, in order to increase their potential and to offer them new occasions to collaborate. The whole process is supported by Federcasa, which looks at it as a useful experimentation for the innovation of housing policies at a national level.
East Harlem Neighborhood Plan
First of all, it is necessary to remember that, in May 2014, Mayor de Blasio released his plan to build and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, creating 80,000 new housing units through the introduction of two new policies: mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) and zoning for quality and affordability (ZQA). This plan and the 2015 proposal were welcomed with wariness and trepidation by many citizens.
Many times before the MIH/ZQA plan passed into law, Community Voices Heard (CVH), an East Harlem-based advocacy group founded by low-income residents, reached out NY’s second-most powerful politician, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito to ask around more information about the rezoning city plan. She agreed and in May 2015, she convened with around 400 community members and community-based organizations to kick off a process to create the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan, a neighborhood-led vision for the proposed upzoning of East Harlem. So, the final plan was released in February 2016 and includes 232 recommendations covering 12 topics such as NYCHA, housing preservation, affordable housing development, zoning and land use, etc. The plan was a great achievement because there were only nine months to draft the plan to avoid a loss of 282 units of affordable housing and because Mark-Viverito would be leaving office in 2017. According to her, this plan is not going to be a panacea but a try to replace the number of losing affordable housing and to add more benefits into the community.
Formally, in the revision of Universal Land Use Review Process (a seven-month timeline to approve zoning changes in the city), the key moment for the community stands when Department of City Planning certifies a plan, because that’s the moment when the plan is handed to the community board. It’s important because,here, communities can voice their concerns or proposals.
The East Harlem Neighborhood Plan’s project partners sought to create a process that would inform the actual rezoning plan for East Harlem that the city will eventually take through ULURP. So, CVH, Mark-Viverito’s office, the Manhattan borough president and the Manhattan Community Board 11 came together to lead. 21 organizations were invited to serve on a steering committee thanks to their long-term experience in the community.
Organizationally, Hester Street Collaborative, a non-profit specialized in community engagement, had the role of indipendent facilitator. There was also the Neighborhoods First Found, a consortium formed by different foundations with the aim to coordinate resources to support engagement by the communities in terms of both organizing and technical assistance. To help prepare residents for a community visioning workshop on different themes such as affordable housing development, zoning and land use and impact on transit, Center for Urban Pedagogy was invited to conduct different simulations.
Nearly 200 people attended the community workshop. What emerged was some cognitive dissonance, i.e. people say yes to more affordable housing but they say no to more density and a lot of private development was already happening without affordable housing. This led people to be against the mayor’s plan. But, knowing how difficult the conversations would be, the project partners also decided to bring in a second facilitator to facilitate subgroup meetings, steering committee meetings and the actual drafting of the plan. So NYC-based architecture and planning firm WXY won the bid and in June 2015 began to work with the project partners and Hester Street.
According to WXY’s Adam Lubinsky, their aim was: “Set up a process by which the visioning workshop findings would go back to these subgroups that were built around the themes, and they could digest the results, present those results to the steering committee, get feedback from the steering committee and then start to formulate draft recommendations.” Subgroups were responsible for combining input from the community visioning workshops with their own research and discussions to formulate recommendations to present to the steering committee”.
The last problem concerns the implementation of the plan because there was a huge amount of work to translate that plan into actions. Fortunately, some institutions are interested in implementation process: for example, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene plans to award $275,000 in grants to 10 local organizations for projects that are helping to achieve recommendations from the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan.
The plan process officially closed at the end of January with a community forum that involved around 350 participants. Lubinsky stressed that the level of ownership of the subgroup leaders was so disbursed that facilitators had to do anything at the event.
In the future, the community will face some challenges, for example, it is fundamental that the future leaders will hold accountable for the plan and the steering committee will continue to meet in order to coordinate follow up with city agencies, advocate for recommendations and set up an evaluation process for the plan.
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Alla luce degli studi effettuati sui fenomeni legati all’affordable housing e al più ampio tema della trasformazione dei quartieri, il piano di sviluppo di East Harlem si rivela un importante caso studio in termini di urbanistica collaborativa, strategia che è parte di una visione più generale basata sulla co-governance del territorio e dei beni comuni urbani, territoriali e locali.
by Cristiano Gatti | Aug 4, 2016 | EducationLabs, The Urban Media Lab
Brussels, 22 June 2016. The EU Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors announced the formation of the first international initiative of cities and local governments in matter of climate change. Since they are the primary city-led climate change initiative, this project will create the largest global coalition of cities engaged in climate leadership: we are talking about more than 7,100 cities from 119 countries and six continents, representing more than 600 million inhabitants, over 8% of the world’s population. This initiative, called Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate Change & Energy is a result of the historic Paris climate change conference (December, 2015) where cities and local governments played a crucial role for the final agreement. The aim of the world’s largest coalition of mayors is to promote and support voluntary action to combat climate change and move to a low-carbon economy.
It is important to remember that the Covenant of Mayors was launched in 2008 by the European Union after the adoption of the 2020 European Union Climate and Energy Package. The Covenant of Mayors covers 6800 cities in 585 countries with an investment of over €110 billion and currently is operated by CEMR, Climate Alliance, Energy Cities, Eurocities and FEDARENE. On the other hand, the Compact of Mayors was launched in September 2014 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change Michael R. Bloomberg and mayors from global city networks C40, ICLEI and UCLG with support from UN-Habitat, the UN’s lead agency on urban issues.
In connection with the announcement of the initiative, European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič said that the strength of the European Covenant lied on bottom-up and close-to-citizens approach. It is precisely this characteristic that European mayors will lead to the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. It is an important factor because this low-carbon and resilient coalition is truly unique on the global scene and: “Never before have so many cities joined forces, eager to inspire each other and committed to collectively taking the path to a low-carbon, resilient society.”
Then, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change Michael R. Bloomberg, who will Co-Chair the new Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy underlined cities efforts to fight climate change. According to him, unity is the strength of this covenant because it makes possible to magnify influence on the global stage.
By increasing and unify city-led initiatives, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy will increase funding to support city action on sustainable energy and climate change building connections and bridging gaps among the actors. This proposal will take advantages of investment powers of European Union and Bloomberg Philanthropies including the importance of worldwide city network partners such as C40, ICLEI, UCLG, Eurocities, Energy Cities and Climate Alliance. This will strengthen the role of local authorities in the work of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The new initiative will provide also a common platform that brings together relevant data on cities’ energy and climate actions reported to the current EU Covenant platform and the platforms supporting the Compact of Mayors, allowing for comparison of cities’ achievements to other cities all around the world, and make them publicly available through a new Global Covenant of Mayors website, to be launched by January 2017.
These two projects will capture the collective impact of city action and create a momentum for city-led climate action. A single coalition will promote participation (cities will be free to focus on a single commitment with both local relevance and global impact), provide greater clarity and ensure more consistent and comparable data – a crucial aspect for investors.
Hence, it is clear that the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate Change & Energy will be an important role for achieving one of the most important political goal of the Juncker Commission’s Energy Union strategy, c’est-à-dire a resilient and forward looking climate policy that facilitates transition to a low-carbon, secure and competitive economy.
For more information, please visit the Compact of Mayors website, and the Covenant of Mayors website.
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Sulla scia dell’accordo di Parigi sul clima, EU Covenant of Mayors e Compact of Mayors lanciano un grande progetto, chiamato Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate Change & Energy con lo scopo creare la più grande coalizione mondiale di sindaci e città per la promozione e il supporto di azioni mirate a combattere il cambiamento climatico e facilitare il passaggio verso un’economia sostenibile.
by Cristiano Gatti | Jul 18, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
This article talks about Y Combinator‘s Basic Income Project, an attempt to understand if and how basic income works in the US. The idea is to give a basic income (an amount of money that is sufficient to meet basic needs) to a group of people in the US for a period of time and try to answer a few key issues: if there are links between basic income and people’s happiness, well-being, financial health and how people spend their time.
The Research Director of Basic Income Project is Elizabeth Rhodes: she recently completed a PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan where she studied health and education provision in slum communities in Nairobi.
Anyway, before running a large long-term study, the researchers decided to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. In order to be prepared for the longer-term study, it is therefore necessary to understand the methods i.e. how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.
According to Y Combinator’s vision, Oakland is a great city to do this because it is a place with social and economic diversity and there are both targeted wealth and widespread inequality. Oakland is also very close to where they live: it is an advantage because researchers are closer to the treated. Researchers also think that local resources and relationships will help them in terms of effectiveness of the study. In addition, in the past, Oakland was the field of other famous scientific investigations: in 1973 Aaron Wildavsky and Jeffrey L. Pressman wrote the book Implementation about an unsatisfactory implementation process of a federal policy in Oakland.
Coming back to the study, they have decided that the income is unconditional: according to the researchers, basic income promotes freedom, so they want to see how people treated will experience that freedom. They are free to use basic income how they want: it is permitted to be a volunteer, to be an unemployed, to work, to move to another country or anything.
It is obvious that, if the pilot goes well, they follow up with the larger study, if it doesn’t go properly, the researchers will consider different action plans.
According to YC’s researchers, in the future technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall considerably. Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a future without a steady job, it could become necessary. The researchers hope a minimum level of economic security that will give people the liberty to pursue their own aims such as improve their education, create a better job, plan the future without anxiety and fear of the future. The question is. “When you have a little more freedom and you have more security, what opportunities does that create?”
This study will be very important because we have some examples of something close to a basic income in other countries, but it interesting to see how it would work in the US.
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Il primo studio sul reddito minimo negli USA sarà portato avanti da Y Combinator e Elizabeth Rhodes nella città di Oakland. Nelle intenzioni dei promotori, questo studio pilota dovrà essere l’inizio di un lavoro di ricerca più ampio e più diffuso nel paese. L’importanza di questo progetto risiede nel fatto che ci sono già esempi di reddito minimo in altri paesi ma questa è la prima volta che si cerca di capire se e come questo possa funzionare negli USA.
