Hello, everyone. Wow, what a nice surprise for all of us since it was almost Christmas. We at Urban impact wanted to share something special with you something. Nobody has ever heard before for those who don't know who we are. We are an agency from Berlin scouting connecting and helping startups to grow in Europe. My name is Sophie. I'm part of urban impact. And I'm your host for this episode this format a podcast has been in our minds for a while now, and we wanted to take this opportunity to publish or first episode around Christmas. We call this podcast City Rebels as it is focusing on people that make a real difference for us and their cities these people the city Rebels understood the issues of today and they want to change them through our work. We have met some of them this and last year. Realizing that the Amazing Stories out there which most of you are so included haven't even heard about yet. So this episode we had the chance to talk to Anthony Townsend some of you might know about him already, but let me briefly introduce him and Tony wrote a book called smart cities Big Data Civic hackers and the Quest for new Utopia in 2013. And we believe that he was one of the first at that time to say, hold on guys. Saturday is not the corporate Utopia. Everyone's trying to tell you about it is rather the diversity of actors in the city's bottom-up or also known as Grassroots movements that bring real change into our city. For example through Civic hacking and Anthony brought together those stories in his book. So long story short Antony was the one opening up the debate on city Rebels and we believe that he was the first one of his kind in doing so, so let me take you back to the Time when you're honest Dominic actually met Anthony in the info tab back in November 2018, which is an innovation space of all Berlin utility companies that you're off campus Insurance Berg Antony came to Berlin for a week and after showing him around the Capitol and introducing him to some of the Smart City activities going on here the three sat down to record this episode together. So let's say we keep it original 60 Minutes full length, and we hope you can gain as many amazing insides as we could back then during our conversation with him. The interview is all about smart cities how he grew up and how childhood experiences can transform and shape our lives and also about his upcoming book ghost Road. He is currently working on and which will be published next year. All right, let's jump straight in and apologies for the sound quality in some parts, but we hope you enjoyed anyway, alright cool. So maybe let me start Anthony really really thrilled to have you here with us also for those couple. Of days in Berlin really great to also like having had all of those conversations already with you. And so I'm sitting here also with with Dominic and we're in the infra lab right now on the Euro of Campus, which is sort of the model district for sustainable urbanization in Germany. So I think it's quite a neat place to be in for a little conversation. And what I actually wanted to start off with is ask About sort of like what brought you to this whole Mobility topic like what inspired you like? What was your trajectory personal trajectory your personal interest in it? Well, I've been looking at the intersection of Technology broadly, but specifically information communication technology and cities for over 20 years when I was a teenager. I got my first computer. I lived far outside the city and I used my modem my 300 baud modem, which is about you know, the slowest way you could tell communicate ever to you know, reach across the landscape and try to connect to the city connect to the pre-internet the Proto internet the world of information that was starting to link up and for me. A way of traveling even though I couldn't really travel to the city. And so that that that like substitution of telecommunications and Mobility was something that like I understood from a very very early age very intuitively and so as I grew up and That became a reality for lots more people and lots more ways. Where did you grow up in New Jersey and Southern New Jersey at the beach in a resort town? So the town I lived and went from a population of a hundred thousand on a busy summer weekend to 5,000 in the middle of the winter. You know, they would they would turn the traffic signals off from you know, red and green to blinking. Was a depressing. Yeah, I mean change it change. If you ever listen to like Bruce Springsteen songs like that sort of the soundtrack of my life growing up like these empty beach towns. So, you know, we look to technology is like exit, you know, Springsteen had fast cars. We have my fast computers, right? That was like that was like our way of figuring out how to how to get out and So eventually she did get out through the university in the city and grew interested in how cities and computers were were coming together and that snowballed over the years and eventually became this thing that people started calling smart cities and I ended up at MIT studying with Bill Mitchell who was the one that actually coined that term in the early to was this he he he started Group, I was there in the late 90s when he was the dean of the architecture school, and it was after he left that that post and went over to the media lab. He started a group called The Smart cities group at the media lab in like 2002 2004 was very early than that was yeah. That was yeah before I be. Yeah. Yeah, and that was when as I understand that term first bike really entered the Larry I don't know if he borrowed it from somewhere else. Unfortunately, he passed away before I got to ask him. But yeah, then IBM borrowed it and changed it to smarter cities because I guess they couldn't trademark smart cities since he had already used smart cities. What about but it's okay. What about his description sort of like so he taught how we discussed, you know inspire. You like what was it? How did he describe it? But let me answer your question about Mobility first. So the interest in Mobility was not just because like that had been a problem that that isolation for me. It was a very personal thing that you know, I understood but also because that is the area where I've seen this technology and this movement like really impact people's lives, you know. know there are a lot of sectors of urban infrastructure urban government Urban Services where people are identifying opportunities and seeing it's you know, exciting things that are possible whether its energy or Public Service delivery or health or what whatever it is where Information Technology can make a big difference but many of them have been very very slow to to be realized Energy is a great example of when we're like it's just a massive socio-technical economic shift that has to happen and there's big barriers to the shift in all three have to change people's habits. We have to change the economy and have to change the whole infrastructure and a technology-based and it's a lot of things that have to get unlocked together and it's it's happening because happening slowly. And a lot of its invisible and transport it just things have lined up. They've lined up, you know part of its chance part of it is luck. But it's lined up in a very tangible way part of it is a fact that consumer economies have been harnessed. You know, we've seen startups come in we've seen entrepreneurs come in and find the opportunities and exploit them. We've seen investors get excited and dump money in. we've seen Regulators both get out of the way and also make Innovation possible or just be so clueless that the industries could run around them are the innovators can run around them and the benefits have reached, you know, rich and poor and everybody in between so that to me is like that's what I wanted to do with my life. Like I wanted to work at this intersection of technology and cities in a way that like reached a lot of people so with this is just to understand was this more through the studies you pursued or was a this leg one moment this Eureka. Oh my God. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. No, I mean, I think it's it was just seeing that that was kind of where the water was flowing downhill and seeing seeing evidence on A ground in cities, you know 2000 2001 2002 a lot of talking about smart cities was was daydreaming like it was won't to be great when you were still looking at the proposals from things like location based services and saying won't it be great when we can track everyone's cell phone and deliver these services that are based on location. What will we do? How will we reorganize the city? And when those things finally started arriving watching the applications come out and watching people's behavior change, you know, seeing the first Mobility Services arrived and then seeing real estate developers respond to that and change the kinds of housing that they wanted to build, you know, and then seeing entrepreneurs respond to that and come up with like the startup Transit screen in the US that that makes screens that they sell to real estate developers that to show all the all the buses and trains that are arriving in the neighborhood and they just, you know, one thing feeding off of another and you know, realizing that this this big system is reconfiguring itself, and that that's something that's important and that we can study And it's really happening to me was just incredibly exciting because I had been I've been saying this like since the mid 90s and had a very difficult time with my my teachers my professors my peers in Academia who thought it wasn't important. They didn't understand why I was interested in this they didn't understand where it fit into the traditional disciplines in urban planning and you know was a real validation and just to me it helps tie together like all the things that I had learned and kind of me irrelevant to the future I guess. So, I think most people you know, they obviously know your book smart cities when it came out in 2013. what what led to the book like, what did you do before that also before sort of like you became so, you know, well known as one of the thought leaders so I spent most of the 2000s working working as a consultant. I think tank in California called The Institute for the future. So I did a lot of work with big companies helping them think about this stuff really was a lot of helping big American Fortune 500 companies understand Global urbanization and particularly Global organization in the context of social networks. And mobile Communications which were really really I think to that big ingredients of smart cities and you know, they didn't really have any basis to understand that most most of these Business Leaders have grown up in American suburbs driving cars back and forth to offices and sitting at desks and talking on phones and using fax machines email is still kind of new for these guys. They barely spent any time in the global South if they had been in like a resort somewhere golfing. So we were teaching them. You know what the rest of the world looked like something else that I had done right after grad school was help start a community wireless network in New York City that called NYC Wireless that wasn't quite As you know radical as the the group here in Berlin Fred Funk is that was cool. Yeah. We were trying to like sit up like a alternative free internet to challenge the Telecom sector. We were really just interested in providing access and public space and challenging the idea that you needed to pay for access to the park. But you know, Really? It really helped me develop this idea that there's like a Grassroots vision of the smart city. That isn't like a telecom providers vision of the smart city. And so what happened around 2008 when the financial crisis hit was, you know, a lot of the big it companies all of a sudden saw their their main, In like corporate clients suddenly stopped spending on I.T. Right. So all these Fortune 500 companies. I've been Consulting for suddenly looked at. Okay, how can we like cut back on expenses? So they fired all the futurists so our treadmill and our Revenue was unemployed. Definitely saw cut back in business. They stopped spending on it. so Cisco, IBM and Siemens, you know, they don't just do it but they definitely Siemens was affected by this and at the same time governments all around the world started stimulus spending and so there are a couple of very smart strategy people at particularly IBM, but also Cisco came up with this idea that well, you know that the logistics Solutions and the global it and all these technologies that we've been developing for Walmart and Exxon and all these Global corporations to run their Global Supply chains and their Global Enterprises for the last 20 years, you know, those platforms might also be good for running the very large complex Enterprises of cities because running a city government is just like running a multinational corporation the same problem. This is their assumption. And so that was really how smarter cities was conceived at IBM. It was really just kind of a pivot something that had worked into a different market and they launched on this campaign. And you know, I really reacted pretty pretty negatively to that because it It had a lot of hubris it IBM in particular came in really aggressively really with very little sensitivity to the political social context of how cities make decisions and set priorities and the stakeholders. Are it caught a lot of people by surprise. because IBM has such a long history of working with government and there were many missteps and it was this very old-fashioned like kind of 20th century reductionist rationalist top-down way of thinking about decision making that is totally out of sync with with the way that planning and decision-making and to the extent that they were digging up like methodologies for urban modeling and planning that had been tried like in the 60s and discarded. I mean, these are like 40 50 year-old methods of urban systems modeling. Like Jake forrester's work. And just totally out of context. I mean it was it was it was really bizarre. And so, you know, I saw this happening and it's disco was doing their own stuff and doing it in China in particular and kind of selling the snake oil to the Chinese government that like, we're going to fix all of the bad decisions. You're making about urbanization in China. We're going to fix it with video conferencing. I mean seriously like this is it this was the literal pitch you were there sounds like a great you were there for the 20 2010. Yeah, I will stay in Shanghai at the time setting up. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it but I think this is this is sort of that the high-level message some of the so I felt the need to respond to that and to show all the other kinds of visions that were starting to develop. Smart cities that we're going to be, you know, essentially vernacular built by people using the tools that they had at hand for their own priorities for their own purposes under their control. The way cities have been built throughout the Millennia, you know, most buildings aren't built by multinationals. They're built by families. Financed by savings and renovated and extended over time and it's so this sort of idea of incremental organic design and expansion, you know in many ways like how apps and websites and these kinds of things have grown. These are the issues you seen five years ago, right and in this time do you think is this progress of the Change for the better or do you think I think? I think you know we've seen a tremendous amount of that Grassroots innovation. In terms of ideas cities have definitely rejected the smart city in a box Vision fully and we've even gotten to the point in the last year where when I hear people from McKinsey Consultants talk about smart cities. They have embraced. You know my point of view. Which to me that is going to feed I honestly cannot think of like a greater measure of success than that, but I think it's also makes so much sense because it just didn't work. No did the other approaches did not produce the kind of results that every moving it didn't sell because and this this was you know, why I knew I was right before I even started writing the book was because the people in the cities were Telling me that what they were getting pitched was insane, you know, this is in the book good people from Boston and people in London telling him telling me like that the things they were hearing from IBM, we're totally wrong, but they didn't understand how people in cities make decisions. It doesn't matter if the cities aren't run like businesses if using a bus stands for that isn't too optimistic given the story of who I am doing I work and I come from Poland and how smart it is now rolls out to polish statistics exactly the way how you described. It was in 2013 like the Box Solutions, right? So I just wonder how much of it is a u.s. Perspective for City already grasped the idea that it's not the way and how does the rest of the world is catching up about the city? Yeah. I mean, I think I think there's sir. laying different parts of the world are going to be at different stages of development different parts of the world have different starting points to identify lot of work since then in Latin America and there's some basic services and basic functions that governments in Latin America, you know need a company like Siemens to come in and just sign a contract and do It right like they don't need citizen participation in you know, making sure that the Water Sanitation system is operating. They need a German engineering company to come in and make sure the water is clean and delivered effectively right at the price that was agreed upon on time. There are certain things that have to be done in a centralized fashion. According to standards and I make this point in the book, you know that like the the Global Engineering complex IT industry has a lot to offer but it can't set the agenda. It can't be the purveyor. The vision can be the creator of the vision. And that was what I was reacting to was IBM saying we have the vision Cisco saying we have the vision what I was saying cities have to provide the vision and then The companies can come in and say okay. Here's how we will implement it, you know in retrospect and I always think I also did give them Credit in the book, you know, IBM spent a lot of his money teaching mayor's like what's possible what this technology can actually do. And I think that was valuable. There were a lot of over promises things that have not yet been delivered things. That didn't work. We see that with other Technologies like Watson. This is a well-documented thing that the the marketing people at IBM have oversold Watson so much that it doesn't do any of the things that they've claimed that us, so You need to take that with a grain of salt but I think oh, oh, you know the the ecosystem is actually working and the movement is marching forward. They're definitely hiccups obstacles and but they're all learning opportunities for the most part but also learning opportunities on all sides. Yeah involved. Yeah. I think this is one of the main misconceptions as always that oh well just to cut the big cobras are the That guy's I don't necessarily think so, you know, I think like you said, you know, there is also so much to be learned from for the startups, you know, how a city function and how to work with a big table door like from the city's perspective. Like what is out there in terms of innovation that could actually make our dysfunctional system may be at the time much better. So I think it's really this. you know almost like this this it should be a joint pursuit of like trying to learn a better understand each other and the because it I don't know what what your perspective on it is in terms of top-down versus bottom-up hours of pitched but whether that dichotomy is really the right way of looking at it, but I think one of the things that was very clear from your book and I think what what what really struck a nerve Time was there was so much happening on this on you know, this diversity of stakeholders. This is like, I mean you popular popularize the idea also the Civic hacking movement and all the stuff that could for America and of those other organizations were doing and what was their response also maybe to your book and also what has happened. How do you do see this whole part of the story you were telling how has that developed? I before we go on I just you know say like I think the top-down versus bottom-up thing. Is there a lot of other people out there who have taken very like anti-corporate stance in this whole discussion, you know, like Adam Green Fields is good friend. His book came out right around the same time as mine against the Smart City very clear. Yeah. I didn't call my book against the smart city and you know the point I just made I think there is a role. These companies and and that role is scale and I think history is proving me right on this. If you look at the record of the last five years the thing that industry has achieved that the Grassroots the bottom-up has not achieved its scale whether it's Uber or Airbnb or whatever it is. They may not be companies that everybody likes. They may have done a lot of nasty things but they've also delivered a lot of value. They've done it all over the world and they have pushed a lot of interesting ideas really really far in a very short period of time it's and they mobilized a lot of action which you know in and of itself is worth something and you know, maybe we can do a better job in Harnessing that action in a more sustainable productive Equitable direction for labor or whatever it is and those companies I think are learning those lessons some of them but they have achieved scale and like if you did urgency of the challenges we face whether its climate change or poverty or managing Refugee crisis are things that matter of time time matters. Right like we are glad 12 more years for the Australian 12 b 2 b a g urbanizing. This is the one shot we get, right. This is this is this is it we're building the city's now, this is Paul Romer and then why you just won a Nobel prize in economics, you know, he always says it's like we're building the city's we're going to live with for the next couple thousand years. And it's like yeah, that's it. This is it. This is like Humanities time. These are the salad days. I mean that decisions will even make now will lock this weird. Yeah. Our population is going to Peak like around 20 80 and then we're all just going to get old populations going to decline like this is this is really this is the peak of human civilization terms of activity where we had super AI material. This is the most people the most stuff so, you know and it's the crisis in terms of our habitat, right? So I think making some mistakes. Like not getting the system perfect, but getting the big things right at scale. Maybe there's a little more important. So, you know, that's why I feel like I'm kind of Been Vindicated and having that more balanced view after after seeing what's happened in the last couple of years that yeah. I wish there was less collateral damage, you know, I wish Uber treated its workers more fairly, you know, I wish Airbnb didn't displace people but you know the fact that they pioneered new models for Mobility. New models for managing Urban housing I think is been in that game speaking of the many of those Giants and also you mentioned before that investors get recently attraction in the mobility. I wanted to ask you the questions. How do you perceive the role of of and of professional investors of venture capital in the creation of cities and as an example, let's discuss Berlin when Recently the investments in Mobility just pretty much exploded and from my from my experience. The investors don't usually take into considerations that complexity of the city or the theory and theory of urban Transportation. Let's say even to say more I would say this is sometimes perceived as the distractions today healthy investment decision process right now. I just wonder how much of this reflection should be there and it Is it is there any risk related to the fact that there probably is not enough of it or this is the way to go. This is how we create a city with with the Market Force well. Is always going to be smart money and done money. I think any investment Community has that having more smart money is always better. It's going to attract more entrepreneurs that's going to track better entrepreneurs. It's going to create more breakout success has it's going to create a better flow of Innovations within the ecosystem so anything you know that can be done whether it's supporting supporting investors who want to get smarter whether it's connecting resources from universities. So this is something I'm starting to think about a New York City is whether we can use some of the new science and technology universities that we've set up in the last few years to help support the new Mobility Innovations. We have New York University. Center for Urban science and progress which I always tease them sounds like sort of like soviet-era Urban informatics program, you know, it's like khrushchev's big data Institute or something Center for Urban progress Cornell Cornell Tech is a Cornell's Engineering campus, which is partnered with the technion from Israel. And Columbia also has the Earth Institute, which is a major climate Science Center. So it has big Urban Focus as well particularly around remote sensing satellite data. So, you know, I think there's a lot of things that can be done and of course the role of government particularly around data sharing and data standards because it's such a crucial. Linchpin for Mobility Innovation and you know, they can be a real Catalyst and setting standards requiring Mobility companies to share data in ways that can unlock opportunities for Innovation. So I think I think that there's there's a lot that can be done to make investors smarter. It's not just about the investors being smarter when they arrived at the table. Well just doesn't step before do you think that it should be done? Like should we make because they invest as I'm talking about they are definitely not the representatives of the damn money. However, there is well-founded argument that lets say investing in the East scooter company is perceived from totally different angle than the Three of us would would consider is not first of all, it's not a Mobility company. Let's say the marketplace company and it fulfills all the it ticks all the boxes of the the good venture capital investment and does it they don't even label or Quorum call it Mobility investment. It's not like even if they do it's not the chorus not informed and the implications of did it of this is that the whole theory of urban planning which of course this company is is deeply rooted in In it's not considered. They created the City by supporting this given company. I'm not considering the fact of doing so and I just wonder if there is any risk in this so I think the lemon one way of thinking about the question you're asking is do you need to be a specialist to invest in Mobility companies versus kind of a generalist investor? I don't know the answer to that. What I think is an interesting question that raises in my head is whether there are opportunities or the opportunities for investors who are not Mobility Specialists are actually more interesting. And the reason I think of it that is the more I look at the mobility sector the more I realized that the big money is the things that catalyzes and particularly real estate. So what did Travis County to as soon as he got kicked out of uber real estate he went and got involved with a company called Cloud kitchens. Which he's now rebranded as I think it's called City storage solutions or City storage systems. Like I can't remember what the name of the company is. But as I understand it, it's basically a holding company for ghost kitchens. Which are cooking facilities that do nothing but fulfill online orders and for for restaurants that either you know, or like Heine high-profile restaurants that have a big online business and so they'll let's say it's like a David Chang Restaurant in New York. And he's got Momofuku have David and David Chang's a bad example, but let's just see it. So he's got home a fuku in the West Village and then there may be five Momofuku kitchens around Manhattan. Placed so that they're closed to customers that have no retail storefront. All they do is fulfill delivery orders to the neighbor of the Darren. Oh, wow. Okay, like my end and when might grow up and what Countess company does is manage those facilities there like a logistics provider. For the deliveries of this world of who don't know they they basically own those kitchens and rent them out to David Chang. Oh today the facility operator and owner. They helped him scale exactly is Brent exactly. And so let's but it's not just kitchens. They're going to do it for like every kind of e-commerce. So they're basically going to own everything in the e-commerce chain. That is not an Amazon warehouse. So I'm just think of all the other businesses that are going to want to move stuff around streets. That doesn't go in a brown box. So that's what callanetics doing. And who burst buying delivery room right like uber and their deliverer who owns the same kind of infrastructure deliver owns a bunch of hundreds of ghost kitchens all over Europe. So those companies like uber buying delivery is not over by a delivery service. It's Uber buying real estate, right? So, That's fascinating to me. So the real opportunity is in the real estate for the last mile delivery infrastructure or it's the logistics for I said, which is funny because often we you know, when we look at we haven't talked at all about sort of like package deliveries and all of those last mile Solutions my crew Depots and so on dispatch man's but effectively that's another way of solving the issues Yeah by having those little Well having this network of ghost kitchens or whatever else goes goes to real estate. Right what other kinds of so what it tells me is maybe need a different kind of specialist right like and so having a having in that sense like if you're only Having transportation Mobility experts in the room. They're not going to see that and this is actually one of the things as a policy planning person when I talk to people and talk to cities about automated vehicles. I insist that cities bring people to the table from inside city government who are experts outside of Transportation. I want to talk to people from their aging Department. I want to talk to people from their children's services. I want to talk two people from their Department of watershed management the people who care about how much paved surface there is in the city and who want to remove roads so that the water will drain better and they want to get rid of vehicles so they can remove roads things that you never would think about when you talk about Vehicles unless what you care about is water, so Talking to Transportation people. The answer is always Transportation, but talking to people who have other objectives. about Mobility The answer is often less Mobility or different kinds of mobility of our ability leading to something else ability serving a purpose exactly not an end in FLV. It's a it's a piece of a delivering service. Right? It's a means is also we can understand it the way that we see approach might be perceived in this context as the opportunity to the development of the cities in the future, right if I read you correctly. Yeah. so I think I think I think you know if you're going to play in this place, you need somebody who understands the nuances because it's complicated and the trait there's lots of trade-offs and lots of regulations changing fast that can break business models very quickly or open them up, but I think there's also the risk of like not seeing the daylight open up, you know, and like in the policy world, you know. It's the risk of becoming too too much of a wang, you know, not seeing missing the big picture and I think that the risk in investing is probably the same and also I mean one of the things is always like the potential impact of City regulation on your business model that might absolutely no it looks great right now. But once you have the city backlash because maybe it's a bad idea at scale at least with the current business model. You know, that's always a big question as well. So and I think some of those Mobility companies are currently experiencing that with burden others being like even bad in San Francisco or the city of New York forcing ride-sharing operators now to share some data sets as well and so on. So, I mean this was the work we published in 2014 the reprogramming Mobility studying, which is really kind of a Capstone to The Rockefeller foundation's five-year investment in transportation. We were looking 20 years out in North America and the US, you know, what is all this technology add up to and what we were trying to say was Planning institutions are not prepared to deal with the pace of change and that the disruption that has occurred from ride sourcing from tncs Uber Lyft and their ilk. This is not one time disruption and we're going to return to a new equilibrium and business as usual can continue and you can keep planning and running your city the same way with the same methods in the same people and the same organizations that this is going to happen again and again and again and again, and I said that 2014 and we shared the message a lot of whoo. Whoo. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, we'll see if that happens again. And then, you know the scooters have come and like now that automated stuff is going to come and like the evidence is sort of starting to mount up that like, hey, maybe Townsend was right like we are going to have one of these things every 18 months the comes out of nowhere. How much will this East Coasters would say, you know being his hype and how much of it is the beginning of a big Urban Trend. I mean, I think the I think the scooters are potentially bigger deal then then what's happened with right sourcing because they're completely operating and like the Consumer Electronics world. It's it's reached like a part of the economy where there's very little regulation. It's now competing directly with two modes are the most sustainable kind of highest priority walking and biking so like the early survey data is showing a lot of the trips would have been taken by what are essentially like carbon negative. Modes of travel walking and cycling because you burn some of the Fuji produce positive health benefits and steady's small electric motor and produce some injuries, which are costly to treat. so yeah, it's they're very appealing. I think they're there. I don't think it's hype at all. I think it's going to be a very widespread thing. I mean, there's a lot of loose ends. Did I have to get tidied up? But just that I mean the sheer so we call this this whole class of small electric vehicles. Once you add automation, which is going to be a trivial thing to do automation want to come down a lot and cost before it starts to get bolted on but and make the case for automation. These vehicles isn't as compelling but it'll be one of the things that allows the Loose Ends to be tied up. So one of the biggest problems with scooters is this that they're there Untidy, I mean they got left everywhere. They don't come when called because they don't have docks. Right? So just having them be able to kind of zip over to the side of the road over come to the corner or you know come when called by the app requires a very modest amount of software. They're also not very big so they don't have to work that safely. So it's a pretty easy engineering problem. They're also not that valuable. So if they accidentally drive under a truck or you know off a cliff or something, it's not that big a deal so they will get automated quite soon and you know the become that much more useful because of that and that much more pervasive and you know, there's there's just going to be everywhere. They're going to be like, you know, magic feet. Like that's what I think so we call this whole category whether it's scooters are skateboards. The board's bikes everyone makes fun of that Google self-driving bicycle video that came out a couple years ago from Amsterdam. Yeah, that was hilarious. I looked at that and it looks like that is absolutely right on. I mean, I knew it was a joke, but I was like this is this is very real April fools. Yeah. I know but it was there was a group at MIT working on self-driving bike at the time like it's that's a very very real thing. And how do you call this cathegory a Rovers Rovers? We call them Rovers because they sort of Rome in a territory and there's some very interesting Urban Design possibilities that they open up because they basically what they do is they make neighborhoods bigger. so you can take you know, the walkable radius of a neighborhood Rose subway station and make it that much bigger so you can have sort of In areas, you can basically up Zone cities because people can zip around over bigger areas. I mean, I love you brought us some of the booklets here taming the autonomous vehicle. I'm just like having it here. I mean, I love the illustrations that you guys came up with sort of and also the storytelling in a sense. Maybe we can you describe Project would you be done and this is just part of the the last piece of work that we did for the Bloomberg Aspen initiative on cities and autonomous vehicles, which was a year-long effort with both of those organizations, Bloomberg philanthropies and the Aspen Institute in the u.s. In 10 cities around the world to try to you know, in many ways kind of similar to it. I was trying to do with the smart Cities book crafted vision for the future of this technology. That was City driven and not industry driven because there's so many kind of modern day myths out there about what autonomous automated vehicles are going to be will have to get to that in a second. Yeah as well and You know cities have a lot of goals for Mobility. They aren't centered on autonomous vehicles and they're centered on human human-powered and mass transit and we wanted to acknowledge that there's this industry Vision that is centered on autonomous vehicles and sort of weave that in in ways that would support City's existing goals, which are very well thought. Cyril very good reasons for being the way they are so sort of taking harvesting what we can from what industries bringing to the table discarding what is definitely not going to work we're conflict with cities cities goals Give an example. So I think the idea of private automated Passenger cars and cities is probably a bad one in most cities. You know, we had a wide range of cities in this project from Paris to Nashville, Tennessee Tel Aviv, São Paulo, the parisians made it very clear almost the minute. They walked into the room that private autonomous vehicles would be banned from the city. If not immediately in the near future whereas in Nashville. Tennessee is a Jur auto manufacturing State. They said it was almost impossible to imagine that ever happening. That the state would never allow them to do such a thing because it would scare off the car makers. So they so they would allow if yeah, they would have deal even though it's not good for the city. Right but they they hands are tied. So, you know, this is kind of a wide variety of realities and abilities to like act on it. But yeah, so that's Private empty Vehicles what Robin chase the founder of Zipcar called zero occupancy vehicles are ghost cars. So, you know taking your self driving a Mercedes and sending it to go pick up your dry cleaning. That's a really bad thing because you're basically contributing to traffic with in producing. No. And Mobility at all. If everybody in the city does that it's it will strangulate the road Network. So there's that there's a number of things that really contribute to excess travel demand that cities identify very quickly as things they didn't want but it kind of bread and butter. Parts of the industry Vision can Antony can I am going to read one of them please the stories here. So silly was just as hooked on instant delivery as her neighbors. We all love instant delivered only so but when the daily Gem of delivery trucks gave way to an even more menacing swarm of sidewalk Bots, she felt like there wasn't much room on the sidewalk for her anymore. So said he was very sad. So and then it goes on I can see already. The sideboard is like blocking the door entrance for the old granny who is very outraged about this, but then it goes on and sort of like, how could it be over nice from the city's perspective. So now every block has a Potter licensed by the city Sally's Porter meets larger conveyor Bots at the curb and carries the goods the last meter or two and I remember when we talked before you call this the To meet a logistics not the last my Logistics with the lead last meteorologist exposure. I love so it goes on the story the product can also facilitate. So these returns and even recycles packaging in the rare instance when dispatch algorithm send something when she isn't there the porter can hold items for redelivery when she returns what I love about those stories. First of all, there's a very specific way how you have written it. It's very personalized and well exactly and I think you You you told me about one of the the most Avid readers of those in our yes, my daughter my ten-year-old daughter loves to read these she seen me working on this project for over a year which in her short life is a very long time and she's fascinated by the technology. She's eager for this future to take place. She also sees us getting packages every day because we're addicted to not instant delivery yet, but And you know, she wants to she wants to solve these problems too. So yeah, it's fun. And I you know kind of joke that like if my ten-year-old daughter can understand it's like a perfect reading level for a mayor. But yeah, and of course the mayor's are totally agree kind of sad, but there's no and I think actually to be completely honest. I think it's a perfect level for everyone. I because you know, we always think all the experts, you know, we need only need like use this dragon and money everywhere. We are expert there's so many fields where we are not an expert and especially in Smart City. Most of the time we are not experts most of the time. We probably need to communicate exactly the same that it goes kind of simple language. I think it's a good test for whether whether it's urgent or not. Whether it's clear if it can't boil it down, you know, maybe maybe you're not ready to deal with it yet. There's so much going on in the scenario, you know, one of the things we were trying to highlight there's the I mean there's a Of issues, but that idea of the last meter when things were trying to highlight is that even though there's a tremendous amount of investment going into automating delivery in The Last Mile because it's expensive but it's also exploding I mean e-commerce in most of the developed economies is growing by about 15% a year, which means it's doubling every five years and the parcel shipments are going about the same rate, which is much faster than passenger. Air travel so Freight fractions are growing much faster than passenger. Is it none of these none of these robots? Anytime soon are going to be able to get through your front door. Climb the stairs up to your stupid on your townhouse gets through the elevator into your apartment block. Mr. Cities are complicated. They're structurally architecturally complicated particularly cities that were built in the 19th and 20th Century like Berlin, so we are going to need human beings people. Our people aren't home people aren't ready. They're on the phone. They're giving the kid a bath they're preparing. Are there down at the corner having a coffee synchronizing delivery is really hard the best solution that the Consultants so of McKinsey actually MacKenzie's German office is still one of the best studies on the last my Logistics their answer is package lockers. So they're saying basically everybody needs to move to system where automated Vehicles put packages in lockers at the corner. Another group has done surveys people hate package lockers. They want the package is delivered to their homes. So what's the Gap there write the solution for industry and the solution for the consumer don't meet so our proposal. I don't know if this works for proposals that maybe there's a role for a human worker in the middle. So the way we think of this is you know the best of machine Intelligence and human intelligence, right and this is this is compatible with how people more broadly are starting to think about Ai and human workers together in the future across all industries that it's not about replacement. It's about rethinking how teams work and that AI is going to become a part of Better teams as opposed to just throwing people out of room that I think it will also be one of the main contributors in terms of the whole acceptance. Yeah of those Technologies because I think one of the things most people are scared about is just oh God. Am I going to lose my job? Like when I am I going to lose my job and I think part of the things that you are also showing and maybe we can just just as we have, you know, I have to wrap up now unfortunately, but it's also what you are looking at now is like what Some of the myth of the this sort of like autonomous future that is being put out there right now. What is it going to look like? Maybe much more likely in reality? Yeah. I mean, I think what we've been sold is this kind of vision. There's a famous film from the US government funded demonstration in 1997, California, the first automated Highway called demo 97 and it's a bunch of Of General Motors Kei cars cruising down this this desert highway in San Diego perfectly synchronized even the drivers have identical haircuts their identically space. There's no cities and site. There's no buildings anywhere and I think that's the vision that a lot of Industry a lot of people in government and a lot of consumers have kind of carry forward that it's just perfectly synchronized homogeneous pod. Cars and nothing could be further from the truth. I mean it's going to look more like the web every vehicle is going to be different. It's going to have different software. It's going to behave differently at different apps loaded on it in autonomous vehicles are going to be more like our phones. They're only going to you know have the same Hardware may be but there's software and services and data and what they do and what we do with them and what we experience in them is going to be infinitely. Ali varied and I think that's a good thing. I think they're going to going to be the perfect Urban machine. They're going to adapt to our Urban environments in a way that cars never did we had to rebuild cities around cars autonomous vehicles will fit into the niches in cities in ways that that let us live, you know better and cleaner adjust the problems that we have. The design value driven cell phone was liberating. I'm very optimistic. The most optimistic Bill and heard for years. I think it's I think it's the right technology for the right time. I really do but let's like let's try to be negative now and what's what's the opposite of this optimistic Vision if things don't work as they should I think the big risk is is that is around free and that you know, essentially let a handful of big online retailers use this to drive the cost of shipping down to nothing turn the streets into a distribution system for You know cheap manufactured goods from I don't know. What be China anymore. I'm able to be Africa or southeast Asia. We don't find ways to turn that towards more circular kinds of consumption and Recycling and it just becomes a gigantic run away energy whole that's a very real possibility. I think Amazon. As kind of moving the u.s. Towards that right now and the next couple of years may make a kind of decisive turn towards that but what does it hinge on that scenario? It hinges on our antitrust policy whether we allow them to come novelist in The Last Mile hinges on our climate policy, which is probably lost now for the next few years. Yeah, I think really right now it's kind of down to antitrust. So it's kind of its kind of funny actually like the personal politics of it at least like the Trump Administration has made the wrong decision climate. But because Trump hates just leaves us so much. He may actually make the right decision on antitrust. So he made block Amazon just said of you know personality which I think would actually be a good thing. So he made me my move you don't see any any role for the city's they're In the u.s. I hope they don't have much power interestingly. They can do some things at the curb. But Amazon will find a way around it because I think we just had to be yeah, we've just had this this whole charade around the Amazon hq2. I don't know if you saw that which is clearly showed who has the upper hand when Amazon deals with local governments in the u.s. They they really just like you have a lot of like s it was the exhibition about the headquarters right? You have like a lot of S&M clubs here in Berlin, right? This is the relationship between Amazon and it's Insidious. All right, very interesting. No, but I mean it's interesting because I think here the I don't know also from my experience. I'm Consulting with City's oldest in Europe. I think here there might be slightly. More Hefty influence also from the city's perspective from the regulatory perspective of just what what cities do allow what the authorities allow me in terms of last my Logistics how they can steered and mandated effectively. Yeah, I think they do. I think you're in a much better position here. Just because cities have done so much more thinking and put in place like a much better set of ideas and initiatives that logistics companies will have to move into it'll be in their interest and Mike yeah, I think all those things. Moving up the timetable and raising the incentive structure faster is probably the priority so you obviously thinking a lot about the the whole topic of autonomy for the autonomous driving and the impact it has for your new book. So maybe it's one of our last question sort of like did you take any like it's also your first time here in Berlin? Us so we're there any any things that inspired you from this trip already like ideas thoughts that or reflection simply, you know, based on the work you've done or what what what you're writing right now that what you feel. This was a useful visit as well in the sense of like being here in Berlin. Oh, I mean, there's so much to learn from Berlin just from the city itself. the uniqueness of scale and structure There's something about the streetscape that's just inherently really flexible. You can see the size of the Avenues and the not the grid that sort of the network of streets has allowed it to accommodate new Mobility Technologies, you know over the last hundred and fifty years in a way that I think is really allowed it to evolve and will continue to it's very Situated so the eager to see how automated Vehicles become a part of that mix, but I think it's going to be easy for Berlin. I find it fascinating that the tension here between it's sort of right on this like interesting balance between being concentrated and being really spread out and almost at this tipping point where if we didn't have these Technologies, it would be a little too spread out but I see people, you know using apps and using Mobility Services whether it's bikes or taxis or the arrival. I Amazon the u-bahn to pull it together and it's like Berlin is a much more connected City now. I just sense because of that right and because of the presence of so many young people who exploit that and that's really it's really interesting to see it so clearly and so concentrated that the city is thriving because of that connectedness, you don't see it so clearly in other places where you know, they would have succeeded anyway because of the density or the transit Network or they're failing because they're too spread out. Because the land use or whatever like here, we have a little bit of both. So close to the Tipping Point where it could have failed, you know, like if we were in the 1980s Berlin probably would be really really struggling even with the same demographics in the same global economy. I don't know that's just my theory, but I think that the timing is really good. So it's fascinating. Another another chance to have I'll be back. I mean, I'm it's going to take me months to process what I've learned in a few days here. And he is there anything else you want to sort of like any last last thoughts you have any about your current work anything else? You want to mention that we didn't touch on? No just think you know, my big Focus right now is trying to follow the money. I think both the money coming in the investments in the money going out. That's really that's the big thing that's changing. Now. There's always been new technology and transportation and Mobility that the amount of money now, it's really new. It hasn't been easy a big influx of money in big like New glow of money and Very very long time and when it happens historically that's when things really really changed a lot. I've been spending a lot of time recently studying what happened when we shifted from horse horse-drawn streetcars to electric powered street cars about a hundred and twenty hundred thirty years ago probably happened in Berlin around the 1880s 1890s. 1890s probably and it was just a massive transformation of cities and the attraction industry as they called it back. Then I think something similar is happening. And now with the soft bangs of this world. Yeah. So Frank is a big part of it, but who's behind SoftBank so tell us the salaries? All right. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Anthony. I really enjoyed it. I hope all of our listeners have have the same view. I'm sure they have so we hope to have you back human ruling soon an enemy. Is there if people want to get in touch with you and follow your work is there what's was a canned good place. I think Twitter's the best some Anthony mobile and Twitter. That's kind of the main the main. Sounding board and right now I'm kind of keeping my head focused on working on the book. What is it going to be called The Working title is Ghost Road the high stakes of the driverless Revolution. So we are certainly looking forward to that. All right. Thanks a lot. Anthony. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to our first episode of City Rebels. We hope you enjoyed it and make sure you follow us on all social media accounts and pre-order Antony's book ghost roads online which comes up next to June. Also if you want to get in touch with us, feel free to send us a mail at hello Urban impact on EU that's it folks. Take care and catch you on the flip side.
„ You can continue planning to run your city with the same methods and the same people and same organizations - but disruption is gonna happen again and again and again.“ (Anthony Townsend, City Rebels Podcast Episode 1)  In our first ever episode of City Rebels we kick off with an outstanding guest: Anthony Townsend (Twitter: @anthonymobile) Listening to our interview which we recorded back in November 2018 you will understand why Anthony is a real city rebel to us. His understanding and takes on smart cities have started way back when he was in college. For him, a smart city has always been more than big players implementing a new technology into the city's infrastructure or government. Since he has been looking at the topic of information and communication for more than twenty years so no wonder he brought out his first book "SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia" in 2014, discussing the use of big data and digitalization of our cities, and their transformation into smart cities. Besides publishing his first book, Anthony’s recent research has covered the future of automated and autonomous vehicles (AVs), the urban science movement, and big data and inclusion. One of his latest projects has been The Autonomous Vehicles: Future Scenarios supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles and NLC. So, let's jump into our first episode! To keep it simple and structured - here are the show notes *drum roll* This episode is all about smart cities and new technologies. Discover with us:  What Smart Cities has to do with the 2008 Financial Crisis and what led to Anthony writing his first book "Smart Cities“ How different parts of the world approach the smart city movement  The three giants Uber, Amazon and Airbnb and their impact on our cities How new mobility is changing real estate models Why we should talk more about last meter rather than last mile logistics What watershed management has to do with autonomous driving E-Scooters in our cities and their potential for automation The Autonomous Vehicles: Future Scenarios - Booklets What potentials Anthony sees in Berlin in terms of future technologies Anthony's current work on his new book: Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car  About this Podcast: We are Urban Impact, an agency from Berlin, scouting, connecting and helping urban tech startups to grow in Europe. Through our work we have been getting  into touch with real change makers, people, that shape our cities, think forward and make a real difference to us. We call those people "city rebels", just like our Podcast. Working with people, talking to them made us realize, how many amazing stories are out there, which we want to share with you. Feel free to send us a mail at hello@urbanimpact.eu if you believe you are a city rebel or simply want to reach out to us. 