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How Technology Can Provide Access for Distressed Communities

Author

Klaus Philipsen
America's new gilded age with its increasing disparities and growing patchwork of pockets of poverty covering the nation like smallpox (see map) causes thoughts about access or the lack thereof. Not to have access, and the associated lack of opportunity have become chief explanations for systemic poverty. Baltimore's unrest in 2015 is frequently explained by the lack of access to jobs and good transportation to get to where the jobs are.
 
The map of US poverty
Access has become a buzzword.  Access to healthcare (in spite of progress under Obamacare), access to good food, access to good schools, access to information, access to banks. Typically the disparities in access are seen as geo-spatial locational issues. That poor neighborhoods don't have certain facilities is usually seen as a brick and mortar problem of the kind that urban planners know how to solve: Build health clinics, build grocery stores, build better schools, build more transit, build factories, build banks, build parks. 
 
Source: Economic Innovation Group 2016

 

The list is of what is missing is long. No matter how many workshops are convened around Baltimore's center of unrest at Penn and North or how many grants and programs may be provided to address the ills of systemic poverty, sufficient resources for all those projects are not likely to materialize. Meanwhile the patches on the map of poverty grow larger and the quilt they form becomes ever more depressing even during a time of relative good economic health..
Instead of lifting distressed communities, the recovery has left them and their residents even further behind. And once distress sets in, it seems to persist: even the country's most dynamic and successful cities struggle to achieve geographically equitable prosperity. New approaches are needed to enable more people in more places to participate in and benefit from economic growth. (DCI Report)
What if solutions could come from leapfrogging disadvantaged communities straight into the digital age instead of from building bricks and mortar or actual movement through space? 
 
The share of distressed communities by US region
(Economic Innovation Group 2016)
This could be one of the promises of the digital age, if notforthe pesky digital divide. It looks like as if the digital divide isn't really anything special, just the same old divide of class and race that has determined the geography of cities for too long. Expensive internet, poor connections, lack of computer literacy and equipment is not just another lack of access but it is the ultimate injustice because it cuts off a rather simple shortcut route out of many of the other access problems.
 
Many of us can hardly handle a few hours without being "connected". Apps tell us how to dress weather appropriately, how long our ride to work will be (whatever mode we pick), allow us to get a present to a grandchild living across the country on almost a moment's notice, read the local hometown paper wherever we may be, pay bills, do research about illnesses, look up lab results from our last medical check-up, download or submit school tests, find our political representatives or give them an earful, pay the parking meter, or order food. The list of digital conveniences is growing longer every day. Additionally, in the "smart city, connectivity is becoming a matter of being heard, for example through real time customer feedback for example on transit. Crowd based information gathering is becoming increasingly a tool for optimizing services.
 
Source: Economic Innovation Group 2016

 

All that is well established. The lack of digital access strikes poor communities on the other side of the "digital divide" with much more disastrous consequences, though, as this recent NYT article illustrates in one example:
Some students in Coachella, Calif., and Huntsville, Ala., depend on school buses that have free Wi-Fi to complete their homework. The buses are sometimes parked in residential neighborhoods overnight so that children can connect and continue studying. In cities like Detroit, Miami and New Orleans, where as many as one-third of homes do not have broadband, children crowd libraries and fast-food restaurants to use free hot spots.

Not to have all these convenient new digital tools would be inconvenient for most, but for some digital access is or could be life sustaining and truly elemental.

To illustrate this point, a detour to developing countries may be in order. Organizations concerned with health, literacy, food access, migration and many other aspects affecting millions in poor and distressed regions of the world increasingly report how people went straight from having no phone at all to mobile broadband access through cheap smart phones. Access to mobile frequencies and internet then becomesever more often a matter of survival. In the latest draft of the United Nations' sustainability goals beyond 2015, universal internet access is named alongside education and health at the top of the development agenda. M-Pesa users in rural Kenya report that they have increased income by 30% by using mobile payment technology. In India, over 5 million people are learning via Bharti Airtel's m Education platform. In Tanzania, patients in isolated rural communities are diagnosed by dermatologists in Dar es Salaam, all through a smartphone app. (Guardian).
Simple smart phone frequently used in
Ghana
Technology has the potential to lift people out of poverty. All signs point to the developing world skipping past the eras of landlines and desktop computers and going straight to mobile. That potential for two-way communication is changing the face of international development. "For the first time ever, we're able to have a clear line to people who are in the middle of nowhere to give them a sense of a future, information, opportunity and choice," says Chris Fabian, co-lead of UNICEF's Innovation Lab. Only 2 percent of African households have a landline, [but] recent Pew Research Center numbers show that cell phones are as common in Nigeria and South Africa as they are in the United States, with about 90 percent of adults owning mobile phones. (CTA)
Spare parts are ordered online, text messages provide crop market prices to farmers in remote locations who previously sold their harvest below value. General health information is obtained on the internet, personal health indicators monitored through connected wearables, smart hone based medical blood tests are tried out in Johns Hopkins' labs, jobs are held through telecommunication, money transactions are done via smart phone. All these are strategies that are becoming more successful in distressed regions of the world on several continents. 
 
Why the detour into developing regions of the world in the context of distressed neighborhoods within US urban centers is not far fetched can be seen on this map which labels Baltimore neighborhoods according to their residents' statistical life expectancy by using country names with corresponding life expectancy. Thus Freddie Gray's neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester becomes Rwanda. 
 
Baltimore neighborhoods labeled as countries according to
life expectancy
In spite of all the talk about the digital divide, digital literacy in US cities remains low, broadband penetration lousy (#16 worldwide, for example, only 10% in the 7th Ward of New Orleans) and internet service in the US is not only comparatively poor, it is also prohibitively expensive. 
 

 

Instead of having an elegant and fundamentally inexpensive alternative to the costly traditional physical interventions needed to provide opportunity and economic development, the US is hobbled by a bad digital infrastructure that is surpassed by countries such as Japan, Portugal, Finland or even Estonia. As noted, the "digital divide" exacerbates the already blatantly unjust US inequalities instead of bridging them as digital technology could and should.
Physical places these days tend to have online counterparts. Every city — perhaps every neighborhood — has a corresponding aggregate of articles, photos, maps, Yelp reviews, Craigslist ads, tweets, memes and other ephemera that describe what's in it, and what that place is like. Taken together, these aggregates are what geographers Michael Crutcher and Matthew Zook call "cyberscapes." Their research shows that, in a city like New Orleans — and a neighborhood like the one where Public Utility 2.0 is centered, Tremé — a cyberscape left to its own devices can reflect and perpetuate deep-seated injustices that already exist in a physical place. (Next City)
In the Baltimore region, for example, broadband fiber-optic systems are limited to the suburbs, The only fiber-optic lines in the city itself belong to special data highways to libraries and select universities that are not available to the general public. Everybody else has to rely on Verizon's DSL phone lines or on Comcast's monopoly on cable access that was built for analog television. Both Comcast and Verizon are monopoly provider and belong to the elite group of most hated corporations in the US. Heavy usage during peak hours can slow data streams to a trickle while the cost of the "triple" phone, internet and TV package can exceed $200 a month if some options are selected. Compare that to the early days of TV when all that was needed to receive free TV was a pair of rabbit ear antennas.
 
Leapfrogging into the age of robust wireless connections would be far less costly than burying fiberoptic cables in the entire city and exponentially cheaper than building all the brick and mortar facilities mentioned before. WiFi installed on top of traffic signals and street lights (maybe next to those ubiquitous cameras?) would provide seamless coverage in distressed neighborhoods. 
 
The matter isn't new and is, in fact, widely recognized. In the fall of 2015, for example, Baltimore City Council member Mary Pat Clarke introduced a Resolution (City of Baltimore Council Bill 15-0263R) which was adopted this month and states:
The goal should be an open fiber infrastructure promoting competition among Internet service providers that can both provide low-cost connectivity options for those with low incomes and offer commercial stakeholders and anchor institutions connectivity operations superior to existing choices.

The small Maryland City of Westminster has already embarked on a private public partnership to create a public Giga-Bit fiber-optic (MuniFiber) network, a model that Baltimore City considers as a model. Several mayoral candidates have picked up on the topic as well, both as an economic development and as an equity issue.

On the national scale, over a year ago President Obama issued a paper on "Community Based Broadband Solutions" in which these best practice places are noted:

High-speed, low-cost broadband is paving the way for economic revitalization not just in Cedar Falls, but in places like Chattanooga, TN and Lafayette, LA — which have Internet speeds up to 100 times faster than the national average and deliver it at an affordable price. 

Most initiatives for better digital access and literacy focus on economic development in general such as in this brand-new study from the Progressive Policy Institute:

The only way to raise living standards is to increase productivity growth in the physical industries, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and construction. These industries lag far behind the digital industries in tech/telecom spending per worker. As a result, boosting productivity growth in these industries requires vastly greater usage of tech and telecom. In particular, the physical industries will need to make much greater use of wireless M2M data in order to link sensors and remote equipment able to manipulate physical objects. We project that the industrial IoT—largely comprised of wireless M2M— demand will rise by a factor of at least 30 between 2015 and 2030. The result could be an acceleration of productivity growth in the physical industries that adds roughly $2.7 trillion (in 2015 dollars) to U.S. GDP by 2030. This translates into an 11 percent increase in economic output, which is equivalent to boosting the average annual growth rate by 0.7 percentage points. 

But as the examples of mobile technology making profound differences for individuals in developing countries as a matter of access show, this isn't just an issue of economic development and global competitiveness but also a matter of equity and a matter of an obvious and attainable solution to access inequalities in US cities. These two strands are hardly ever connected.

Of course, there could be a dark side to an attempt at solving systemic poverty based access problems with technology. There is a bad history of experimentation on the backs of the poor that comes to mind when one imagines remote monitoring of personal health, there is a deep distrust in authority when it comes to privacy and data sharing that has even deeper implication in distressed communities than it has for the population in general. Digital access may not be exactly a silver bullet, but it is probably the most promising avenue available. Human based and people controlled strategies that have worked in other parts of the globe should be brought to bear right here at home, in the Freddie Gray neighborhoods we find all across America, the country that invented the internet.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

See also my Daily Blog with daily updates about planning, urban design and transportation with a focus on Baltimore

Links and sources:

The Digital Road From Poverty