Digital Equity in Future Cities: A Conversation with Surbhi Agrawal
Surbhi Agrawal is a Research Fellow at MIT Senseable City Lab and a final year Masters candidate in City Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT. Her current research is focused on responsible urban digitization and digital equity.
Agrawal is an Urban Planner and Architect who is exploring how the equitable application of digital technologies and urban analytics is shaping interactions between people and communities with the city. She is an advocate for socio-spatial justice and is working in developing contexts like Mumbai, Delhi and Nairobi to help bring digital equity and meaningful connectivity in urban informal settlements. She has also worked on the development of responsible and democratic sensing systems for the City of Amsterdam.
Photo Credit: Sarah Rege.
A baseline for interactions between people and communities
“What type of empowerment does it bring to communities when you bring them digital access? What are the key failures of the current system and how can these be changed through policy and design intervention?”
The human-centric application of emerging digital technologies and will play a vital role in shaping the future of our cities.
“For me, on a fundamental level that encompasses equitable access to the internet, and sensing and data collection infrastructure built on top of that layer of access.
What data is being collected about people, how is that informing decision-making about them. Who owns this data? What rights do people have around this data in the city and how does it shape the ways in which they interact with their environments?”
Agrawal previously spent time in the Netherlands where she worked with the municipality of Amsterdam at the Responsible Sensing Lab where she explored how values like privacy, democracy and transparency were being operationalized in sensing and data collection applications in the city.
“In 2018, as I started my career as a fresh architecture graduate, I started getting interested in the context in which architecture operates. This took me to my first graduate program in urbanism and urban design. While engaging with the physicality of the urban environment, questions about emerging digital technologies and their influences on the urban realm caught my interest.
I realised I wanted to study the city not just from the perspective of the built environment, but also understand all the other layers of social interactions, policy and governance. This led to me to pursue the City Planning program at MIT.”
As centres of human habitation, cities are increasingly synergistic and are an essential part of Agrawal’s work. Currently, cities are home to 4.4 billion people and this is a growing trend with this figure expected to double by 2050. Over 8% of global GDP is generated in cities and the changes we put in place in cities are what will have the biggest impact on the possibility of a more sustainable future.
Digital transformation in the urban experience
It has become increasingly less difficult to navigate new places when visiting somewhere for the first time. Services such as Google Maps and Uber are becoming more ubiquitously available in every country and translation services have bridged the gap for language barriers.
“When I started working in urban sensing I suddenly saw all of these cameras and sensors that were installed by different agencies in the city to collect data about you. I realised how, increasingly, decision making about people in the cities is being done based on these data models. For example, in the context of Amsterdam, traditionally you have all of these cameras monitoring how traffic is moving, how people are moving, and then perhaps a police officer is deployed if the system flags a violation somewhere.
That’s where the thinking began for me... I see this immediately change how people interact with their urban environments.”
Data is increasingly becoming the new currency for how decisions are made in the city. However, there is also a disparity. If you don't understand what data is being collected about you and how, you might not understand the rights you might have as a citizen in a digitally supported city, and how to contest these systems. How does the idea of democracy and choice translate into what data is being collected about you, through your phone, different organisations or environments in the city?
In a lot of data poor economies, or sometimes when certain populations are not part of the data set through which these decisions are made, people don’t have any form of representation. Existing social inequities can thus become compounded if you're not part of the digital ecosystem.
Ability to use the internet: in India, starting in 2016, there was a nationwide telecom revolution where good quality cellular internet access became highly affordable, resulting in higher digital connectivity across all socioeconomic groups, especially in urban areas. This helped reduce entry barriers of cost, devices access and infrastructure for previously disconnected populations. But there hasn't been equal capacity building at all scales in society. This really shapes people’s opportunities and ability to engage with what's available, as the pandemic very clearly showed us.
How can we build capacity for communities or beyond giving them access to the internet? How do we support them to access better educational and economic development opportunities? What does access have the potential to unlock and how can we shift that for more empowerment?
The importance of digital equity in the future of cities
1. Access to the internet should become a utility. It needs to become universally accessible, similar to how we need to have electricity and education. Internet access is going to enter a similar territory given how digitally empowered our world is increasingly becoming.
2. We need a lot of granular understanding in the public around issues of privacy and cities and governments need to build higher capacity to engage with the application of digital tools and technologies in a way that clearly protects citizen interests.
While people are becoming more aware of questions of data privacy and digital rights, there is a strong need for incorporating transparency and active choices in data collection practices (think of the GDPR in Europe). The onus is not on only on people, it is on the authorities to develop strong policies around data collection, handling and sharing in the public realm.
3. How can we build capacity in governments to engage with and create policy frameworks that ensure stronger governance as they deal with new technology? For example, think of a case like Uber coming into the city. Many cities, don't currently have frameworks in what sort of data would be collected and how that data would be handled. Would the city get access to that data or would the company be collecting the data for the consumer? Shared e-scooters, which are an exciting urban mobility innovation, have also become an operational mess in several cities because cities are not equipped with policies to regulate them in terms of access, security and rights.