Residents, Newcomers, the Government, Developers: How Do You Think Through Their Tangled Interests? | The Ideal City, Part 2

We talked with urban planning expert Mao Mingrui about city planning, big data, and how he sees the city.

Data and Urban Justice: How Do We Solve the Problem of Huilongguan Residents Whose "Bodies Have Been Hollowed Out"? — Mao Mingrui never expected that this clunky, faintly academic title would draw so much attention. Once the article passed 100,000 views on the WeChat official account of the talk platform Yixi, it could no longer be opened, and the video came down from the site soon after.

In that talk, Mao described his own understanding of "urban justice," and the work this value system had led him to do — including projects such as "using data to guide functional improvements in the Huilongguan area and urban renewal in Dashilar."

Urban justice, Mao said, comes down to how a person sees the city. His own view was shaped by Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was a pioneer of writing on urbanization; she argued that cities should be built to human scale, and that diversity is the real source of a city's vitality.

Mao also cited the Marxist geographer David Harvey, arguing that urban justice has to cover both social justice and spatial justice. People in a city should hold citizens' rights, and those rights include the right to housing, the right to work, the right to move around, and so on. They are the rights of a person to enter the city, live in the city, take part in city life, and use and shape the city as an equal.

"If the government cannot protect the housing rights of these people (he is referring to the 'rat tribe,' the 'ant tribe,' the homeless and so on), and they are driven out of basements and urban villages in the name of improving their living conditions or removing safety hazards, that kicks away the first rung of the ladder for a lot of migrant workers in Beijing, and even for fresh college graduates. So is that kind of redevelopment urban justice? Is it urban justice to rebuild and wall off these street spaces in the name of restoring traditional character, or of regulating spatial order, or of the law? Is it urban justice for the government to pay for pedestrian overpasses? What gives anyone the right to make pedestrians hand over the ground-level road to motor vehicles — did anyone ask us pedestrians for permission?" Mao Mingrui said in the talk.

It also made him look again at the question of running a business. A year earlier, in May 2016, he had founded a company called Urban Quadrant (UrbanXYZ). The company set out to study human behavior and use big data to carry out urban governance and raise the quality of cities, and to influence the people who run them. By collecting and analyzing location data from several billion smart devices in China, along with road networks, land use, points of interest and geotagged Weibo posts — plus, in some cities, mobile phone signaling data and bus and subway smart-card records — it can monitor foot traffic, profile populations, analyze home-to-work commuting, track urban vitality and map urban space for any spatial unit and any attribute, across every city in China. The findings he shared at Yixi came out of this work.

After he started the company, Mao's clients were still the same people he had dealt with back when he was inside the system: government bodies, development agencies and city operators.

"We're trying to influence them — with better data products, better big-data tools, better big-data service models, application models and application values — to get them to use big-data technology reasonably, compliantly and legally," Mao told QDaily.

That means Mao has to do more than "educate" clients; he also has to keep working with the system. Hence the public posts he holds, such as secretary-general of the Cloud Platform Innovation Center at the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning & Design. It was never going to be easy. "Broadly speaking, no official really believes the city should be decided by you planners. In other countries, the planner is an intermediary — an organizer, a maker of rules — not the one who hands down the conclusion," Mao said.

At the end of Data and Urban Justice, Mao said urban justice comes from citizens taking part. "We've been carrying out practices that seek urban justice on our own initiative, but by ourselves we have no strength to bargain with public authority, with developers, with market capital, because we have no allies. Who are those allies? Everyone in this room. Our fellow citizens," Mao said.

On July 24, the day before we interviewed Mao Mingrui, an article titled In Beijing, 20 Million People Are Pretending to Live spread through WeChat Moments, striking a chord by hitting so many people's sore spots.

But in his interview with QDaily, Mao said: "Go into the groups of Beijing natives, the WeChat groups of people whose ID numbers start with 110. Look at how they read that article, and at the piece they wrote to rebut it. And you'll find that our city is splitting apart — into two kinds of people, the transplanted elite and the local natives. They judge this business in completely different ways."

For Mao, who is 39 this year, starting a business meant that "first you have to make money, you have to survive" — which meant working with the system. As for whether the company can turn a profit: "We'll see. If it really doesn't work, I'll go find someone to help. Go find a big leg to hang on to," he said.

A man who has spent 15 years in urban planning now seems to be lost.

"I find that after 15 years of planning, I suddenly don't know what urban planning is. Because I simply cannot say what size of city is a good size, what population is a good population, what population density, road density or building height makes a good city — we don't know any of it. We've done a thousand city plans, and we don't know what we were planning on the basis of," Mao Mingrui said at the "What Is the Ideal City" forum, held on July 22.

At that forum, at Yixi, and in our interview, he talked at length about urban planning and data, but the heart of it was the method for thinking these questions through. We've compiled it below; this is the second set of questions in the "Ideal City" series. For the first set (questions 1-9), click the underlined text to read How Should the Cost of a City Actually Be Calculated?

10. Why Do Some People Support Beijing's Crackdown on Shops Punched Through Walls?

I think there's a point in going back afterward (he is referring to the recent run of urban crackdowns in Beijing and Shanghai), sorting through it, taking a look, and looking from different positions. Think about it: when so many people opposed this, where did the push for it come from? Who was driving it? What were they after? Did they have supporters? We were disappointed to find, later, that at least judging by what shows up on Weibo, some of the values we hold are not the values most people hold.

But you could also say this: we live under an unusual regime of opinion control, and yet we can still see plenty of dissenting voices, and plenty of supporting ones too. How do you explain that supporting voice? Go into the groups of Beijing natives, the WeChat groups of people whose ID numbers start with 110. (For instance) how did they read that article (he is referring to the viral piece In Beijing, 20 Million People Are Pretending to Live), and what did they write to rebut it? We all think citizens' rights should be protected, but the locals, for instance, think the first people who should be protected are the old Beijingers who have lived there for decades — when they were children, the place wasn't this chaotic.

You find that our city is splitting apart — into two kinds of people, the transplanted elite and the local natives. They judge this business in completely different ways.

If you really want this city to be more democratic, you have to accept opinions unlike your own. Otherwise you're running a fake democracy and may in fact be a real dictatorship. What is democracy? It is making decision-makers pay the price of their own decisions. If the great mass of citizens supports sealing up walls and blocking holes, why not let them do it? Only by letting them do it, and letting them see the result. If it turns out well, that educates us. If the result is bad, they have educated themselves. That way they can make mistakes and correct them, and that is the value of democracy. Let decision-makers carry their own responsibility, instead of making people who had no part in the decision carry it for them.

11. Who Really Decides for a City? What Makes a Decision Reasonable?

What we want (hope for) is a bottom-up model of urban governance, pluralistic and shared, that gives more weight to what citizens ask for.

I'm not encouraging illegal construction, and we shouldn't get stuck on sealing walls and blocking holes. What deserves more attention is whether the making, carrying out and evaluating of public policy sticks to the facts, respects facts, respects science and protects citizens' right to take part; whether it discloses information fully; whether it can honestly and objectively evaluate conditions before and after the crackdown. Illegal construction should be dealt with — but should it be dealt with by sealing walls and blocking holes across the board? That calls for experts and citizens to take part, and for careful discussion and deliberation. It might raise the cost of deciding, but it's like shopping around and doing the arithmetic before you buy something: saving on the cost of deciding can mean paying a far bigger price later.

A good friend of mine has very concrete feelings and experiences here. He lives in the old city and takes a different view from mine on street vitality and residents' rights. But his voice helps us get the facts straighter and work out how to solve the problem. That is the value of broad participation and full discussion. Sealing off discussion across the board is exactly like sealing off streets across the board — it will only do our city more harm.

12. How Do We Avoid Being Treated as Criminals With No Privacy at All?

Big data keeps strengthening the capabilities of certain people, strengthening the power of capital, strengthening the power of government. Some of those capabilities strike us as improper: control bought at the price of privacy, or push notifications bought at the price of privacy. You're being marketed at every day, aren't you? But you should know that 99% of the time people do not have good values. Everyone is thinking about how to monetize you, how to market to you, how to build a profile of you, and once the profile is built, how to push ads at you, how to get you to buy their things, how to tie you more tightly to their platform, and so on. It's all consuming you.

Then there's this: none of us wants a certain kind of thing to exist — even though it hasn't done anything to you, you still don't want it to exist in that form. For example, a client once wanted to serve the residents of its properties better, so it put detection equipment in the elevator of every residential building. That equipment could roughly identify a resident's characteristics, their patterns of life, and where the resident went. From a security standpoint, what people want most is that the moment I lay eyes on this person, everything about them comes spilling out. That, in effect, treats every single person as a criminal.

Big data keeps encroaching on every one of us. We don't want big data used in improper ways, big-data applications bought at the price of violating citizens' rights. In this contest, the energy of the individual citizen keeps dropping. All you have is your own data, and you may not even have turned yourself into data. But think about it: Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, this whole batch of internet companies; think about the big-data trading, the outfits the black market has thrown up; think about the powers that already hold every capability there is. Set against them, what are we supposed to do?

13. Where Exactly Are the Limits on Collecting and Using Urban Big Data?

We're trying to get a set of values across: that if we want to solve a problem in a city, it can be done in a more civilized way, in a way that violates nobody's rights, and still achieve the effect of governance. In comprehensive governance, comprehensive urban governance, we stress the safety of the city — so isn't there a better way to do it?

For instance, can we work out whether the crime rate and public-security incidents bear some relationship to the physical environment of a space, to the street furniture you can see, to how well lit the street is, to the types and density of businesses along the street, and to how many people walk down it? Data science can get us some of that.

That approach doesn't treat every person as a criminal. Instead we can find relationships: what kind of street design, what kind of surrounding facilities, street lamps of what brightness, cameras placed where they can be seen, along with good street vitality and shop density, can bring down the street crime rate and the number of crimes. In other words, we can achieve just as good a result in governance without having to watch everyone as if they were criminals. That's the set of values we want to get across.

So what we want to create is a technology for big-data urban governance that is appropriate, ethical and still solves problems. That's what we want to build, and we're trying to educate our clients toward it.

Our clients are government bodies, development agencies and city operators. The people who build the city, the people who plan it, the people who manage it — all of them need to be educated. Sometimes we notice ourselves that something may have crossed a line, and then we pull back. If you stand on the side of serving citizens and yet make citizens pay an extra, steep price, you have to stop and think about it: you haven't even worked out how you're going to serve them, but you're perfectly clear about what they'll have to pay. In that case we pull back. That's the issue.

14. Can Products and Services Change People's Values?

Mobike — and that includes ofo and every other bike-share — is the dream of people like us who study cities. We called for a lot of things: for the right to travel by bike, for a lower share of motorized trips taken by private car, for public transit and bicycles to come back into the city, for cities with more walking in them. None of it did any good. Then Mobike came along and solved the problem. Of course it created new problems too, but on the whole it solved it.

Holding good values is one thing. Whether you have a service that can really affect how citizens behave, or how decision-makers behave, and change it — that's what lets you get your values across.

Either you reform the decision-making system itself, but can you move that? You can't. So you settle for the next best thing: you put out a product and a service to change people's values.

I think humanistic and political literacy in China is still fairly thin, really thin. Not many people have had anything like a political enlightenment education, and people haven't worked out where the line falls between the group and the self. Of course, given our country's particular environment, if you don't go and learn these things yourself, school won't teach them to you either; it doesn't necessarily want you to wake up. We believe people will wake up sooner or later, and at that point it matters enormously what values we are acting under.

For internet companies: when should they do what, and what shouldn't they do? This is worth a close look. Baidu is the classic case. You can't say their technology is bad, but why does some of what they build leave you uncomfortable? Behind that is a question of values and ethics. So in this era, one slip and you're over the line before you know it.

15. What Role Does a Planner Play in a City?

In other countries, the planner is an intermediary — an organizer, a maker of rules — not the one who hands down the conclusion. The core of the job is organizing plural participation, forming rules, and producing a policy vision and an implementation path under scenario simulation.

In China it works differently. You have to understand that China came out of a planned economy. What is a planned economy? A planned economy means I can set everything, which is to say the decision-making process settles everything at that level and then hands it down to you. City planners are treated the same as engineering staff; they file you in with the engineers and technicians. So the city wants a subway here, you go draw the subway; it wants housing built here, you go draw the housing.

For engineering matters, that way of working holds up: a road is needed here, so we design a road; a subway line should run through here, so we build it; a sewage treatment plant is needed here, so we build a sewage treatment plant. That works.

But things in the social domain cannot be planned into existence. Plan floor space per person? You can't plan that. People first have to be able to afford a home before they're even in a position to talk about floor space per person. Quality of life per person cannot be planned into being directly.

So the moment something touches the social domain, or the economic domain, the traditional way of planning is useless and powerless. But that other road has never been brought over here. The decision-makers above don't want you taking part in this. They think it's a thing that can be set and controlled, and if you can't even set it or control it, then what are you planning for? We think that setting it is no use anyway, because it was never yours to control.

Cover image via: Wikipedia