“Retrofuturism” in art and literature is a look back at the (sometimes recent) past and how the stories of the future were told. The retrofuturist aesthetic can be found in present-day theme parks like Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland and EPCOT and in the concept of steampunk. Through retrofuturism, we try to understand what was once hoped for, often as a way of understanding success or failure and of critiquing present-day efforts and priorities.
Retrofuturist impulses are particularly important in technology law scholarship. Critical appraisals of ‘smart city’ and urban innovation projects and initiatives examine how people joined the digital with the material to imagine a better world. You can’t tell the story of the smart city without at least engaging with the tales of the city. And so, in a very real and immediate way, the literature of geography, planning, and–yes–physical architecture is a key resource for the legal scholar. In The Kind of Solution a Smart City Is: Knowledge Commons and Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Michael Madison gives us a compelling retrofuturist account of Pittsburgh, the smart city. Madison’s account of a range of projects in Pittsburgh (including those of the 21st century) tells a story that is both universal and particular, tapping into the need to understand the roads taken and not taken, and what was imagined or foreseen in the recent and not so recent past.
The Governing Knowledge Commons framework, an approach to which Madison himself has made founding and abiding contributions, allows for the study of how intellectual and cultural resources (e.g. information, science, and software), as distinct from natural resources, are created and shared, and in turn governed through, by, and with communities. Applying this framework, Madison digs into the past ideas and initiatives meant to improve (or “fix”) this mid-sized Pennsylvanian city. Imagined overlapping and data-driven futures like the pioneering Pittsburgh Survey of a century ago, the 3RC (Three Rivers Connect) civic computing initiative of 1999, or reaching the final of (but not winning) the USDoT Smart City Challenge in 2014 offer rich resources for anyone seeking to understand how cities attempt to anticipate and evolve in the face of disparate and dynamic challenges.
Madison also tells the stories of the conditions for urban reform and renewal in Pittsburgh, contributing to the overall argument that context, geography and history all matter. Physical infrastructure is old. Social and political infrastructures are tied up in long-standing institutions and networks. Pittsburgh’s population has been declining. The geography of the city, in its ups, downs, rivers, and bridges, is irregular. The city’s many neighbourhoods are disconnected from political power. The City Council is not the only game in town, due to the presence of regional and other government structures. Where once there was steel, now there are universities and hospitals (“eds and meds”) and, increasingly, an innovation economy (“tech-centred development”). Yet until recently, data systems weren’t often used in municipal government.
Readers will recognize many of these facets in “post-industrial” cities around the world. Pittsburgh is one of a number of cities where ‘economic renewal efforts’ dominate cultural and political discourse, decades after the decline of a major production or extractive industry. But, as Madison makes clear, Pittsburgh is unique in how its infrastructure, population decline, geography, and changing industry are interconnected with money, power, and people, meaning that the factors and actors affecting economic renewal and the digital transition require particularly close attention.
Some political institutions and funders nowadays emphasise the “knowledge square” (e.g., as the European Commission now puts it, the interconnection between education, research, innovation, and service to society). Though Madison does not put it quite this way, his careful attention to the roles of philanthropic organisations (a distinctive part of the Pittsburgh civic story) and universities tells another dimension of Pittsburgh’s reform and development trajectory. He highlights the different roles played by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and its projects. These include the smart cities institute Metro21. Madison also traces the distinctive character of a number of major interventions, such as the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Centre, and the individuals who have led and championed them.
This article is not (only) a celebration of a great city, though. Madison highlights the difference between the problems the city tries to solve and the biggest problems that need to be solved. He retains an appropriate scepticism about extreme smart city boosterism, calling for greater attention to evolution over creation and to the enduring role of physical infrastructure and its limits.
The dream of a better tomorrow is at the core of urban (re)imagination. As Pittsburgh moves towards being a smart city, Madison draws a contrast between the city’s “older smoky self” and its aspirations towards becoming an “equitable and forward-looking ‘green’ community”. Yet Madison has also shown us that the smoke never fully clears. Even the ‘recent’ history of what was tried and why it did or didn’t work in the late 1990s is in his account an essential part of a proper understanding of the choices now available to this particular city. Other cities will face different physical and political factors, but Madison is rightly calling on us to map and understand those local conditions; some common questions, but different answers, are what we can hope to find.
