About

BACK IN THE DAY (circa 2018)

A NEW BEGINNING

Data-driven policy; smart city initiatives; the Internet of Things; dashboards and platforms; AI-powered modelling and planning; live analytics and demographic breakdowns; speedier and more efficient constituent service delivery; design thinking and behavioral nudging; digital advocacy and online debate; innovation teams; public entrepreneurship; private sector tools adopted by governments: there is much debate on the values, consequences, and best practices of these approaches - be they real or rhetorical - for public problem solving in the 21st century. Each, for sure, makes room for a spectrum of uses ranging from public asset to democratic liability; and each contains uncertainties in how it intersects with our current notions of justice, governance, and civic life. But undeniable is the increasingly substantial role these technologies play in the new urban mechanics of the cities and settlements throughout the world. 

Human history is littered with too many examples of technologies that are built for the sole purpose of causing harm. But far more numerous are the seemingly mundane technologies that present neither an inherent civic good nor an inherent civic evil, outside of how they are put to use and toward what ends. But this ambiguity presents its own set of dangers. As century after century of human cohabitation on this planet has shown, technology always brings with it a potential for dehumanization - at best, as an unexpected symptom of rapid change to be deliberated and mediated; at worst, as an intentional utility of oppression, to be shattered by revolt and revolution by those it seeks to dehumanize. 

Thus, in the morass of data, tools, and philosophies generated at breakneck speed in our hyper-connected (yet increasingly fragile) world, we believe it is essential now more than ever to locate and to meet the presence of the human being at the heart and at the margins of our complex systems. Every person, and every community, is more than the sum of its data. The fundamental condition of public life - indeed, the human condition itself, as Hannah Arendt wrote after the government-sponsored technologies of WWII helped decimate much of the planet - is every human being’s capacity to raise their voice and begin something new which has never existed before and which no calculus could predict; which cannot be rationalized away via the “coercive force of logic”; which sets off a chain of action in the world affecting and affected by one’s fellows and on and on and on as “… an ever-present reminder that [humans], though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”

We believe technology becomes civic technology when its design and deployment is viewed not as a means to an end, but as a means to a beginning. 

We believe the foundational ethic of all civic technology is to privilege the boundless presence of every human being and the voice of their desires, needs, and imaginations. We believe effective civic technology leans into the natural differences that arise with this ethic and uses them to achieve a greater good that no one person, or one theory, could possibly have achieved alone. We believe we need a new generation of stewards, both individual and institutional, that explore, experiment, and evaluate new civic technologies with the people and communities they impact - and ultimately, not to care-for these communities, but to care-with. And we believe the ultimate purpose of civic technology and its guiding ethic is to bring new capacities to bear in the solving of public problems, while not just countering the inherent tendency of technology to dehumanize, but to wield it to actively rehumanize our systems. 

Who are “we”? Of all the technologies, the moving pieces, the nuts and bolts that make modern cities tick, the fundamental new urban mechanic is the person; on that everything else moves and springs. But since each person in a functioning democracy is not some fixed cog playing out commands, and instead a living, creative being with the power to act, each of us is also a Mechanic - called upon to repair, replenish, and re-imagine how our world ticks. We are both the fixers and the fixable; the caregivers and the care-for; the means and the ends. We are all New Urban Mechanics. 

A PURPOSE TO CARE WITH

“... one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it.” - Judith Butler, from Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

It’s no coincidence that the above quote, from a book focused on care in the context of the precarious conditions faced by coalitions for social change, is also a cornerstone of many peer support networks around the world, ranging from Alcoholics Anonymous, dating back to 1935, to the Black Emotional and Mental Health (BEAM) Collective, founded in 2016. “Being called” in these groups can have a literal meaning: to make oneself available to listen, no matter the circumstance, and being open and honest about one’s own vulnerabilities in a shared give-and-take of experience. It also has a broader meaning: being always at the ready to be called upon by an ethical responsibility to act before being asked - that is, to keep an ear to the ground for emerging troubles and allow oneself to be drawn in, proactively, in their solving before they become heavier burdens for the more vulnerable. Both aim to make sure no one ever feels completely alone in their struggles, and both call for a level of personal vulnerability on the part of the caregiver, or problem solver, in order to enter into meaningful dialogue with those needing care. 

To truly answer a call necessitates a level of intimate experience and identification with who or what is calling, as well as a level of future risk taking pledged by the caregiver, to be there no matter what, through the end - to stay with the trouble. Only then can trust emerge between parties and create a more equitable distribution of power between fellows in order to join in a common context of struggle. This is the difference between what the philosophers of democratic care Joan Tronto, Nel Noddings, and others refer to as moving from a caring-for to a caring-with ethical relation.  

In 2010, then Boston Mayor Tom Menino created the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM), Boston’s take on the “civic innovation team.” What started as a simple mandate to bring new ideas and technology into local government (in order “to get stuff done” for residents), anchored in the power of the Mayor’s Office and staffed by only two people, has evolved into a distributed network of partners throughout the Boston community and in cities around the world, stewarded by a full time staff of 10+ people from backgrounds ranging from social work to game design to public high school teaching. The MONUM fellowship program, aimed at bringing college students from across disciplines into the public problem solving arena, has produced a multitude of fellows that are now disbursed in local governments, community organizations, private institutions, etc throughout the world. As of 2021, MONUM is the longest continually running municipal innovation team in the US. 

We believe the staying power of this team, after many other “innovation teams” have disappeared after initial funding ends, is in no small part attributable to the team’s commitment to care-with, instead of care-for, and to staying with the trouble. We also have a very particular, though very fungible, perspective on what innovation means. Often it is used as a verb, as in “to innovate” something. We firmly believe this is nonsense. Innovation is not something you do; it is something that happens. It is when something new is introduced into a context that changes the very context itself in unprecedented and often unexpected ways. It is a beginning, never an end that can be predictably designed. We can say that an innovation has occurred when something that was once novel - ie an idea or tool that had no particular use in a context - becomes widely adopted and finds a use so pragmatic and everyday that its novelty disappears and becomes part of the mundane functioning of the new context it helped create. An innovation is when a novelty becomes a banality. 

An invention may have a single hand at work, toward a single purpose - its history can be traced neatly; an innovation is the collective work, intentionally and unintentionally, of an infinite set of hands, events, and environmental conditions - it is a story with no end. When viewed this way, attempts “to innovate” make way for the real, gamechanging work that such a team can and should focus on: caring-with. What one does, then, is to explore, experiment with, and evaluate new conditions to a context hand-in-hand with the people who make up that context; and the best one can do in shaping the effects of an innovation is to introduce these new beginnings with the ethical values one hopes to become intrinsic to the new context that emerges. This requires a degree of vulnerability, of being honest about the values one is hoping to instantiate in the world, while constantly standing on a limb of unpredictability and precarity. 

MONUM has lived this. New Urban Mechanics Labs is making sure this mission lives.