Sustainable and Equitable Urbanism: The Role of ICT in Ecological Culture Change and Poverty Alleviation

Introduction

Recently, experiments combining new technologies, incentive structures, and educational activities have shown promising results towards teaching sustainable urban practices. Cities have successfully used real-time data to educate the public about their choices, as well as harnessed the powers of differential price structures and competitive spirit to encourage people to experiment with their own habits of travel, work, civic participation, and consumption (Spinak, Chiu, and Casalegno, 2008; Mitchell and Casalegno, 2008). Unfortunately, some of the more effective solutions in the urban sustainability toolkit have been criticized for disproportionately burdening the poorest urban residents (Albalate and Bel, 2009; Shoup, 2007). Because many of these programs allow people to make tradeoffs between money and convenience or quality, residents on limited budgets are denied the luxury of choice these programs supposedly offer. When the cheaper option – say, using public transportation rather than paying an urban congestion tax to drive downtown – is inaccessible or time-consuming, such “choices” exacerbate preexisting inequalities. Similarly, information-based initiatives targeting mobile technology users can create problems of unequal access some refer to as a new “mobile digital divide” (ITU, 2007). The danger is that cities may be turning certain public services from rights for all into exclusive privileges for the middle and upper classes in the interests of “sustainability.”

This paper approaches sustainability planning through the lens of social equity, asking: how can initiatives that target individual behavior both improve urban ecological health and work to narrow the gap within the dual economy structures that plague many of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities? We argue that cities cannot be ecologically sustainable without social equity, and that poverty alleviation needs to be a central factor in planning “smart cities.” Using case studies from research conducted within the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, we then examine how information and communication technology (ICT) can teach urban residents ecological practices, while also making city services more accessible, more equitably distributed, and more multifunctional. We end with a more theoretical analysis of ICT in sustainability planning.