The concept of “ smart cities ” seems like a present-day urbanism trend . But as early as the sixties , cities were using technology to gather , interpret , and visualize civic data . Here ’s how a 1974 account by Los Angeles ’s Community Analysis Bureau used computer databases , cluster analysis , and infrared aerial photography to help them to make decisions about policy .
In December 2013 , Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued anexecutive orderinstructing each city section to gather all the data it collects and deal it on a publically accessible site by early the next year . In February 2014 , he appointed LA ’s firstChief Innovation Technology Officer , and a few months later he launchedDataLA , the urban center ’s online data hepatic portal vein . The launch , aimed at a generation who had acquire up with smart earpiece , the internet , and GIS function , was raise with ahackathonhosted at City Hall .
Whether you call the approach “ voguish city , ” “ levelheaded metropolis ” or “ digital metropolis , ” DataLA puts Garcetti on a develop list of mayors who believe that better consumption of information technology and data can facilitate them govern cities more in effect , touch base residents to metropolis government and imagination , and spur high - tech employment . Smart city have been criticise for prioritise whiz - bang tech over residents ’ basic need and for their potential to widen the economical opening between the technology have and have - nots . While those are real care , the construct of improved urban governance through better use of information is a promising one .
Like many smart , new ideas , however , it ’s not newfangled . It ’s not even raw to Los Angeles , which has been pursuing computer - assist data and insurance policy analysis for decades . Beginning in the previous sixties and through most of the 1970s , the little - known Community Analysis Bureau used electronic computer databases , cluster analysis , and infrared aerial photography to pile up data , produce reports on neighborhood demographic and housing quality , and assist direct resource to ward off blight and harness impoverishment .
I have been read about the history of preparation in Los Angeles for year , but the first time I had seen anything by or about the Community Analysis Bureau was when I escape across its insightful - but - weird 1974 written report “ The State of the City : A Cluster Analysis of Los Angeles ” at a depository library . A data - rich snapshot of LA from forty years ago , the report card did n’t categorize Los Angeles into the usual neck of the woods or community design areas , but into scattered clusters with name like “ the singles of Los Angeles , ” “ the suburbs from the fifty dollar bill , ” “ richest of the poor , ” “ gracious support , ” and more . The language was apparently drawn more from market research than traditional city preparation reports .
I mentally filed it away as just another 1970s urban experiment , an attempt to sort and categorize piazza across LA ’s surface area . As I read more about the methodological analysis , however , I became scheme by the Community Analysis Bureau ’s ambition to make an “ Urban Information System ” that could be applied to tackle the problems of the day . I wondered whether this urban tidings had charm city policy or program . How had the bureau fared as the politics of planning , poverty alleviation , and land use in the metropolis changed ? Was there a treasure trove of miss data moldering somewhere in boxes of lick menu ? I looked up document on the history of the bureau in the urban center archives and located several former faculty penis still live in the Los Angeles area . They were gracious enough to deal their memories of the bureau ’s work .
Cybernetic Urbanism in the Know-How City
In a 1976 essay , British travel writer Jan Morris summed up Los Angeles as “ The Know - How metropolis : ”
“ Remember ‘ know - how ’ ? It was one of the vogue words of the forties and fifties … It reflected a whole climate and pure tone of American thought in the years of supreme American optimism . It stand for … the sure thing that America ’s particular sensation , the whizz for applied logical system , for systems , for machine , was inexorably the trumpeter of progress . There has never been another town , and now there never will be , quite like … Los Angeles … where the lost American faith in machine and materialism built its own astonishing memorial . ”
In the years after World War II , that know - how and faith in car translated , in part , to an interest in computer - assisted social analytic thinking , thanks to the accessibility of both mainframe computers and large federal grants during the Cold War . Social scientist in peculiar were interested in explore the possibilities that data point and calculator could bring to public policy , as were city planners and architect . InA Second Modernism : MIT , Architecture and the ‘ Techno - Social ’ Moment , Arindam Dutta writes that for them , “ the emphasis on assembling , collating , and process larger and larger amounts of data ” was “ paramount in the postwar frame of expertise . ”
Data was the key to recognize - how , and Los Angeles was key to the techno - optimism of the era . Although the realm ’s lingering reputation may be for ungoverned sprawl and popular entertainment , twentieth - century LA was extremely plan — and gallant of the organization on which it depended : its web of streetcars and freeways , its flood control and pee infrastructure , and its intentionally disconnected municipal and quasi - public governance . Southern California had a Brobdingnagian eminent - tech clump in the aerospace industry . Even the Hollywood studio apartment had their “ system . ” LA was a tabernacle of progress , “ the external symbol of the City of the Future , ” as Mayor Sam Yorty put it in his intromission to a 1970 Community Analysis Bureau report . By then , the city had been knock into the technological know - how of the region for more than a decade .
During the 1950s , the city of Los Angeles departments of planning , and building and safety had mocked up computer punch cards for a system they skip could facilitate track and analyze every opus of holding in the urban center . In 1962 , the urban center submitted a proposal of marriage to the Ford Foundation seeking funding for “ A Metropolitan Area Fact Bank for the Greater Los Angeles Area . ” In proposing the “ fact camber , ” the city manager ’s office noted that Los Angeles “ was one of the first non - federal government agencies to expend electromechanical and electronic data processing systems in accomplishment of its twenty-four hours - to - day service rendition tasks … the City now staffs and operate thee solid DoS computer and four electromechanical data point processing installations . ”
The Ford Foundation rejected the proposal of marriage , but LA ’s loss leader were undiscouraged . In 1964 , the metropolis hire Calvin Hamilton as director of the city planning department , in part due to his winner in bringing computer modeling to Pittsburgh . Two class later , Los Angeles applied for federal funding to set in motion a community analysis program that would do “ a comprehensive analysis of the intact metropolis ” to “ preclude further inroad of a physical , economical , and social nature which contribute to … obsolescence . ” The metropolis had proficient chance this time . The grant was approved , and the undermentioned year , in January 1967 , Mayor Yorty approved an ordination creating “ a section of City Government known as the Community Analysis Bureau . ”
Bytes vs. Blight
Like many American city , LA had been studying and trying to prevent , cure , or clear “ slums ” for X . At the last of World War II , the city ’s lodging authority issued an annual report entitled “ A Decent Home … An American Right , ” which promulgate , “ No metropolis can flourish when 176,000 of its citizen are populate under unsafe and insanitary conditions . The inferior houses in Los Angeles with their filth , sordidness , and foul environmental influences are a costly threat and disgrace to our urban center . ” Planners and policy Godhead believe that badly maintained housing threatened the prosperity , health , and morals , not just of gloomy - income populations live in inferior homes , but of the across-the-board metropolitan area . This was the epoch of urban renovation : Los Angeles ’s preparation , wellness , housing , and building departments had created alarming maps picture concentration of tuberculosis cases , trapping without plumbery , juvenile dereliction , and other indicator of poverty .
In form the Community Analysis Bureau , Los Angeles sought new putz to accost the old challenge of deteriorating housing by provide detailed local data to identify neighborhoods record other signs of obsolescence . The city hadrazed “ blighted ” housing in Chavez Ravinein the early 1950s and , when the CAB launch in the late 1960s , was using Union funding toredevelop the Bunker Hill area . The bureau ’s data would help discover blighted areas across the city for replenishment exertion like these and inform bill aimed at palliate the poverty that led to plague in the first place .
Data Hunting and Gathering
The US Census Bureau had gather and report statistic on housing quality between 1940 and 1960 . The agency halt directly rating lodging character after finding that only one - third of the social unit they judge as dilapidated would be debate so by trained living accommodations inspectors.[19]After 1960 , the Census Bureau recommended looking at other characteristics such as building age , lack of plumbing system , and overcrowding to infer lodging quality .
The Community Analysis Bureau adapted and developed a range of technologies and analytic approaches to assess housing ( and relate social ) conditions to fill up this void allow for by the Census Bureau , and ply elaborated local data to identify neck of the woods showing other augury of obsolescence . Computerized data storage and recovery were centerpieces of the federal agency ’s planned work with the ultimate goal of help insurance policy Divine plan and budget metropolis responses .
First , however , the federal agency had to digitalise and centralise relevant information from the US Census , the Los Angeles Police Department , the LA County Assessor , and other secret and public sources using the city ’s exist IBM-360 mainframe computers . As a partial step toward a comprehensive Los Angeles Urban Information System , the bureau created a database using 220 staff - identify information category as the nucleus of its database . This eventually expanded to 550 categories available to analyze individual census nerve pathway .
In 1974 , the CAB recommended a strategy of clump psychoanalysis to allow “ the data to advise its own ‘ born ’ grouping . ” Clustering could distinguish part of the urban center that might be geographically far aside but shared important societal and strong-arm characteristic . Bureau staff select sixty - six central items from the database , include universe , ethnicity , education , housing , and offence data , and an environmental quality rating .
Using a combination of hierarchal and reallocative clustering procedures , Thomas A. Smuczynski developed the cluster psychoanalysis techniques used by the Community Analysis Bureau , and his colleagues programmed the city ’s existing central processing unit data processor in City Hall using Fortran and COBOL . Smuczynski tell me that the city was able to hire gifted information processing system programmers in the early 1970s due to layoffs in the aerospace manufacture . City data point was processed with the computer programs SPSS ( Statistical Package for the Social Sciences ) and BioMed , a data depth psychology programme created at UCLA .
Using Smuczynski ’s techniques , LA ’s 750 nosecount tracts were sorted into thirty clusters . Cluster 2 , for deterrent example , was “ The Singles of Los Angeles . ” It contained “ a very young universe with an average age of thirty - three , living in high-pitched - density new flat buildings . ” Seven of the nineteen census parcel of land in this cluster were located adjacent to one another in West Los Angeles and Brentwood . Other tracts with exchangeable unseasoned , single , apartment habitant were find in Palms , Baldwin Hills , Del Ray Palisades , Hollywood , and Bunker Hill .
clump analysis also revealed correlation between data and social consequence . Bureau faculty comment that it didn’t’t take sixty - six data type to pinpoint which component of the city had the bad blight and poorness . Three Set of data considered together — nascence weight of babe , 6th - grade reading score , and age of housing — emerge as an precise index for housing decline and socioeconomic disadvantage .
Aerial Photography
Even with a Brobdingnagian array of data at their fingertip , evaluating the physical state of more than a million lodging units spread out over Los Angeles ’s most 500 straight stat mi was an enormous challenge for the bureau — so bureau staff take to the melody . A 1970 report from the bureau noted that “ the use of colouring infrared ( CIR ) aerial picture taking offer immediate aid as a relatively inexpensive substance of settle those areas most affected by conditions of blight and obsolescence . ”
The city ’s ethereal analysis was led by Robert Mullens II . As a graduate scholar at UCLA , Mullens pen his master key ’s thesis on manner to analyze lodging quality from aerial picture taking , and he was lease by the Community Analysis Bureau to refine these techniques for program in Los Angeles . He recommended that the city utilize colour infrared aerial photography due to its ability to penetrate fog and to show vegetation timbre and small-scale object .
aeriform photography had evolved by this period into a wide used creature for everything from surveying land and analyzing forest health to fighting the war in Vietnam . In her 2004 book From Warfare to Welfare : Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America , Jennifer Light underscores the tat military machine and civilian origins of aerial photography . She explore how some of the procedure used for urban preparation in the 1960s and 1970s — not just aerial picture taking but also computer analysis and the very metaphor of the cybernetic urban center — derived part from Cold War military research . I observe this thesis to Gary Booher , who helped Mullens analyze aerial photos of Los Angeles at the Community Analysis Bureau . Booher answer that whatever the military - civilian cross - fertilization on urban policy , the bureau never had access code to high resolution defense section cameras and photographs .
After trial runs over Watts and parts of Northeast LA , the city compress with ethereal survey agencies to conduct overflights of the intact city in 1971 and 1978 . camera mounted in clear sheet took color infrared exposure at a 1:6000 shell . Mullens and his colleagues developed a point organization to rate the environmental quality of nose count parcel of land based on these ethereal photos . The purpose was to quantify living accommodations caliber “ by photo reading of selected foster feature of the neighborhood residential environment . ” Each exposure mainsheet was look at and rated by three city staffers to deduce an mean score of between 1 and 10 ( a low-toned numeral meant few problems and good environmental quality ) . Some of the characteristics considered were vacant dry land , domain uses , street conditions , tripe , the presence and timber of vegetation , house and portion size , and the presence of “ convenience structure ” like patios and swim pools .
metropolis staff tug through a sample distribution of neighborhoods to verify the accuracy of their aerial ratings . These “ windshield ” observation of dwelling house for visual sign of willful neglect , plus data from city building inspections and Los Angeles County assessor , helped pick off the environmental quality ratings . The evaluation showed that the “ City ’s center has the worst environmental quality , with the next poorest quality classes shape concentrical rings around the downtown area . ” The map from the 1978 flyover shows dreary areas ( bad environmental and lodging tone ) flock business district and to the south and E of business district . estimation from this analysis show that nearly 150,000 dwellings—13 percentage of LA ’s caparison stock — could be considered substandard . Most of these needed only minor repair , but 4,807 units—0.4 percent of the urban center totality — were considered truly decay and beyond rehabilitation .
While Mullens and Booher still think that aeriform photography and the bureau ’s military rating system were a fairly precise way to place housing in demand of mend , they notice , in Booher ’s words , that “ economic prejudice crept in . ” evaluation standard favored homes with residents who could yield to uphold landscaping , extend deck , and build pool . The focusing on lush planting in those seventies assessment also seems dated ; xeriscaping in today ’s drought - conscious California would not value well using their methodological analysis .
From Analysis to Action
The agency ’s datum and analyses were intended to spur intervention in the metropolis . An early report on the office ’s methodology used the doctrine of analogy of a “ thermoregulator that taste change in data … and , free-base on these measurements , or studies , make recommendations to operating and staff agencies of the City as to the difference in the desired City clime and the factual . ” The city ’s datum - driven clime control would help to order everything from crime pace to unemployment to traffic . That broad kitchen stove of recommendations reflects the ambition of the previous sixties and early 1970s , when urban planners claimed a wide mandate than we are used to today . As the bureau ’s first “ State of the City ” report explained , “ It has become obvious that the traditional approach to urban refilling , the discussion only of forcible problem , is not passable … to deal with the social , economical , and physical nature of urban decay . ” Recommendations from that report included raising crime syndicate incomes above poorness layer , placing all needy three - to - four - year - old into preschool , and spurring the twist of 7,000 to 9,000 low - to - moderate income trapping whole per yr , in addition to those already project .
As a sort of think tank inside metropolis hall , the Community Analysis Bureau miss authority to launch its idea into action mechanism , but the timing was right to explore way to address inequality . In 1973 , Los Angeles elected Tom Bradley , who was live to be more committed to assisting disadvantaged neighborhoods and to addressing racial disparities than his buttoned-down predecessor Mayor Sam Yorty , as its first African American mayor . The next class , the federal government make the community development block subsidisation computer program to fund redevelopment , societal servicing , and infrastructure in high-pitched - poverty neighborhoods . According to Romerol Malveaux , whose first job was conducting enquiry and administer grants for the Community Analysis Bureau and who remains a community activist forty - five years subsequently , the information that the government agency generated helped Los Angeles become the first metropolis to welcome community development cube Ulysses S. Grant . LA used these funds to expand societal services , maintain streets , and build libraries and parks in low - income areas . elaborated data point at the census tract level even allowed the city to name mellow - impoverishment pockets eligible for stop grants in wealthier council districts .
But in the end , the federal agency was a dupe of its own achiever . The datum it pile up bear witness so utile in securing federal grant money that the urban center focused the bureau ’s activity on grant developing and administration , with continued data analysis to justify these funds . Instead of using enquiry to guide the city ’s action , the agency wind up respond to the city ’s preset goal as set out in backing applications . The bureau was folded into a new Community Development Department in the mayor ’s berth in 1977 , where the Community Analysis and Planning Division of the department continued to issue reputation until 1980 , after which the “ residential area analysis ” name was retire .
Legacy and Lessons
Today , most people lick on planning , caparison , and economical development in Los Angeles have never heard of the Community Analysis Bureau . Having spoken to former bureau stave members and having take through some of its reports , I think that the history of the bureau — its mission , strategies , accomplishments , and shortcomings — are worth sharing . This former drive to apply calculator analysis to the societal and physical challenge of a big city might harbor some deterrent example for our contemporary era of big data , smart cities , and digital urbanism .
The bureau never achieved the full ambitions of its father to create a ascendance venire for what we call a “ smart city ” today . Gary Booher , who joined the project when it shift into the Community Development Department , described the seventies technology as just too “ embryonic ” to allow real - time datum to course to decision maker who could adjust policy and pattern on the fly .
Despite this restriction , staff members who helped develop the bureau ’s method acting believe that they were worth explore . Thomas Smuczynski , Robert Mullins II , and Romerol Malveaux all told me that it was exciting to be working on new techniques for sympathize Los Angeles . They also find it rewarding to know that their work had helped distinguish places and problems where grants could help improve multitude ’s lives .
But the ultimate failure of the Community Analysis Bureau suggest that data analytic thinking needs to be better unite to provision , insurance policy , and even advocacy . The bureau was n’t closely ally with societal movements that might have pushed for change related to the way ’s findings , nor was it sufficiently integrate into the structure of conclusion making and budgeting in the city . With no Congress of Racial Equality constituency in the eye of city government , the bureau ’s findings were easy to send away as interesting but unessential factoid . Bureau employees predicted this trouble in 1970 in a report that noted , “ Political realness must be very carefully commix with the creature of engineering science . This uniting will be difficult at advantageously since , by pattern , the conclusions of engineering tend to be objective , while those of politics tend to be subjective and excited . ” The government agency might not have won any Friend in City Hall with self - important affirmation like these , but there ’s some the true there , too .
The office may not have brought about the technocratic decisiveness making its early exponent hoped for , but Romerol Malveaux state me that the Community Analysis Bureau did advance equality in a Los Angeles stratify from tenner of sequestration by provide data on what needs be in the city ’s many neighborhood . There are some hopeful signs that LA ’s current chic city attempt have those same inclusive goal . Thewinners of the hackathonlaunching LA ’s heart-to-heart data portal vein were a team of high-pitched shoal student ’s whose app is intended to facilitate deliver supplies to homeless shelters . One of the city’sfirst fund effortsto utilise an invention advance to governance will be an effort to understand whether LA can have revitalization without supplanting .
We should judge the data generated by and for smart metropolis by its social relevance as well as by the intensity of it made available publicly and the processing top executive and analysis harnessed by the urban center , the individual sector , and academe . Could digital urbanism help narrow the spring up gap between company ’s 1s and 0s ? Will smarter urban center help us manoeuver below a 2 - grade Celsius rise in global temperature ? If intelligent cities and open data point can advance knowledge , efficiency , equity , and sustainability , a new generation of biotic community analysis might fill the techno - optimism that took root in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles and is back with us today .
See additional notes and sources related to this piecehere .
Mark Vallianatos is policy director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute and teaches at Occidental College . He would like to give thanks Thomas Smuczynski , Robert Mullins II , Romerol Malveaux , and Gary Booher for their insight , and LA City Archivist Michael Holland and UEPI inquiry helper Amelia Buchanan for helping locate file on the bureau .
serious-minded , provocative , and playful , bunce : A Journal of Californiaaims to create a lively conversation about the full of life social , cultural , and political issues of our times , in California and the world beyond .
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