Is Informal Transit Smart?

In this post I’ll discuss qualities in informal transit that we could call smart and reframe them it in the discussion of smart cities.

With the rise of smart city discourses in the last years, there has been increased buzz arround the word smart but the mainstream idea of smart city is still a very contextualized concept beyond the general meaning of smartness. From a governance perspective, smart cities are used to designate an enhanced urban management which aims for improved life quality and sustainable development. From a technological perspective, the smart city arises from overlaying digital networks on the city’s infrastructure with the aim of optimizing urban flows and processes.

Rio de Janeiro’s Control Room. Source: Centro de Operações Rio

Because informal public transport (IPT) exists in contexts where information and communication technologies (ICT) are not so widespread and thus this kind of smartness doesn’t apply, it may be interesting to see how some of its qualities that differentiate it from formal transport systems are smart in the classic sense. This meaning has roughly to do with adequacy, efficiency, frugality, adaptation, contextuality, etc..

You will see that most of the attributes listed below come from IPT being a paratransit service and underling an informal free market economy. But this kind of smartness is also part of the sustainability toolbox, and that’s a good reason we should acknowledge it.

• Rapid evolution. In its most usual form, IPT is not centrally planned or even regulated. Therefore it reproduces the organic growth that underlies rapidly urbanizing cities in the global South. The capacity to rapidly react to local conditions and expand to where it’s requested makes it extremely useful in this context. The downside is the insecurity of long-term planning for passengers.
• Low cost of implementation and operation, affordability. Simple standards but also low wages contribute to the low costs. This together with the competition among operators, they keep fares relatively affordable. Appart from the causes, this allows it to serve the less well-off while being financially independent.
• Flexibility / interactiveness. It’s usual for low/moderate capacity transports to accommodate special wishes from its passengers like flexible drop-off and pick-up (most often there are no official stops at all). In some cases, small changes to standard routes are also negotiated with the passengers (usually the routes are not strictly fixed, and go from a central hub to another hub alongside main roads). Therefore it`s difficult to catch a transport on the run.
• Dynamic pricing. From the perspective that transport is a basic service and should be inclusive, this might not be perceived as an advantage, but dynamic pricing regulates congestion (for example in a rainy day), making people distribute their mobility needs. This fact is undoubtedly smart, but at the same time is creating forms of exclusion. It’s also worth mentioning that sometimes discriminatory pricing occurs, regarding the passenger status, racial background, etc.. although this is rather an issue than a virtue, it’s interesting to think that more affluent passengers or tourists are requested to contribute more.
• Maximizing efficiency. With no fixed departures, it’s common that bigger transports wait at the departure point before beeing reasonably full and only then start the journey (which makes it unreliable on the other hand). Running with a full vehicle also means it proceeds with no stops until the first drop-off and thereby catches up some time – quite smart.
• Informal transport is often refered as a source for low skilled jobs not to be underestimated, due to its labour intensive processes (low capacity vehicles which feature drivers and sometimes dedicated fare collectors, plus “ticket boys” on hubs and the whole backing economy). Under the traditional understanding of the term, this is not really smart, but in struggling economies it is an interesting distribution of work (albeit existing exploitative practices from operators…).

Taxibuses in Kigali, Ruanda. Photo by SteveRwanda (reframed) [CC BY-SA 3.0]

We can see here that the smartness of IPT emerges locally from individual demands in an highly interactive urban process and at the same time that it is a system that is molded on maximizing efficiency. While in the context of smart cities in the global North, critics like Adam Greenfield claim that pursuing optimization should be not be the primary goal of urban governance because it is a wrong model for cities, here we have an example where optimization efforts are stimulating urban life. We assume that efficiency is contrary to opening up possibilities, but here it means dynamic actions for dynamic environments.

What is also very interesting, is that the paratransit-like aspects presented above are in fact what today in developed countries are being mystified as smart or intelligent transport in things like taxi-sharing or demand responsive transport (DRT buses). In the global North mass transit was conceived in a time where there was no mobile ICT, so the best way to provide the service was on fixed schedules and routes. In the future, digital technology enables a greater atomization – a model that converges with that of IPT.

So I would say, we can consider the way informal transit works as smart, at least in some aspects (not romanticizing and forgetting all the problems mentioned earlier), and there is a great potential through use of communication technologies, which could build on this smartness of paratransit, exploring the virtues and addressing the issues.

The smart city paradigm ignores the smartness of Informal Transit

Adam Greenfield (2013) wrote recently that “smart cities literature ignore the smartness of urbanisation, what de la Pena called ‘autocatalythic city’, where ‘adaptive processes are founded on accurate, real-time local intelligence, city dwellers are empowered to respond appropriately to highly dynamic conditions, and emergent urban order is produced from the bottom up'”.

Mainstream smart city discourses are arising from within the finance and technology industries and thus with a very narrow understanding of its meaning. Either as cities built from the ground up or as applied systems to existing cities, they are top-down planed with big investments and have certain model for economic development in mind. This model is usually centralizing and very much a closed system. On a sidenote, it’s interesting to realize that the smart city concepts are focused on the functioning of cities (perhaps a new modernism) but centered primarily on management models instead of rational-spatial models. In the global South the smart city paradigm is no different and so it remains ignorant to other kinds of smartness that exist on the ground (whether they are based on ICT or not).

Simulation of Konza Techno City, Kenya. Source: shop architects (c)

But If you think of smart cities purely in technological terms as the overlaying of information networks on the existing diverse urban networks it can become many things. Information and communication technology is a very good enabler / facilitator of networks, like the spacial proximity from a city also is (the city and ICT potentiate and complement each other because they have different ways of connecting). Thus, ideally Smart Cities should enhance the capacities of citizens that in their turn improve their livelihoods. This would be the smart city of smart people.

When observing the impact of ICT on informal economies we see that mobile networking technology became a key enabler of livelihoods and mobility (see Odendaal 2013). For example, the mobile phone spread very fast in Africa and is now the base for other services, like banking. When even the most poor quickly appropriate these technologies, they give us a hint about the potential for change that they bear.

Mobile technologies in Kampala, Uganda. Source: The Guardian Photo: Yousef Eldin (c)

Therefore, we should re-focus the debate of the smart city on its citizens, especially in the Global South, where the lack of many formal basic services can be at least alleviated by empowering the individuals. The smart city should not be offering alternative visions but instead should be building on the existing realities.

See this post for the references used.