打印

作者

Jared Kamrass

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.42,Issue4,P.688-689

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Rivertown Strategies

摘要

Too often the term innovation has been nearly exclusively associated with the private sector in recent years as advances in technology and artificial intelligence have upended the way different groups live together and interact with one another. While there’s no doubt that the disruption that we all experience in our everyday lives is due in large part to the private sector’s fixation on innovation and market-driven desires to keep the attention of consumers with updates and new features, we are all too eager to ignore the benefits of innovation in the public sector that have substantially, but with little fanfare, made so many of our communities more livable and equitable or even prevented massive-scale crises in the systems that we so easily take for granted. There has been a vacuum in the literature with insufficient material to display the public sector’s ability to innovate and achieve substantial and broad scale impact as well as a failure to highlight many of the individual successes already achieved by public sector entities. Simply put, without these successes, the infrastructure needed for so many of the highly touted private sector innovations to succeed, would not exist in the way we know it today. Smarter New York City methodically prosecutes a case against the persistent stigma that government is broken and weighed down by its own bureaucracies and redundancies. This book does more to convince the casual political observer of government’s ability to both be nimble and results-oriented than any other work I have used as a consultant and as an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati. By acknowledging the constraints facing the public sector, while highlighting the opportunities and successes that are created because of unique benefits that only the public sector can utilize, the book paints a realistic picture using a narrative of specific examples in New York and the impact of those innovations on public policy. In doing so, the reader is given a user manual in pitfalls to avoid and best practices to adopt for public policymakers and urban planners, making the book useful to the neophyte and expert alike. In addition to the content being useful to all readers, the book is organizationally structured in a way that allows the material to be accessible and manageable not simply to urban planning and public policy experts, but also to the novice who may only have a passing interest in the subject matter. Each of the 12 examples is presented as its own stand-alone case study, although each of these case studies is linked with common themes about the city’s use and deployment of innovation. Two case studies in particular stand out as illuminating examples: “The Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and New York City Police Department: ShotSpotter” and “The Shift to Precision-Based Policing.” The first one demonstrates how changing organizational structures leads to a stronger emphasis on innovation. The mayor’s office made an intentional effort to use data as a tool for not only identifying macro-level problems such as transportation usage, but also micro-level trends including instances of disease to prevent full-on epidemics. Additionally, the office enabled provided real-time updates on the effectiveness of city initiatives, making officials accountable for the quantifiable results for their departments. Similarly, the ShotSpotter case study is a great example of how innovation and leveraging data can have tangible results in preventing violent crime before it even begins. ShotSpotter is a technology that allows for sensors to, in real time, to pinpoint where a gunshot has taken place. In the short term, it allows first responders to address a developing situation in a fraction of the time it would take for a witness to call 911 and report an accurate location In the long run, this technology allows for analysts to infer patterns, thereby enabling the police to act proactively police and to cut down on future crime. The book is organized like a journal article or a legal brief. This makes it easy for the reader to digest the material in narrative form. Teachers can easily use the specific case studies extraneous information has been excluded. There are more than two dozen contributors to the case studies, as well as a forward from Mayor Stephen Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina, the President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The authors are able to bring to bear their own considerable experience to each case study. If the book does nothing else it provides a counterpoint to the harmful and inaccurate narrative asserting that the public sector acts in a plodding way and is slow to adapt. Smarter New York City provides stories that inspire and give hope to the cynical about the capabilities of our public institutions to make large scale impacts that addresses the complex problems of cities.