Faculty Bibliography

Residents of Charleston, South Carolina could be forced to leave their homes. This is how they might do it—and provide a blueprint for other cities.

An unflinching look at the beautiful, endangered, tourist-pummeled, and history-filled port city which now finds itself at the intersection of the twin crises of climate and race. Unknown to the happy, mostly white visitors who hop from one restaurant to another on the charming streets of the Charleston peninsula, or to readers of the glossy magazines in which the city is named a top destination year after year, rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storms are mere years away from rendering the Holy City uninhabitable. If this precarity is hidden, it is because the city and the state have a strong interest in keeping up appearances. And because the city’s Black and lower-income residents will bear the brunt of the storm. Charleston will show how the city must quickly reimagine its future before rising waters stymie its ability to act at all. Along the way, the city will need to confront and right historic wrongs. Susan Crawford’s evocative and profoundly important book will make us question whether Charleston is a bellwether for other towns and major cities along global coastlines. Charleston will chronicle the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city, from protests to hurricanes. It will show readers the city tourists never see, and lay out the risks now faced by a place that is in the business of marketing ahistorical, glossy luxury. We will hear from Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region—who has an acute sense of the city’s shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. It will introduce Michelle Mapp, one of the city’s most promising Black leaders, who left her nonprofit post to attend law school at the Charleston School of Law and sees clearly how the systems around her must change. We will hear from Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who fears her people will be displaced by developers if they aren’t first wiped out by chronic flooding. Readers will meet Jacob Lindsey, the young white city planner charged with running the city’s ten-year “comprehensive plan” efforts—who ends up working for a private developer bent on turning what was once part of a river running next to the city into a giant commercial development. Each of these people, and the city in which they live, faces extraordinary risks in the form of coming environmental chaos. This emblematic American city crystallizes human tendencies to value profit and property above all else. At the same time, Charleston, like scores of other global coastal cities, urgently needs to chart a new future for its citizens in light of the changes ahead. Whether it can do so successfully will have crucial implications for cities everywhere. Illuminating and vividly rendered, Charleston is a clarion call and filled with characters who will stay in the reader’s mind long after the final page.

The world of fiber optic connections reaching neighborhoods, homes, and businesses will represent as great a change from what came before as the advent of electricity. The virtually unlimited amounts of data we’ll be able to send and receive through fiber optic connections will enable a degree of virtual presence that will radically transform health care, education, urban administration and services, agriculture, retail sales, and offices. Yet all of those transformations will pale compared with the innovations and new industries that we can’t even imagine today. In a fascinating account combining policy expertise and compelling on-the-ground reporting, Susan Crawford reveals how the giant corporations that control cable and internet access in the United States use their tremendous lobbying power to tilt the playing field against competition, holding back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward. And she shows how a few cities and towns are fighting monopoly power to bring the next technological revolution to their communities.

In this case study, the authors chronicle the creation of the municipal smart grid and fiber-to-the-home Internet access project in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, and quantify early paybacks on the town’s investments. (A companion report, Smart Grid Paybacks: The Chattanooga Example, describes paybacks on a national model for such a project, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.) In 2009, Concord voters authorized the town’s municipally-owned electric utility (Concord Municipal Light Plant, or CMLP) to build a $3.9 million smart grid which included a 100-mile fiber-optic network passing 95 percent of premises in town. Next, in 2013, the town borrowed $600,000 to fund the startup of an Internet access business, called Concord Light Broadband. The town began making fiber connections to subscribers’ premises in early 2015. By the end of 2016 CMLP was serving about 750 customers with service of up to 200 Mbps upload and download. Today the town’s network has added reliability to elements of the town’s electricity grid, helped the town avoid $108,000 in annual communications costs, and generated $88,000 in annual leasing revenue. The town has recently begun a strategic planning process in part to help identify how the smart grid can best be used to reduce expensive peak-hour electricity demand, reduce operating costs, enhance revenue, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. One vendor estimates that CMLP could earn $125,000 in revenue by allowing the regional transmission system to use the town’s smart grid to help balance regional electricity supply and demand. Although the financial paybacks on the town’s project are not yet fully covering debt service and operating costs, the long-term prospects are bright, especially given that the fiber will last 30 or more years, and debts on the smart grid will be paid off after 15 years.

Cities today collect and store a wide range of data that may contain sensitive or identifiable information about residents. As cities embrace open data initiatives, more of this information is available to the public. While releasing data has many important benefits, sharing data comes with inherent risks to individual privacy: released data can reveal information about individuals that would otherwise not be public knowledge. In recent years, open data such as taxi trips, voter registration files, and police records have revealed information that many believe should not be released. Effective data governance is a prerequisite for successful open data programs. The goal of this document is to codify responsible privacy-protective approaches and processes that could be adopted by cities and other government organizations that are publicly releasing data. Our report is organized around four recommendations: Conduct risk-benefit analyses to inform the design and implementation of open data programs. Consider privacy at each stage of the data lifecycle: collect, maintain, release, delete. Develop operational structures and processes that codify privacy management widely throughout the City. Emphasize public engagement and public priorities as essential aspects of data management programs. Each chapter of this report is dedicated to one of these four recommendations, and provides fundamental context along with specific suggestions to carry them out. In particular, we provide case studies of best practices from numerous cities and a set of forms and tactics for cities to implement our recommendations. The Appendix synthesizes key elements of the report into an Open Data Privacy Toolkit that cities can use to manage privacy when releasing data.

New Yorkers are now safer in the city than they have been in years. Yet tensions between police officers and the communities in which they work have continued to mount in New York, as in other cities across the country. Just this past summer, racial violence erupted in Milwaukee and Baton Rouge in response to the fatal shooting of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Milwaukee joined other cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., in which police killings have been seen as brutal evidence of the disrespect that many African Americans say the police show them. The challenge facing the NYPD today is to maintain safe streets while ushering in a new era of mutual respect between officers and local communities. At this early stage of digital technology adoption, the NYPD’s attempt under Commr. William Bratton (2014-2016) to change the culture of policing by enriching communications between police and neighborhoods holds lessons for public agencies across the U.S. during a period of intense volatility. This white paper explores NYPD’s adoption of Twitter and an ideation platform called IdeaScale that was aimed at allowing community members to nominate “quality of life” issues for resolution by the police. It examines the department's pivot to Facebook as an interactive communications platform following its experience with IdeaScale. It connects these initiatives to the NYPD’s overall push for Neighborhood Coordination Officers throughout the city. Finally, it pulls together information about NYPD’s revisions to its training and recruitment programs and the department’s ongoing efforts to upgrade its basic digital assets, from precinct Internet access to smartphones. These programs, all made possible by Commr. Bratton’s strong leadership, were designed to create a virtuous cycle: The NYPD’s social media, neighborhood policing, and new recruiting and training programs aimed to increase mutual respect by helping officers understand and enhance their responsibility to serve and protect New York City communities — and help community members see police officers as human beings. Stronger community relations may, in turn, support crime prevention. Shifting from a confrontational to a collaborative approach may encourage community members to come forward when they learn about crime. And all of these steps are designed to lead policing away from an exclusive focus on crime reduction and towards a balanced strategy of crime prevention and community outreach — an effort, in Commr. Bratton’s words, to move from a “warrior” to a “guardian” policing mindset.

Over the spring and summer of 2014, New York City put in place a full-day universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) program. The blistering pace, enormous scale, and administrative complexity of this rollout were all striking: a program that did not exist when funding for it was finalized in March 2014 had put 53,250 four-year-olds in more than 1700 new full-day programs by the first day of school in September. This report provides a detailed account of the launch. It includes an extensive discussion of the city’s use of data science techniques; the city was able to combine and analyze databases in such a way that outreach teams could contact households that were likely to include four-year-olds and help interest parents sign up, all with a sharp eye for the privacy of New Yorkers. The launch as a whole combined the energy of a micro-targeted political campaign with service-oriented, street-level energy, and the lessons New York City learned in the course of this work should be useful to other cities and states.

This report provides detailed accounts of planning carried out in connection with community fiber networks in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, CA, and Seattle, WA. It includes information about existing fiber assets that the cities identified, funding mechanisms that were considered, and roadblocks that were encountered. Our hope is that this report will be helpful to other cities that are considering launching fiber optic networks. Key findings: The cities profiled in this report have each approached the question of community fiber differently. Washington, D.C. made concessions and arrangements that allowed it to build a robust public-safety-quality fiber network, but limitations on the use of that network have made it unavailable to residents and businesses. Additionally, prices charged non-profits for use of the network are currently too high to be competitive with incumbent products. San Francisco has been highly innovative in expanding fiber to public housing, aggressively leasing dark fiber to community anchor institutions such as libraries and schools, and ensuring free public Wi-Fi, but has not yet cracked the nut of alternative community residential or business fiber access. Seattle has had an extensive city fiber loop in place since 1986, but regulations limiting use of poles and approvals for cabinets have slowed the rollout of competitive last-mile service. Seattle's recent negative experience with Gigabit Squared (which was unable to execute on its last-mile promises and subsequently vanished from the scene) casts a shadow. Seattle's current mayor appears to be determined to ameliorate both the regulatory burdens and the information asymmetries that have dogged the city.

Labels are important in policy debates. The “broadcast flag” effort was very nearly successful in forcing all devices capable of receiving television broadcasts (including PCs) to be designed in order to protect “flagged” content. Who could be against a flag? By contrast, “net neutrality” advocates have had difficulty convincing anyone to care about something that sounds so, well, neutral. One effective label that has often been used during the first two years of the Obama administration is the “looming spectrum crisis.” FCC Chairman Genachowski said in October 2009: “I believe that that the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis.” As the crisis loomed, the administration—worried about the lack of spectrum allocated for high-speed Internet access—declared it would re-allocate 500 MHz of spectrum. There is a hunt on for spectrum: Every closet in every agency is being searched. Looming. Crisis. It may be time for yet another label to enter the lists: “the looming cable monopoly.” It is gaining strength, and it is not terribly interested in the future of the Internet. This is the central crisis of our communications era.

The Comcast Situation, the latest development in a story of increasing private control over access to basic communications functions, has brought national attention to the way in which this country conducts its communications policy. In this Article, Professor Crawford suggests that Comcast's blocking activities, and the FCC's ad hoc treatment of Comcast, reveal the fundamental incoherence of current communications law. After tracing the history of the non-discrimination principle in U.S. treatment of telegraphy and telephony, Professor Crawford suggests that regulatory gymnastics and credulous courts have caused us to forget that private discriminatory control over basic communications networks has never been acceptable. At the same time, public uproar over growing private domination of this basic service is rising to the level that caused the U.S. to create its communications legal structure in the first place. Professor Crawford calls for reforms that will restore the role of basic non-discriminatory transport that the framers of U.S. communications law had in mind.

Three problems of online life - spam, informational privacy, and network security - lend themselves to the peer production of governance. Traditional sovereigns have tried and, to date, failed to address these three problems through the ordinary means of governance. The sovereign has a role to play in the solution to each of the three, but not as a monopoly and not necessarily in the first instance. A new form of order online, brought on by private action, is emerging in response to these problems. If properly understood and encouraged, this emerging order could lead to an accountable internet without an offsetting loss of those aspects of online life that we have found most attractive. There has been a great deal of loose talk about the need for "internet governance," particularly in the context most recently of the World Summit on the Information Society, but much less careful analysis of the question whether the online world really does pose special problems, or present special opportunities, for collective action. There has been a general discussion as to whether the internet, as a general rule, lends itself to governance by traditional sovereigns or if something in the net's architecture resists such forms of control. We do not seek to re-open this debate, acknowledging at the outset the important role that traditional sovereigns have to play in most areas of decision-making and enforcement on the internet. Rather, we seek to look more closely at a series of particularly thorny issues that have proven especially challenging for policy makers seeking to impose governance by states. We seek the special problems - and corresponding opportunities - of online activity and assess the relative merits of various options for how to resolve them.