CeaseFire trains, mentors, and puts into the field outreach workers (known as “violence interrupters”) drawn directly from local communities. Their role is to detect, prevent, and mitigate conflict on the street before it leads to violence. Being drawn from the local community, interrupters are often former gang members, respected older women or men, or other influential members of local society.49 They rely on force of personality, street cred, relationships with key players in the community, and hyperlocal understanding of the territorial logic of their own district (how things work, what drives violence, and how the neighborhood flows). They focus on detecting and intervening in acts of violence before they occur, changing the behavior of individuals who are influential in the neighborhood system of violence or who are at risk for violent behavior, and changing community norms about violence.50 Interrupters attend a formal training program designed by Slutkin and form part of a network (both physical and online) that supports their work, helps them track progress of situations and individuals, and links them to a broader movement. After being launched in 2000 in West Garfield, then Chicago’s most violent neighborhood, the program has spread throughout Chicago, and offshoots of the program are now active in Baltimore, Kansas City (Missouri), New Orleans, New York, Phoenix, and several cities in California, as well as in Britain, South Africa, and the Caribbean.51 The program expands by proliferating small projects with a common but flexible methodology and adapting to local conditions in each new area, rather than by imposing rigid controls or attempting to create a large, monolithic, one-size-fits-all model. The movement is funded by a combination of private philanthropy and donations from local and national businesses; for a time it was also supported by government money from the city of Chicago.
Gary Slutkin grew up in Chicago, but I suspect he would be the first to admit that he’s not exactly an insider in the tight-knit, violent, low-income, marginalized, and excluded communities and social networks where CeaseFire works. He’s a doctor, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious disease control, and an academic—professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. He did his initial medical training in Chicago, and his internship and residency at San Francisco General Hospital, learning infectious disease control methods (and getting intimately acquainted with street crime, gang violence, and public health) in the tuberculosis program of the San Francisco Health Department. He then spent several years working in Africa for the World Health Organization, where he specialized in reversing epidemics, including tuberculosis, cholera, and AIDS, “including being principally responsible for supporting Uganda’s AIDS program—the only country to have reversed its AIDS epidemic.”52
Thus CeaseFire, like the Liberian women’s peace movement, is an example of co-design. Slutkin is an outsider in the communities where his program is succeeding so well (in fact, he is the proverbial white guy with a clipboard, maybe even a lab coat as well). He couldn’t, and doesn’t, succeed by trying to go into other people’s communities, telling them what their problems are, making them stand aside, and then imposing his own technocratic solutions. Clearly, though, local people weren’t doing too well solving their own problems before his program arrived. What Slutkin brings to this collaborative, co-designed effort is training and mentoring, technical skill, functional (not locally specific) knowledge, a scientifically developed methodology, and a perspective on how these kinds of problems work in many different places. It’s the local community that brings the insight, hyperlocal context, and spatial understanding of the systems logic and day-to-day flow of their own districts, and who ultimately hit the streets to implement the program in their own way, with support and technical assistance from Slutkin, but bringing their own insights and leadership talents to the effort. Ultimately, too, there is a police force, mostly offstage and out of mind but with the ability to bring lethal force to bear in a complex urban environment, to prevail in a close fight, and thus to enforce a normative system (in this case, that of an elected government), upholding the coercive end of the spectrum in the districts where CeaseFire works. The enlightened and informed support of police, and in some cases integration with community-oriented policing programs, is a key external enabler, framing the program’s success.
Crisis Mappers
If the Liberian women’s movement and CeaseFire are examples of street-level co-design in dangerous urban areas under stress, then Crisis Mappers is the virtual, remote-observation analog to these local physical programs. Crisis Mappers—formally, the International Network of Crisis Mappers—was co-founded by Jen Ziemke and Patrick Meier in 2009, at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping. The network describes itself as “the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mapping.” Crisis mapping, in this context, means applying a huge variety of techniques—mobile and Web-based smartphone apps; participatory maps (where local communities work with a tech platform or an outside expert to record their perception of their own environment, for their own use); crowd-sourced data on events such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and conflict; aerial and satellite imagery; geospatial platforms such as Open Street Map or Google Earth; advanced visualization tools; live simulations; and computational and statistical models—to provide early warning and to support rapid responses to complex humanitarian emergencies. It is a fundamentally multidisciplinary endeavor that combines local field insight from affected communities or researchers on the ground with remote observation, visualization, and analysis by people far from the scene of a crisis.
This is quite a mouthful, but what in means in practice is a network of about five thousand people spread across the world in more than four hundred organizations (private companies, academic institutions, and NGOs)—not to mention quite a few talented individuals in basements and coffee shops—who combine their efforts to monitor developing humanitarian crises and to produce accurate, up-to-the-minute, geospatially referenced visualizations of events on the ground as they unfold. Humanitarian NGOs, first responders, or local communities can then use these visualizations to shape their response to developing crises in real time. Partners on the ground can contribute data, validate what’s being reported, and update inaccurate information in real time. Crisis mappers work, like Anonymous or Telecomix in the Arab Awakening examples we looked at in Chapter 4, as an “adhocracy”: nobody gets paid, everyone contributes out of personal commitment or passion for the tech or humanitarian concern, and the ultimate outcome is the organizational manifestation of the “Web as witness” phenomenon that I described earlier—someone is watching, and she and five thousand others are making and updating a map in real time.
The map matters—because everything that happens, happens somewhere—and knowing where things are occurring is the first step toward understanding them and responding to them. In urban metabolism terms, mapping the flow requires an understanding of what’s happening where, and you need that knowledge before you can understand why it’s occurring, as we saw in the Kingston and San Pedro Sula examples. In terms of the networking between the virtual and human domains, mapping human social networks and understanding how they intersect with electronic ones is critical if you want to make them work together, as we saw in the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan examples in the Arab Awakening. And in cases of major natural disaster or conflict—such as the January 2010 Haiti earthquake, the April 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, or the efforts to map the flow and needs of refugees and displaced persons during the Libyan and Syrian civil wars—crisis mappers can provide essential information by ensuring that help can get to the right people quickly.
Crisis Mapping is an example of co-design in two different ways. First, it’s a voluntary, ad hoc, free association of motivated individuals who ge
t together in a self-synchronized, self-directed way and swarm onto specific projects and events that interest them. Group hackathons and crowd-sourced code are used to build open-source, open-architecture systems that anyone can use, add to, and refine. Data are shared and resources are pooled. Second, the crisis mapper in a remote location is analogous to the outsider, while local civil society organizations, individual researchers and field teams, and local communities on the ground provide the insider inputs. Without the field component, a crowd-sourced crisis map is just an unverified guess; without the crowd-sourced map, the field team can only produce unstructured data. Together, though, they represent an unparalleled solution to an incredibly difficult problem—remote mappers build the apps and create the frameworks and the initial data cut (the base map, if you like), which local teams and on-the-ground partners validate, add to, and refine. Working together, these two components can produce an incredibly detailed and workably accurate map in near-real time as a crisis unfolds.
Co-Designing for Resilience
Together, as I mentioned, these examples are as hopeful for me as the military projection is daunting. They suggest that the same factors that make the future conflict environment so problematic—rapid urbanization, crowded spaces, the dramatic expansion of connectivity, the emergence of technically skilled and networked populations across the planet—also suggest the outlines of potential solutions. We talked earlier about resilience, about making actors in a system better able to handle and bounce back from shocks within it, rather than grasping to reclaim a mythical “stability” that was probably never there in the first place. We noted the work of Andrew Zolli and Anne Marie Healy, whose research suggests that as cities grow, even as they run into massive problems of urban overstretch, they also carry within them the adaptive resources needed to overcome these problems. We noted that the same factors that will swamp the world’s poorest and least-governed cities with three billion new people in the next generation will also bring unprecedented health, education, and prosperity to many of them, unleashing enormous new human potential. Part of the key to unlocking this potential may well have something to do with the idea of co-designing for resilience.
What I mean by this should be clear from the preceding examples. The co-design approach is something we seek to use in chaotic, complex environments—particularly cities under stress—where there exist problems (often involving intense violence) that local communities have been unable to solve, and that outsiders lack the knowledge or commitment to understand. The methodology tries to avoid fetishizing external, technocratic, top-down, white-guy-with-clipboard knowledge. At the same time, it also tries to avoid the magical thinking associated with treating local people as the fount of all knowledge and insight. If locals could understand and agree on the problem, let alone fix it, there’d be no need for outside intervention. If outsiders understood and could fix the problem, their interventions wouldn’t be failing so often. Both outsiders and locals need to come together, in defined spheres of expertise and in a defined process, to jointly design approaches to their problem—which, in the modern connected world, where problems in one place rapidly spread to and affect others, is a joint problem, too, not something wholly owned by a local community.
These spheres of expertise are clear. What insiders bring (what some anthropologists call the emic perspective) is insight into their own environment, an understanding of their own social and spatial system in its own terms and in their own words and images—what drives what, what matters and what doesn’t, how things work, how their district flows and breathes, what has been tried before, what typically works there, what doesn’t usually work there, and why. They also bring leadership, initiative, motivation, and a genuine desire to make a change, without which nothing else, however cleverly designed, can work. What outsiders bring is a technical understanding of relevant disciplines, functional skills, knowledge of what usually works and what doesn’t work in other places where similar problems have occurred, a large-n perspective (one that draws on a large number of examples), access to knowledge, networks, supporting data and expertise, connectivity to international public opinion, and of course access to funding and resources. They also bring humility, skepticism about the brilliance of their own insights, conscious and continuous awareness of how little they know about a local environment, and a willingness to experiment—starting small, testing hypotheses, and figuring out what works by trying things out.
There’s a third sphere of expertise, one that we can be clear-eyed about, whether we like it or not—the security sphere, the category of action that’s ultimately founded on coercion. For insiders and outsiders to sit down together and jointly work on problems, or for different groups of insiders to come together, build consensus, and figure out a way forward, there has to be a modicum of security, safety, and predictability. Someone has to guarantee that predictability, and whoever that is, they have to be able to prevail in a close fight if necessary. We’re talking about a normative system here: creating rules of acceptable behavior that give people predictability and allow them the feeling of safety that makes everything else possible. Who it is that provides that security depends on the situation. Better an insider than an outside intervener, obviously, for all the reasons discussed in the last few chapters. Better a civil society organization than an external police force, and better a police force than the military. Far better a local military than an intervening one, and so on. But ultimately, someone has to set conditions for the meeting of minds, or nothing can happen. The paradox is that although there are no purely military solutions, there are also no solutions without the ultimate sanction of coercion to enforce the order that makes joint action possible.
This is all starting to sound very theoretical and philosophical, but in practical terms it’s actually pretty straightforward. First, create a secure enough environment with enough predictability and sense of safety that locals can get together and begin to work towards a consensus on the nature of their problems. Then, provided locals have the necessary leadership and desire, bring in an external team—the smaller and less intrusive the better—with specific functional and technical knowledge relevant to the problem. The external team has to explicitly acknowledge that it has no right to tell the locals what to do, no privileged knowledge about their circumstances, and no legitimate opinion about what they should or must do. But it shares what it knows, provides data and expertise that fill the gaps in locals’ knowledge, builds the maps and visualizations that help locals understand the whole of the system they inhabit (not just their own little bit), and acts as a research and support team as the locals decide what to do next—if anything—about their problem. Then the external team takes a backseat, except perhaps if asked to facilitate, answer specific research questions, or help mediate disputes. The locals, armed with the knowledge of what has worked elsewhere, and secure in the protective bubble provided by a security system that gives them safety and predictability, take what they want from the outside perspective, discard what they don’t need, build on it, change it as they see fit, and come out at the end (perhaps) with new ideas and an agreed way forward. If appropriate, they pitch their idea to their own communities, without the outsiders in the room. And then . . . well, it’s their city, it’s their problem set, and they handle it.
What I’ve described isn’t theory. It’s what our teams do, all over the world, in conflicts and crises in half a dozen different cities. They focus on resilience rather than stability, on enhancing connectivity and building predictability, on helping local communities figure things out themselves. Is it perfect? Absolutely not: it doesn’t always work, it depends utterly on local commitment and talent, and it’s imperfect, like any other approach. But when it fails, it fails quickly and cheaply, it doesn’t involve turning someone else’s society upside down because of things that seemed to us like a good idea at the time, and it doesn’t invoke Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” of international int
ervention: “if you break it, you own it.” Most important, the co-design methodology isn’t an answer to a problem: it’s just a set of ways to think toward solutions. Can it work in a high-threat, chaotic, urban conflict environment? Absolutely—and, in fact, when I think back to times when what we’ve done has worked in conflict zones, including in very high-threat counterinsurgency environments such as Baghdad, it’s always been because of something akin to this approach. Locals bring the leadership and the insight that outsiders lack, outsiders bring the technical support that fills the locals’ gaps, and someone (the less coercively, the better, but nonetheless)—someone provides the security that lets the whole thing work.
Given the dense, urban, coastal, networked environment where populations will live, and where governments, businesses, communities, and military and police forces will operate in the future, we’re really going to need these kinds of participatory design-based approaches to solving strategic problems. That is, external interveners in these environments—whether “external” in the sense that they’re foreign governments, or merely in the sense that they come from a different part of town or are members of a different community—need to begin with a conscious acceptance of their own ignorance about the environment. Outsiders need to accept that, initially at least, they don’t understand exactly what is going on, and therefore they have few useful insights about what needs to be done.
To me, the co-design approach that I’ve outlined here makes vastly more sense than trying to bring in state-based, government-driven solutions to every problem—to govern every piece of ungoverned space on the planet, or to turn every society into a mirror of our own. Q uite apart from being authoritarian and coercive, that kind of unilateralism is just too expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to be achievable. Even if it did work, this sort of approach would be problematic—it would turn Western governments, in particular, into a global version of Baron Haussmann—but the fact is that it doesn’t work anyway: we simply don’t have the money, the persistence, or the military will to make it happen.
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