This
week, MIT is offering an online course on “Tackling the Challenges of Big
Data.” In pitching the course, CIO Today opines that without an
understanding of what makes data good or bad, business users “may make
decisions based on insight that’s fallacious.”
As
they are refined, measure of such characteristics as race and income may assist
in avoiding unfortunate lawsuits such as the Supreme Court’s Texas disparate
impact case, New Jersey’s Fair Housing Act disputes, and the redlining cases against
lenders brought in New York. Big data allows the analysis necessary to go
beyond the either-or choice between neighborhood revitalization and moving to
opportunity, especially in circumstances involving non-discriminatory policies
and programs.
Place-based
policies and incentives will continue to evolve as we discover new ways to disrupt
the status quo and avert the consequences of bad behavior – intentional or not.
Disruptions are occurring in many
disciplines – energy efficiency and green construction, education and job
re-training, and healthy homes and living, to name a few.
The
common thread of bringing people, resources, and communities together is
another type of disruption - civic disruption - envisioned fifty years ago by planner-lawyer
Paul Davidoff, and those that followed, as the foundation of progressive community
planning and development.
Davidoff
was among the first wave to recognize and address the inherent problems of
inner city communities and the discriminatory effects of white flight to the
suburbs, later founding the Suburban Action Institute to challenge exclusionary
zoning in the suburbs. A half-century later, we have abdicated much of that
debate and resolve to the courts and simplistic measures of disparate
impact.
Big
data and the promise of civic and economic disruption offer us new ways to
influence public policy and decision-making – if we have the personal courage
and moral conviction to set aside the physical isolation and socio-economic
conditions that racial and class inequalities have wrought.
