Embracing the Age of Disruption

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.