Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

Boston’s City Hall is a 500,000-square-foot concrete monstrosity. Built in 1968, the structure is a prominent example of Brutalist architecture, and it screams, “large, impersonal institution.” For decades, Bostonians have despised it. Now comes the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a scrappy five-person team charged with making Boston better through clever, low-cost hacks. They’re talking makeover. Not the gazillions-of-dollars, knock-the-building-down kind. Something a lot cheaper. But still: a makeover. Finally.

Inside City Hall, right on the fifth floor near the mayor’s office itself, New Urban Mechanic Kris Carter, 33, gives me a tour of the proposals, which were marked up and arrayed along a wall. One of them, “Stairs of Fabulousness,” would cost less than $5,000 and cover the steps of the building’s concrete grand staircase in bright rainbow colors. I asked Carter if it would play xylophone notes when you stepped on it, as a staircase at the city’s Museum of Science does. Nope. It wouldn’t capture data about foot traffic either. But still, it would be fun, and cheap, and so the mechanics were giving it serious thought.


“Local government over the last few years has gotten used to the idea that the kinds of services we deliver are gray,” says Nigel Jacob, 39, who along with Chris Osgood, 37, has led MONUM, as the office is known, since its 2010 inception. It’s MONUM’s job to make those services more vibrant. Some innovations aren’t necessarily major breakthroughs in good government, like the whimsical project, undertaken in October, of lighting up a bridge in pretty, multicolored lights. But many others are practical revolutions in how local government can connect with its residents using technology, like the famous Boston pothole app, and another one to handle all manner of basic government service requests right on your iPhone.

As “innovation” becomes all the rage in city government, New Urban Mechanics has created a unique brand of it. Bearing the imprint of its first patron, former Mayor Tom Menino, the office has relentlessly focused on delivering services to residents—an approach that’s as much cultural as it is technological. It’s “the first smart city leadership group that feels like it was designed by a political scientist instead of a computer engineer,” says Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and Quest for a New Utopia. The model has produced nifty apps, made Boston a national leader in the field and survived this year’s transition to a new mayor, Marty Walsh. Now, MONUM is digging in for its oh-so-modest long-term goal: reinventing civic engagement for the 21st century.

How Boston fixes a pothole This video installment of POLITICO Magazine What Works shows how citizen engagement through new technology is literally fixing the city of Boston, one pothole at a time. Filmed by Mark Peterson. Edited by Madeline Marshall.

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If all politics is local, most government innovation is urban. And Boston has been a leader in urban innovation since at least 1721. In late April of that year, a British ship, the Seahorse, arrived from Barbados, and by early May, 10 members of its crew had come down with smallpox. It was the first smallpox epidemic in New England in 19 years, and within a few days, 1,000 of Boston’s 11,000 inhabitants had fled. The official response in the Puritan stronghold was prayer.

Fortunately, 18th-century West Africans took a more pragmatic approach to smallpox than their New England contemporaries. Onesimus, a slave belonging to Cotton Mather, informed the prominent minister that he had intentionally contracted a mild smallpox infection in Africa and acquired lifelong immunity—an inoculation procedure. Impressed, Mather recruited Zebdiel Boylston, a local physician and future great uncle of John Adams, to leverage Onesimus’ expertise. Boylston prototyped the process—which required rubbing smallpox pus into a small wound—by trying it on his two young sons and a slave. It worked, and he and Mather undertook a full-on pilot program, inoculating 287 Bostonians. (The data-driven approach was quite an about-face for Mather, who had been deeply implicated in the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.)

MONUM leaders Nigel Jacob, left, and Chris Osgood in Boston's City Hall. | Mark Peterson/REDUX

Mather and Boylston were greeted with scorn. Most of Boston considered their innovation bad medicine and an affront to God. James Franklin attacked the pair with so much vitriol that local authorities briefly imprisoned him, leaving his brother and apprentice Benjamin in charge of his printing shop. Someone threw a bomb through Mather’s window with a semi-literate note attached, reading, “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’l inoculate you with this; with a pox to you.” (The bomb failed to go off.) But it worked, and the pair meticulously gathered data to prove it: The mortality rate for inoculated Bostonians was 2 percent, compared with 15 percent who contracted the disease naturally. The innovation gained acceptance and spread. The British royal family even decided to undergo inoculation, in part based on the results of the Boston pilot. You might call it the first recorded instance of data-based civic hacking, a practice that wouldn’t even have a name for another three centuries.

The city was once again at the forefront of urban innovation in 1799, when it created the first health department, under Paul Revere, which then carried out the first controlled experiment of a vaccine, also for smallpox. In the 19th century, as major American cities swelled, they fell into the grip of urban political machines, whose governments were marked by inefficiency, cronyism and corruption. Again, Boston was a leader in improving urban governance. In 1865, a group of prominent citizens formed the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science. It encouraged the development of free public libraries and worked to set up a national network of them. Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace, used the group as a platform to promote his then-novel idea that cities should create municipal parks. Over the course of that century, Boston became the first city in the United States to establish a police department, a municipal library and a subway.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the locus of civic innovation shifted west, as the Progressive movement swept the country in response to the excesses of Gilded Age capitalists—and the outrages of corrupt urban machine bosses. At Hull House in Chicago, Jane Addams and a community of educated women taught classes to the poor, studied the causes of poverty and advocated urban reforms, including the establishment of playgrounds. In the name of scientific government, many municipalities replaced mayors with city commissions or professional managers. Others set up bureaus of municipal research. As part of the drive for efficient administration, cities expanded in size. In 1898, a hodgepodge of jurisdictions was consolidated into the modern New York City. The City of Los Angeles annexed much of the rest of Los Angeles County. The 20th century became an era of large, centralized municipal administration—and buildings like Boston’s City Hall.

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In the 21st century, “innovation” has replaced “reform” as the term of art for remaking local government. It has many associated buzzwords: “smart cities,” “civic hacking,” “Gov 2.0.” To one degree or another, they all involve the application of new technology, especially to collect, make available and make useful large amounts of data. For its part, MONUM bills itself as a “civic innovation lab,” meaning, says Jacob, “Our job is to run experiments that push the envelope in terms of how services get delivered to residents,” whether or not those experiments are high-tech.

One approach to innovation, best lumped under “smart city,” is the logical extension of efficient, centralized administration. Often, it entails massive IT contracts to hook up cities with ubiquitous sensors that monitor and automate the urban environment. In 2010, IBM set up a futuristic, centralized control room for the city of Rio de Janeiro that draws data from 30 city agencies. In 2000, developers in Korea broke ground on Songdo, a built-from-scratch “smart city” 40 miles southwest of Seoul. Thanks to Cisco, a citywide system controls traffic and energy consumption. As in the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984, two-way tele-screens are everywhere.

At the other end of the spectrum is urban innovation that’s citizen-driven, decentralized and ad hoc. In 2007, British journalist James Crabtree wrote a short manifesto titled “ Civic Hacking: A New Agenda for E-Democracy.” It called for governments to use new technologies to facilitate “mutual-aid and self-help among citizens” and “encourage self-reliance, or community-reliance, rather than reliance on the state.” In this spirit, pockets of coders across the United States began organizing sporadic “civic hackathons,” events lasting from several hours to a few days, at which they tried to create apps for the greater good in intense spurts of collaboration, often using troves of data supplied by local governments.

In 2009, the founding of Code for America—on whose board MONUM’s Jacob sits—institutionalized the spirit. The movement has even trickled up to the federal level. In 2011, Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican, hosted a hackathon to improve Madison, a tool that allows citizens to comment on legislation as it’s being written. Last year, the White House sponsored the first National Day of Civic Hacking, which drew 11,000 participants in 83 cities. While an exact definition of civic hacking remains elusive, Code for America has settled on “people working together quickly and creatively to help improve government.”

Since the 1700s, Boston has been at the forefront of urban innovation in America. | Mark Peterson/REDUX

Though different, smart cities and civic hacking aren’t really mutually exclusive—a city could pursue both at once. MONUM’s approach is much closer to the latter. “The question is,” says Townsend, “is something that happens inside of government a civic hack? I would argue that it can be, especially when it’s done with the assistance of an outside organization.” MONUM’s modus operandi is to produce its innovations by partnering with outside groups and civic hackers across the region. Philadelphia liked the approach so much that the city, in Townsend’s words, “copy and pasted it,” opening its own Office of New Urban Mechanics in late 2012.

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Former Mayor Tom Menino—who once said, “Visionaries don’t get things done”—earned the nickname “the urban mechanic” early on in his 20-year tenure as mayor of Boston for his obsessive focus on the nuts and bolts of urban management. He was the most prolific user of his own mayor’s hotline, calling in several service requests a day.

In December 2005, in a speech to the Boston Chamber of Commerce written by Mitchell Weiss, then a student at Harvard Business School, Menino—who famously banned voice mail at City Hall—announced that he would update his practical, get-stuff-done approach to city government for the digital era, hiring a chief information officer and creating a fellowship to bring in a generation of what he called “new urban mechanics.”

In 2006, Jacob—who began his career as a software engineer at IBM and then worked at tech startups—began a computer science Ph.D. program at Tufts. Feeling an itch for public service, he scratched it with a university fellowship in Boston’s IT department. He began work on the same day as Osgood, who had done a post-college service stint at City Year in Boston before spending the next five years at New York City’s parks and recreation department. He was coming to the mayor’s office on a Harvard Business School fellowship. Jacob and Osgood soon found each other—and decided to connect the city much more with its great academic minds. “Here were are in Boston. We have these incredible institutions all around us,” Jacob says. “It was crazy to me that we didn’t do anything with MIT or with Harvard or with Boston University.”

That year Menino also hired his friend Bill Oates as the city’s first CIO. Oates, who now serves as head of technology for the state of Massachusetts, and Osgood worked for two years to implement a new hotline and back-end system for making and processing municipal service requests. It launched in 2008 to notable success: The time it took the city to replace burned-out street lights fell by more than half and the time it took to deliver residents recycling bins fell by three quarters.

Around that time, Jacob grew interested in the civic applications of a hot new technology called the iPhone. He connected with Osgood, and the two set out to make an app that could serve the same function as the city services hotline. They consulted the MIT Media Lab, which referred them to Connected Bits, a mobile development firm in Southern New Hampshire. In late 2009, the city launched Citizens Connect, which cost just $25,000 in its first year. The app, which lets users report issues like potholes, graffiti and broken streetlamps with geo-tagged photos, was their first high-profile success. It was also among the first of its kind. The app now accounts for one-fifth of all city service requests, about 10,000 annually. It also formed the basis for Commonwealth Connect, a similar app that’s been adopted by more than 40 Massachusetts municipalities.

In 2010, at the beginning of his fifth and final term, Menino created the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, with Jacob and Osgood at its head and no annual budget — it scraped by in its first year with funds from other city departments. “In some ways, it just formalized what they had begun to do informally, which was to become a locus of innovation,” says Weiss, who first coined the term “New Urban Mechanics” and served as Menino’s chief of staff for his last term.

Citizens Connect became the model: Harness the Boston area’s considerable talent, move quickly and deliver new ideas to directly connect Bostonians and their government. In 2011, MONUM partnered with Code for America’s fellows in Boston to create Discover BPS, a web app that let parents find out what public schools their kids were eligible to attend by plugging in their name, grade and address, simplifying what had been a confusing and labor-intensive process.

In 2012, the office upped the cool factor with Street Bump, an app that monitors mobile users while they drive and collects data on the location of potholes. The prototype, created several years earlier, had been rigged up using Menino’s own car. Because the mayor called in so many potholes, the city eventually resolved to equip his SUV with an accelerometer, a gyrometer and GPS to detect and report them automatically when the car drove over one. The New Urban Mechanics realized that the sensors built into iPhones could allow thousands of cars to detect and report potholes, but first they needed to collect data. So they borrowed a car from the press office and spent a day circling Boston Common, aiming for every pothole they could find. “We were all pretty sore,” says Jacob. A week later, they found out they had also totaled the car. It was probably worth it. The app garnered reams of laudatory press coverage and thousands of downloads, not to mention a trip for the mechanics to explain their tool at a meeting at 10 Downing Street attended by the British prime minister.

How Boston Fixes a Pothole Step 1: A user reports a pothole on Citizens Connect, a mobile app that allows city residents to flag issues ranging from graffiti to broken streetlamps with geotagged photos. Step 2: Boston's Department of Public Works receives a notification about the pothole. Step 3: The Department of Public Works dispatches city workers to fill the pothole. The process of reporting and responding to a request takes up to 48 hours, but the repair will take as little as 20 minutes. Step 4: A city worker fills the pothole. In the course of three years, civic apps in Boston have helped bring the proportion of pothole cases closed within two days from 48 percent to 92 percent. Step 5: The Public Works Department closes the pothole case, and the person who originally reported the pothole receives a notification.

In the past, the city had fixed potholes when they irked residents enough to call them in, or by sending work crews to drive around looking for them, a grossly inefficient process. Between Street Bump and Citizens Connect (which allows users to manually report potholes), MONUM helped the city increase the proportion of pothole cases closed within two days from 48 percent in February of 2011 to 92 percent this April. The data provided by Street Bump revealed that sunk manhole covers were a more frequent problem than potholes, and the city adjusted more than 1,000 of them.

Along the way, Chris and Nigel, as everyone in town seems to refer jointly to Osgood and Jacob, have become two of the most popular guys in Boston. Dazza Greenwood, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab who has done extensive government consulting work, can barely contain his enthusiasm for the pair. “Sometimes I’m at meetings, and I’m like, 'What the hell are these guys doing here?’” he says. “It’s like going to a movie: Wouldn’t it be great if the government were like this?” His take is a fairly typical one.

Of course, it’s easy to wax overly optimistic about the potential of gee-whiz apps to improve citizens’ lives. In announcing his final run for mayor in 2009, Menino said that New Urban Mechanics could bring “a wave of municipal innovation not seen since cities first brought water into people’s homes.” It hasn’t done that. Nor is it going to. Many of the projects are ephemeral and gimmicky, like Pulse of the City, which temporarily installed heart-rate monitors—shaped like hearts—that played music when passersby grabbed their handles in five locations across Boston.

But Discover BPS, Citizens Connect and Street Bump have all been hailed far and wide and measurably improved city services—while avoiding much of the criticism that’s been lobbed at urban innovation initiatives elsewhere. For one, the office is lean—five full-time staffers and a steady stream of university fellows. MONUM’s highest annual budget, says Jacob, has been $2 million, and much of that comes from private grants; the Bostonians are determined to avoid the kind of expensive fiascos that often occur when public bureaucracies seek tech solutions from government contractors.

It also looks like MONUM is built to last. “They’ve survived a transition in administration, which is not easy,” says Townsend, noting that 100 days into his term as mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio had still not filled the roles of chief digital officer and director of the Office of Data Analytics created under Michael Bloomberg. (He’s planning to create a new head of technology position.)

Even potential adversaries have been impressed. Carl DiSalvo, a professor of digital media at Georgia Tech, has criticized the culture of civic hacking in part because it’s been organized largely around gimmicky one-day hackathons. “You tend to get fairly surface-level responses to contemporary social conditions,” he says. In MONUM, DiSalvo sees “one model of a kind of engagement that’s sustained and could potentially work.”

Crucially, New Urban Mechanics stands outside of the city’s normal departmental structure, a feature that, according to Townsend, makes it unique. This has allowed MONUM to form partnerships all across city government and created an environment where city employees feel safe failing. “They didn’t have to deal with the bureaucracy,” Menino told me. “They did their own shtick.”

Despite its success with high-tech projects, the office still bears Menino’s old-school imprint (“I don’t use it much myself,” the former mayor told me of the Internet)—distinguishing it from innovation efforts where technology has taken the lead. In 2008, Washington, D.C., challenged programmers to find new uses for the city’s data catalogue, offering $50,000 in prizes. The 30-day Apps for Democracy contest yielded 47 mobile and web apps—including “Stumble Safely” for helping bar patrons navigate home on foot—and was widely imitated by cities around the world. But the apps reflected the wants and needs of coders, who were not representative of Washington as a whole. In the contest’s second run, in 2009, the city made an effort to better define the types of problems Washingtonians wanted solved. But the next year, the city’s new chief technology officer shut it down, saying that, despite the hype, the contest and many of its imitators had failed to produce anything of real long-term value to residents.

MONUM has avoided that trap. “When I talk to those guys,” says Townsend of Osgood and Jacob. “It’s about service delivery, it’s about governance, it’s about engagement—a different set of values than what you see in some other cities where people are pushing technology to the forefront.”

In the Walsh era, the office continues to evolve. “Under the old administration, there wasn’t a whole lot of time spent on big strategic plans,” says Jacob. Now, the office has expanded its mandate to areas like the arts and education, and the new mayor has insisted it contribute to longer-term city “master plans”—not just opportunistically hacking up cool new apps. On education, for example, MONUM is now fleshing out a plan to connect the region’s education technology firms with city teachers to turn classrooms into labs for rapid testing and implementation of new ideas.

Still, MONUM’s hasn’t abandoned its basic shotgun approach of taking on several initiatives at once. Up now? A program that lets residents text the city their preferred business for filling a vacant storefront and the creation of a citywide network of workshop spaces for residents to design and prototype their own civic innovations. “We’ve always been stretched thin,” says Jacob. “That’s actually been part of our strategy.”

Through this hodge-podge of projects, MONUM aspires do more than just fill potholes and make apps. If the mechanics are going to become the greatest thing since indoor plumbing or “Maybe Even Rescue Democracy,” as the title of a Mitchell Weiss talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government once put it, it will be by drawing Bostonians into a new model of civic engagement they call “peer-produced governance.” The idea is to put residents in the city’s driver’s seat (“moving beyond the vote-only way of engagement,” as Jacob puts it), so that residents view themselves not as the passive recipients of government services, but as the active makers of their own urban environment.

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A weekly Code for Boston gathering. Of the 60 cities with an all-volunteer Code for America brigade, Boston's is one of the most active. | Mark Peterson/REDUX

On a Tuesday night in May, two dozen people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, with the odd speckles of gray hair, crowded around a long conference table at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square. The building is a center of the region’s startup community, but the young professionals hovering over Macbooks and Lenovos were there for a 21st-century version of a town meeting, the weekly gathering of Code for Boston. They delivered status updates on an app that would track gentrification, a push to bring broadband access to low-income housing and the drafting of an open data ordinance for Cambridge.

About 60 cities have all-volunteer Code for America brigades, and Boston’s is one of the strongest. After 18 months of existence, it has dozens of active members and hundreds of peripheral ones. Jacob and Osgood helped guide the brigade’s launch and actively partner with it. If this is an updated version of the Rotary Club, it’s one with a decided hipster feel to it. A 29-year-old man calling himself Lyre Calliope, one of the meeting’s leaders, wore a royal blue and orange velour top hat and explained to me in a raspy voice, “I rule the world, and it’s a multi-decade effort to put together my administration and reforms.” On a more serious note, he described MONUM as “an anchor and a flag in the ground” that’s enabling the growth of a broader civic innovation community around it.

Then again, the revolution isn’t exactly one of multitudes yet. To realize their vision, the New Urban Mechanics will have to mobilize a broader swath of Bostonians than the creative-class members they’ve drawn in so far. Their plan for doing so involves a new Boston-wide network of workshops, called “civic FabLabs,” stocked with equipment like 3-D printers and laser cutters to give residents the tools for creating their own civic innovations. The labs could produce new concepts for street furniture, or, to take just one small idea Jacob has cited, street signs with hooks on which drivers could hang their dry-cleaning so as to get into their cars without laying their clean clothes on top of them. It is, as that idea suggests, still a work in progress.

To realize its broader vision, the Office of New Urban Mechanics will need a larger group of Bostonians to conceive new ideas for a citizen-driven local government. A network of workshops called "Fablabs" could be crucial to that plan. | Mark Peterson/REDUX

The FabLab concept began at MIT—and draws inspiration from a program in Barcelona, which Osgood was packing off to visit when we met. But there’s already proof of concept, in a dingy neighborhood across town, where Boston has been running the South End Technology Center at Tent City since 2002. Even here, in one of the city’s poorest areas, there’s talk of what Bostonians can do, with the right tools, to reinvent the modern city.

Inside the lab, bundles of wires drape over the partitions between iMac terminals. Susan Klimczak, 55, the lab’s administrator, tells me, it’s geared toward kids.

Several years ago, Klimczak relates, the teenagers she worked with grew sick of letting their cell phones die because neighborhood café owners refused to let them come in to charge them. The group caught wind of a stash of solar-powered lawn lights that were being thrown away, she says, “So we scarfed them—and hacked them.” The teenagers hooked up the solar panels to USB cords, and the contraptions did neighborhood service by a bench outside the building. One day, the technology center received visitors from Haiti, who were taken with the hack. They asked to take the chargers home with them, and the teens consented. Last Klimczak heard, the visitors were sharing the design and spreading chargers across rural Haiti. It makes you wonder what else the people of Boston could be producing for their neighborhoods, and the world.