The Smart Bridge

 

Queen Maxima, watching her ribbon-cutting duties being automated away

On a trip--such a wonderful trip--to Amsterdam in 2016, Felix and I visited MX3D, a Dutch startup developing processes for large-scale 3D printing in metal, to talk to them about their plans to print a bridge. I was looking for my next Internet of Things project, something that would generate well structured data in a reliable and consistent fashion, and Felix was there because robots. The IoT was in a hype cycle at the time, and "smart cities" especially so, but practical examples of the benefits to be gained from placing sensors in the urban environment were scarce. Would a smart bridge in the middle of Amsterdam prove the case, one way or the other? The question is still open, but now--literally today, exactly 5 years to the day after that first meeting with MX3D--we can finally begin to answer it.

The MX3D bridge took a long time to print--money was scarce, other projects came and went--and creating a sensor network to fit onto the bridge was a major effort on top of that, but what really ate up the years between then and now was the work required to rebuild the canal walls upon which the bridge rests. Amsterdam is, famously, a city of canals, and canals, like everything else, require maintenance every so and so many decades. Indeed, it was the plan to renew the canal walls that created the opportunity to place a new bridge in the Red Light District in the first place, so I can't complain about the delay caused by that maintenance effort, nor is there any point in complaining about the additional delay caused by COVID. But really.

A lot has changed in the half-decade between inspiration and installation. I've had three different jobs at Autodesk, each within a different division of the company. (Ironically, and really very much by chance, I now sit in Autodesk Research, which is the part of the company that has sponsored this work all along.) I've moved to Amsterdam and then back again. I've read and thought and even written a thing or two about the smart city thesis--i.e., that the massive effort required to sensor an urban environment produces novel and useful insights justifying that investment--mostly focused on the fact that there are significant downsides to the current approach to the collection of data in public spaces. And I have learned more than I ever expected to about sensors and structural engineering and the inner workings of city bureaucracies.

My goal with this bridge is to demonstrate a model of effective and ethical collection of data in the urban environment, and to draw lessons from that example for other projects and other cities. But that's for another day. Today I'm simply enjoying an enormous sense of relief: the bridge is in place and the data has finally started to flow.