The concept of “smart cities” seems like a contemporary urbanism trend. But as early as the 1960s, cities were using technology to gather, interpret, and visualize civic data. Here’s how a 1974 report by Los Angeles’s Community Analysis Bureau used computer databases, cluster analysis, and infrared aerial photography to help them to make decisions about policy.

Beginning in the late 1960s and through most of the 1970s, the little-known Community Analysis Bureau used computer databases, cluster analysis, and infrared aerial photography to gather data, produce reports on neighborhood demographics and housing quality, and help direct resources to ward off blight and tackle poverty.

I have been reading about the history of planning in Los Angeles for years, but the first time I had seen anything by or about the Community Analysis Bureau was when I ran across its insightful-but-weird 1974 report “The State of the City: A Cluster Analysis of Los Angeles” at a library. A data-rich snapshot of LA from forty years ago, the report didn’t categorize Los Angeles into the usual neighborhoods or community plan areas, but into scattered clusters with names like “the singles of Los Angeles,” “the suburbs from the fifties,” “richest of the poor,” “gracious living,” and more. The nomenclature was seemingly drawn more from market research than traditional city planning reports.

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The bureau may not have brought about the technocratic decision making its early proponents hoped for, but Romerol Malveaux told me that the Community Analysis Bureau did advance equality in a Los Angeles stratified from decades of segregation by providing information on what needs existed in the city’s many neighborhoods. There are some hopeful signs that LA’s current smart city efforts have those same inclusive goals. The winners of the hackathon launching LA’s open data portal were a team of high school student’s whose app is intended to help deliver supplies to homeless shelters. One of the city’s first funded efforts to apply an innovation approach to governance will be an effort to understand whether LA can have revitalization without displacement. ... If intelligent cities and open data can advance knowledge, efficiency, equity, and sustainability, a new generation of community analysis might fulfill the techno-optimism that took root in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles and is back with us today.