Laundromats have recently been closing down in San Francisco, which prompted a Google employee to tweet in response "cost of disruption: washio and others have removed need for laundromat on every block." Who needs laundromats when there's an app for that? Well, people who can't afford to spend $15 a pop on washing their socks, for starters. The tweet prompted a thoughtful article in Tech.Mic, in which the short-term gains of disruptive app inventors are speculatively played out to their potential society-eroding ends, especially in the arenas of transit and health care. In this case, the article points out that the laundry delivery app in question is exactly that: a delivery service that still uses third-party launderers to actually clean the clothes, but charges for the convenience.

Apparently, the San Francisco laundromats are closing mainly because of the usual gentrification pressures in the form of desirable cheap real estate, not necessarily because of apps. However, assuming that everyone can afford to live on a digital grid, as the author of this tweet seems to do, could dramatically re-shape our urbanity by centralizing or dislocating services such as laundry and grocery shopping from residential areas, essentially suburbanizing swaths of a formerly integrated city. So how much, if at all, will apps influence future urban planning? According to an article in Mashable, the Internet of Things has already started to play a greater role in future urban design. While the Internet of Things is distinct from apps, the basic idea of using millions of points of data to design more efficient cities is similar in that it replaces the notion of human experience with digital verifiability. Apps have disrupted industries; perhaps they will disrupt our design of cities, too.