URBAN AGE
London Conference, 6-7 December 2012
This
year’s Urban Age conference followed the
recent pattern of being issue-centered, rather than being primarily about a
particular city or region. The topic was
the Electric
The Endless City, a book representing
the integration of the findings of the first
series of conferences (which began in New
York
[q.v., my write up]
in February 2005 and which culminated in Berlin in November 2006 [with Shanghai, London, Johannesburg, and Mexico City in between], was released by Phaidon Press
in 2008. It was co-authored by Ricky
Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (member
of the Urban Age team and author of The
Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--and Their Architects--Shape the World, and many
other books).
The second series of conferences began in November 2007. The first of this series was Mumbai (q.v., my write up), followed by São Paulo, and, in 2009, Istanbul (q.v., my write up), which was
the final of the three meetings of this second series. Living in the Endless
City,
also co-authored by Ricky Burdett
and Deyan Sudjic and published by Phaidon Press (2011), presents an in-depth overview of the
findings from this series of conferences.
The
third series of conferences began in
December 2010 with the Global Metro Summit in Chicago, organized by LSE Cities in conjunction with
the Brookings Institution Metro Policy
Program. This conference explored
approaches and perspectives to overcome the current global economic crisis as
it affected cities. The Hong
Kong conference on Health and Well-Being (q.v., my write up) was
the second in this series of issue-centered conferences.
Introducing
the idea behind the Electric City, Ricky
Burdett, Director of the LSE Cities Program and of the Urban Age, and Wolfgang Nowak, Managing
Director of Deutsche's Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, wrote in
their introduction to the Conference
Newspaper,
In 1879 Thomas Edison invented the
light bulb and built the first power station on Pearl Street in Manhattan in
1882, while the German inventor Werner von Siemens installed the first electric
elevator in Manhattan in 1880, Since
then, electricity has powered—directly and indirectly—the shape and dynamics of
urban life.
It
is hard to remember just how basic electricity is to the very essence of our
modern urban life, except when disruptions to its supply or delivery make us
acutely and painfully aware of it, and it is easy to miss how much electricity
has shaped the form and structure of urban life, unless we remind ourselves
that what created the ability to build skyscrapers at the end of the 19th
century was the introduction of the elevator.
The Electric City conference used the fact that, as Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode (Executive
Director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age) put it,
electricity is re-emerging as the common
denominator of a new technological revolution; and the subject of the Electric
City was really the whole range of electric and electronic technology that is
reshaping our world and presenting multiple, fast-emerging possible futures for
it.
What
follows is my rough summary of the proceedings of the conference. The summaries are quite impressionistic, but I
hope they provide at least some sense of what was said by each
participant. (Eventually, many of the
actual presentations will be available on the Urban
Age
website. The program for the conference is currently available online by
clicking here. Some of the talks are already available on
YouTube videos; and, where they are, I shall include embedded links to their “video online” URLs. As others become available, they can be
located online by clicking here.
{My
own personal remarks in the sections below are set off in curved brackets}
DAY
1 : 6 December Thursday
Morning
Session
Opening
Conference Video (available online)
Welcome
Then
Craig Calhoun (photo on right,
below, with Ricky Birdett), an old urbanist friend (formerly from NYU) but now the newly
appointed Director of the London School of Economics, noted that
there were speakers from 30 cities, 15 countries, and 4 continents at this
eleventh Urban Age conference, and that over the history of these conferences
they have been attended by 4,500 people—presidents, mayors, and ministers of
government, as well as the planners, architects, real estate developers,
engineers, academics, etc.—who have
contributed to changing the questions researchers are asking and contributing
to the a new body of collaboratively created intellectual knowledge across many
disciplines. He introduced the theme and
intellectual framework of the conference, defining Electric City as the nexus
of social, economic, cultural, and political dynamics involved in and affected
by the burgeoning technology of the 21st century. Our infrastructure is crucially intermingled
with our culture and our intellectual and social life. The electric grid is an example of situations
of infrastructure where new technologies merge into our way of life. It involves not just old and existing sets of
infrastructure, but also the set of decisions and social history that shapes
our public life—how immigrants are integrated into the social grid, how class
is bridged or integrated into society.
It provides the context and conditions for what we understand as
action. It reflects Schumpeter's famous account of the destructive
side of capitalism, in which finance destroys society. {Schumpeter was an
interesting person to reference at the start of this conference which was to
speak so much to the crucially important role of entrepreneurship.} But while there
is a destructive side, there also is an exciting side. In considering what will truly transform
society, we need to deal with the problem of long term versus short term
Ricky Burdett (photo at right, with Craig Calhoun)
said the name Electric City was also a conscious avoidance of the term
"smart city." Electrification
drove urbanization in the 19th century.
In the 20th, the automobile changed things; but electricity was still
there, powering things. We are going to
focus on: 1) How to generate electricity in different ways (e.g., Guy's Hospital, in the heart of
London, is now generating clean electricity to power its operation); 2)
transportation (moving as efficiently as possible); and, 3) the space and place
of the cities of the future. And, of
course, we shall look at the personal dimension of how all this affects how we
communicate and engage. He quoted the
famous British architect Cedric Price, who decades ago said, "Technology
is the answer, but what is the question?"
That is what we shall be exploring.
And he said that we shall explore it in the world the Urban Age has been
examining: where the people are—India,
the Pacific Rim, the US, and parts of South America—where growth is
concentrated. He then introduced two
special guests to the conference:
David Cameron (Photo at left, below), Prime Minister of the UK, gave a talk
in which he began by saying that
Boris Johnson, Mayor
of London, then swept onto the podium in his inimitable fashion and began
by saying that 213 years ago London created the institutions that drove the
industrial revolution, and that now it has created the
biggest, most thriving high-tech cluster in Europe. There are now 24,000 tech businesses in
London; BT has just taken 100,000 ft2 of space in the Broadcast
center which was built for the 2012 London Olympics, and several other major
world players have recently announced that they are choosing London. He did a mock quiz, "asking" for
where many crucial technological breakthroughs of the past had taken place—the
answers all being various neighborhoods in London. He spoke of the importance
of the “vibe.” He said that we cannot
directly create the street vibe that makes London such a desirable site, but
that government can put in place the infrastructure and investment that encourages
its development. London is planning to
build two new underground stops on the Northern Line (which serves this area of
London), and to construct new river crossings.
London is doing all the things necessary to bring people together to
produce the “blinding flashes of innovation” that drive these new
industries. People ask why it is that
London has not created a billion pound company—and the answer is that there is no reason. It will.
(Sections of Mayor Boris Johnson’s talk are available in a video online)
Ricky showed graphics of the enormous
numbers of people per hour moving into cities, raising the issue of whether
cities will continue to grow in the forms they have—whether they grow without
limits and boundaries (like Mexico City) or like the denser, more bounded
version (like Hong Kong). São Paulo has
its 14 million people so spread out and so car dependent that people commute on
average 4 hours each day; Bogotá, on the other hand, has provided effective Bus
Rapid Transit and extensive bicycle lanes to move people cheaply and
efficiently. Density is the issue. Cities like London, New York, and Hong Kong are
quite different in where their inhabitants live, but they all have high concentrations
of people living near where they work, with good systems of public
transportation connecting people to their work places. Despite its growth, London's CO2
emissions have been decreasing.
Nevertheless, it is resilience—social as well as physical—that matters
most for the future if cities.
The
dynamo of cities: density, technology, and ideas
Craig Calhoun chaired the panel.
Dayan Sudjic (at left), Director of the Design
Museum, spoke on "The 21st
Century Legacy of the Electric Age."
Cities are shaped by ideas as well as by things, and
Saskia
Sassen
(at left), Professor of Sociology and
Co-Chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, spoke
on "Urbanizing Technology." She emphasized the need for cities to
"talk back," for technology to consider and listen to the
"speech" of cities. There is
the problem that technology needs to be urbanized—it needs to be made to
conform to the differing spatial formats within cities, forming intelligent
systems for the city, as opposed to imposing them onto cities. We need to take care to preserve what has
enabled cities to be so successful. We
must avoid smart cities becoming closed systems; but rather encourage an open
source technology for cities to maintain innovation, flexibility, and change. Urbanizing open source technology provides a
direction that can overcome some of the risks and rigidities of what is to
come. Perhaps a vision
of "city as hacker"? {You may wish to read Saskia’s article
in the Conference Newspaper}
A
new climate for the urban economy
The panel was chaired by Ed Glaeser.
Roland Busch, CEO
for Infrastructure & Cities Sector and Member of the Management Board of Siemens AG, spoke on "The
New Urban Infrastructure Business."
In 2011, the internet connectivity market for infrastructure and cities
was € 236 billion. Urbanization is the
most efficient way to provide infrastructure.
This market is extremely interesting to Siemens: transportation (how
efficiently to move people and goods; intelligent traffic flow), energy and
energy efficiency (energy efficient buildings), environment (reducing CO2
emissions), waste and water systems, crime prevention. Siemens has a City Account Management group,
high-competence people with a high level of integration,
and with expertise on various urban issues.
They have developed a Green Cities Index that they have used to
benchmark and evaluate 120 cities (Berlin's great energy efficient buildings;
London's plans to upgrade public transit—congestion pricing, GPS system for
buses). The future holds grids that talk
to buildings, urban and inter-urban mobility systems, power from renewables, intelligent buildings with no emissions. We need a more integrated look at cities,
rather than separate silo-thinking.
Holistic approaches are what will make cities work, with good civic engagement,
with the right technology and technology partnerships. Sustainability will create jobs and
innovative competitiveness.
Dimitri
Zenghelis (at
left), Senior Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate
Change and the Environment, LSE,
spoke on “The Green Economy: A Global
Perspective.” The use of resources
is increasing exponentially,
Judith Mayhew Jones, Chair
of London & Partners, commented
that the green economy in London has bucked the financial downturn, growing
5%/yr. The survey that was done by
Boris Johnson showed that London had enormous resources—and that things could
and should be driven by the boroughs.
Andy Altman (at right), Chief Executive for London
Legacy Development Corporation 2009-2012, warned that one can build a
“smart city” and still produce a dumb one if one forgets about the specific
fabric of the city (its urban form, with particular attention to what works
within it). In the planning for the
London 2012 Olympics, they looked carefully to what had made London great in the past, and they used that as the
foundation onto which to overlay the technology. A technological framework must be consistent
with the overall city form if it is to work.
Ed Glaeser
commented that while
the “Electric City” is a city of technology, it is also about the “electricity”
of people. The guiding principle is that
the parts have to “speak to each other.”
Jeremy Oppenheim, Director
for Sustainability and Resource
Productive Practice, McKinsey &
Co., noted that we need to focus on resource efficiency—and that if we are
to address the problem, cities must play the biggest role. We must address building efficiency, waste management,
building design; and, in this, institutions can either support or get in the
way of the process. Resilience is also a
major issue, given that 2/3 of major cities are exposed to major shocks—even
without taking climate change into account.
65 million people are moving into cities each year, the vast majority of
which are in coastal regions. This
vulnerability could be an enormous circuit breaker on the global economy. We need to create “voice” (communication,
engagement) to enable people to take ownership of the process.
Ed said that cities are centers of
vulnerability, and that much has to do with the strength of institutions—which
is what could be most crucial in Asia, where the biggest growth will be.
Jeremy raised the question of how to affect
the level of interaction with people.
Judith said we must look at
infrastructure—smart, appropriate infrastructure; and the defensive resiliency
of infrastructure—and the redundancy in infrastructure (e.g., multiple sub-stations and telephone exchanges.
Dimitri raised the question of what to do
with places that do not have the institutions.
He noted how much depends on the emergence of strong political
leadership on the mayoral level, and gave the example of Bogotá in South
America. He praised the vision involved
in creating congestion pricing. He noted
that the initial condition matters, and that the first steps involve huge risk.
Roland said how great it would be if
adequate planning could take place in China and India.
Bruce said it is important how we talk
about cities. They can be the centers of
innovation going forward, although this is not always the model.
Innovating
urban futures
Chair: Craig
Calhoun.
David Willets MP, Minister
of State for Universities and Science, UK,
gave a keynote which began by noting that cities are drivers of innovation and
creativity. Britain was the first
country to urbanize (reaching a peak of 50% in the 1850s), when its population
was only 20 million. Technology is
currently making possible new forms of city life: urban agriculture was long
delayed by the problem of the heat generated by incandescent lighting
(requiring enormous heights in buildings designed for the purpose), but that
this has been changed by the introduction of cool LED light sources, which can
provide the necessary light at a height of only 1 meter above the plants,
creating the reality of practical factory agriculture in an urban setting. Sophistication in programming has resulted in
a decreased amount of energy consumption by IT.
There are programs to fund other centers in the UK. The UK’s Technical Strategy Board (TSB) has
been an effective stimulator of technology business in the country; and its
Catapult centers have been successful in creating a critical mass for business
and research innovation by focusing on a specific technology where there is a
potentially large global market and a significant UK capability to address
it. (The first Catapult opened for business
in 2011, less than a year after Prime Minister David Cameron announced the £
200 million technology and innovation center program; and the six other
Catapults are in development and are expected to be operational in 2013) £ 1 billion are being spent to develop the
Northern Line of the London Underground to better serve its high-tech business
neighborhoods. There are a number of
things that are stuck, however: there
are many planning delays, there is a desire to expand the education role of
London in the world, the EU’s Galileo Satellite program (which eventually will
provide much higher accuracy GPS for cities than anything currently
available). Oxford should be a growth
center, but the local council has imposed limits on providing accommodation that
has severely hampered the institution’s growth.
It appears that standards in London’s schools are rising, partly due to
an increase of the number of mature students in London. The UK is learning from American competition,
where the pace of demographic growth and change has been attracting students.
DAY
1 : 6 December Thursday
Afternoon
Session
Continuity
or disruption: the impact of new urban technology
Chair: Philipp
Rode.
John Urry (at right), Professor of Sociology, Lancaster
University, gave the session keynote, “Sociotechnical
Scenarios for the Future of the City.”
Although the first car to go over 60 mph was an electric car, the
predominant technology has not been
electric, but rather based on fossil fuels.
The “car system” has been central to an individualistic, consumer culture—with
the car being a symbol of freedom. 95%
of all transportation energy is oil-based; and there is a declining ratio of
use to production of oil in the US. 1950
was the great turning point for emissions; the 60s marked the peak of the
discovery period for sources of oil (a straight rise from 1910; a straight
decline since the 1960s). There is an
indication of the decline of the car in the West; and the explosion of the
world’s population makes it impossible for the oil-based car system to be
available around the world, especially across Asia. {It
should be acknowledged, however, that the promulgation of this car culture—and
the consumer-based economic growth with which it is associated—is precisely
what the Chinese are quite consciously attempting to emulate, copying all too
accurately what the economic growth was based on in the US in the 20th
century.} Technology alone won’t
change things: these patterns are heavily embedded in social, economic, and
political life. Innovation has multiple
lines that require synchronization; he quoted Buckminster Fuller’s famous
saying, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that
makes the existing model obsolete.” He
also quoted W. Brian Arthur (The Nature
of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves), “A revolution does not fully
arise until we organize our activities—our business and commercial
procedures—around its technologies, and until these technologies adapt
themselves to us”; and he said the time frame is likely to be decades. He advanced the concept of
socio-technological systems in understanding what is at issue. He foresees four very different possible
future outcomes: one in which diminished possibilities caused by climate change
and dwindling oil supplies lead to diminished but locally sustainable life
styles (in which travel is greatly reduced, and activities become far more
local; GDP would decrease, but wellbeing might be higher for the shrinking
global population); a second, bleaker version, in which there would be a
breakdown of mobility, energy, and communications in the face of extreme
weather events and energy shortages (in which regional warlords would control
the access to remaining resources in endless battles with their neighboring
regions; governments would weaken and collapse, infrastructure would collapse,
there would be a plummeting standard of living); a third alternative of
hypermobility, based on new modes of transportation and communication (and at
least the rich, northern inhabitants of the world would prosper); and, finally,
a post-car, electric future (in which technology would come up with the most
efficient means of doing tasks, travel would be extremely energy efficient and
modest, and the consumption of energy would be appropriately and sustainably
priced). {You may wish to read
John’s article in the Conference Newspaper}
Rainer Becker, Chief
Operating Officer of car2go GmbH,
Daimler, AG, spoke about the company’s extensive business in providing cars
to people in cities for hourly use rather than to own—and how appealing the
program is to people in the younger generations, for whom car ownership is not
seen as a plus. He noted the amazing
fact that currently 15 times more space is devoted to parking than is to
education. The company is now expanding
the availability of electric-powered cars, which even further enhances its
environmental benefits.
Frauke
Behrendt (in
center in photo at left, below), Senior
Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Brighton, described the
universe of electric bicycles—from the electrically-assisted (that require
constant pedaling [and therefore most closely replicate traditional cycling], but
provide power assistance for hills [thereby making cycling open to a broader
audience]), through throttle-controlled (that one can pedal, but also can use
in a power-only mode), to electric scooters (that require no pedaling). The range makes cycling attractive to a wider
audience, and provides an energy-efficient mode of transportation, while still
inviting people to engage in exercise.
The plan is to provide programs for widely available city rentals, which
will provide electric bikes, much as the current “Boris Bikes” program in
London provides easily available access to regular bikes.
Kent Larson, Director,
Cities Science Initiative MIT Media Lab,
described the notion of transformable houses (which are designed to utilize a
small available space for multiple purposes, using movable walls, multi-purpose
furniture, complex wall units, etc.). He described other integrated projects, in
which resources could be shared rather than just being for housing. He also gave some descriptions of technology
that will potentially revolutionize our modes of residential living (e.g., new forms of lighting, sensing,
computer controls, and local need analysis within the living environment that
adjust household functions to maximize comfort and minimize energy use).
Greg Lindsay (on right in photo at left, above), Journalist, Fast Company and Visiting
Scholar, NYU, maintained that
innovation comes from chance encounters between individuals. The fact that so many work places are
confined to traditional office buildings, with mono-cultural offices
discourages this process. He raised the
question of how to foster chance encounters and cross-fertilization of ideas in
an office environment. One way is co-working, in which employees share space
with people not part of the same company.
Liquid Space is a similar idea, where different people are issued
passports and visas that allow them to participate across traditional
borders. He also spoke of using social
networks and applying it onto GPS data to find potential matches—a kind of
“sonar” for “engineering serendipity.”
Philipp noted that there are those who
recommend against going vertical in order to promote innovation.
Kent said that there are co-working
centers cropping up in many cities.
Ideally, neighborhoods conducive to innovation need to be within two
blocks of public transportation, and they need to have a network of cafes,
restaurants, and gathering places.
Patrick Cerwall, Head
of Strategic Marketing and Intelligence, Ericsson, spoke about smart phones.
Ericsson is predicting 50 billion connected devices by 2020; there are
already 1.1 billion smart phones in use as of the end of 2012—40% of the
world’s phones being smartphones. They
predict 85% of the world’s population will have high speed internet by 2018.
Tom Hulme, Design
Director (on left in photo at left, above), IDEO, London, said that citizen-centered thinking was going to be the key
in the participation economy; have to look at the “desire paths”—even the
gathering of information may involve the passive participation of communities (e.g., passive data collection from
motion sensitive smart phones can be used to map the location of potholes in
the roads). But there is a collective
activity paradox: there would have been
no personal risk to Rosa Parks if everyone had chosen to act that day in
Montgomery, Alabama; on the other hand, if she had waited for everyone to act,
nothing would have happened. There is a
process that relies on inspiration, moves through group formation, then to
evaluation, and ultimately to winning concepts
Kent said there was an issue of
agility—the ability to move to where the jobs are, life accommodation.
Infrastructure
for social progress: a global outlook
Wim
Elfrink (at
left), Chief Globalization Officer
and Executive Vice President for the
Industry Solutions Group, Cisco, in discussing high-tech
solutions, emphasized that technology is just a tool, an enabler, not the solution. There are many challenges: 700 million
people will be urbanized; only 50% in
India and Africa have access to healthcare and education—more with internet
connection than with healthcare; a shortage of 4 million teachers in India
alone. The problems are more severe in
the emerging world, but there are common themes: Safety and security, access to healthcare and
education, talent mismatched (supply to demand), and energy management. Everything will become connected—30 billion
devices; and this will enable new technologies (e.g., Integrated Operations Center, Citizen Service Menu). The issue is how to turn data into wisdom:
data to information to knowledge to wisdom.
The problem is the monetization model.
What is required is visionary leadership. Global open
standards (to reduce cost), smart regulation. Public/private partnerships need to be
created; we need to team up to create new ecosystems.
Julio Dávila, Director,
Development Planning Unit, UCL, spoke about low-tech experience in
the world of poverty. Mobility usually
works for the wealthy; the poor suffer from being anchored to one spot. In Medellin, Colombia, relatively low-cost
ski lift technology was employed to create the Metrocable lines to provide
accessibility to some of the poorest, more conflict-riddled neighborhoods of
the city. Line K rises 400m over its 2 km length,
built at a cost of $11.6 million/km. (A
considerable amount of money was also spent on a major upgrading of the
informal settlements along its route.)
This publically-owned operation gave enormous visibility to the poverty
of the city, while creating a collective sense of self-esteem in the community.
Ken Banks, Founder
of Kiwanja and Co-Chair, Mobile Web for Social Development Group, spoke about connecting
disadvantaged communities through the mobile phone. Technology is energizing
rural communities. Where there used to
be at best a single phone box for a community, there are now mobile phones. People are figuring out how to use mobile
phones to deal with the problems of life: 50% of Kenya’s GDP will go through
its mobile banking system. The question
remains how we can deliver healthcare through this route and get information
back out of the system. It is not such a
difficult question with smart phone technology, but much trickier with simple
mobile phones—and the vast majority of mobile phones in poor areas of the world
{some estimate as high as 90%} are not “smart” (i.e., internet enabled).
But every mobile phone on the planet will do SMS as well as voice, and
this provides a way to connect to poor communities. FrontlineSMS has developed a technology to use
non-internet enabled phones in a way to enable instantaneous two-way
communication on a large scale, in order to collect and disseminate
information; it lowers the barriers to positive social change and enables NGOs
and grassroots organizations to create a meaningful means of exchange. He noted the need to buffer communities
against future shock, but he also recognized the power assets that can be
accessed from communities. He said that
game developers create games to figure things out that don’t exist; he
suggested that networks of citizens might be able similarly to create things
that do not yet exist—and solutions to problems that actually do exist.
Mark Swilling, Professor
and Coordinator, Sustainable Development Programme, University of Stellenbosch, discussed
the role of technology in the green transition of cities, and said that
digitalization would play a key part in achieving sustainability. There needs to be a shift from linear to
circular flows in cities; urban infrastructure needs to be reconfigured in a
way that makes it work the way we want to see—to do more with less. The question is whether we can reconcile what
is required to shape cities and our desire for democracy, or do we have to go
to less democratic means. Things work
best when we can use knowledge gained from outside combined with internal
control. One-size-fits-all will not
work; it has to be particularized to specific places and situations. He is going to be testing out some approaches
in South Africa.
Edgar noted that there is a tension between
democratic dysfunction and the need to create change. In China the issue is scaling change; in
India it is how to spread it.
Wim said that it is crucial we come to
informed decisions, whether democratic or not.
Mark noted that local officials are being
offered flashy solutions—and financing—by private companies. The question is what actually happens.
Ken pointed out that technology can
exacerbate a problem rather than dealing with it. He raised the question about whether we
should even think about populating places where people cannot live without air
conditioning.
Julio said that the next wave of growth
will be in medium-sized cities, and raised the question whether these cities
will be able to resist the Siren call of ready fixes. Part of the success of Medellin is based on
the fact that it has a strong institutional tradition.
Wang Shi, Chairman
of China Vanke Co. and Executive
Manager of the China Real Estate Association,
said that there is a need for smart regulations.
Nicky Gavron, Deputy
Mayor of London from 2000-2008 and London
Assembly Member and Chair of the
Planning Committee, said that London
had been locked into the wrong infrastructure, and that their task had been how
to transition it to low-carbon emissions.
They needed a strong policy context, which was provided by the London
Plan and its Integrated Spatial Plan.
They need to accommodate a growing urban population, predicted to be 1
million over the next decade. They
decided that London would be a compact city with good public transport and a
high level of mixed use development.
They need mixed income neighborhoods, and they wanted people to have
choices. London instituted a successful
program of congestion pricing, and it is moving to hydrogen powered buses. They invested £ 200 million (and an ancillary
£ 100 million), all of which was paid back in a few years.
Abha Joshi-Ghani, Director
of Thematic Knowledge and Learning, World Bank Institution, Small,
mid-sized cities have the least developed systems and the weakest
institutions—and will see the
bulk of urbanization. How
can we use technology to help? Only 20%
of this population has access to the internet, but a vast majority has mobile
phones. People in developing countries
already use their mobile phones for many practical purposes (e.g., where the best fishing is to be
found, who is doing something that is illegal)—things that can make cities more
workable. On the other hand, every
Indian and Pakistani {and, I should
add, Chinese} wants a car for
himself—and we have to find some way to change this culture, because the world
cannot survive that becoming a reality.
We need to find ways to use technology to make cities more sustainable
and livable—and creating cyber-communities to deal with problems offers a
powerfully important approach to this.
Simon Giles, Lead,
Intelligent City Strategy, Accenture, said that the lack of trust
people have in the technology they are presented with is smart. From his experience in Mexico, he knows that
there is a lack of communication, business models, financing, and master plans. There needs to be more community input from
the beginning of planning processes; a more integrated approach is needed, one
that is multi-disciplinary from the outset, and which recognizes the human
capital that is necessary to make things work.
This involves a different approach to government, and a different
approach to real estate development, where traditionally the main profits are
reaped by the developer. He suggested
that communities need to set up foundations which own the land to be developed,
and business models that reframe how the developing is financed and takes
place. Such foundation trust development
models could provide more social justice and protect projects from the vagaries
of electoral processes.
Edgar said that the notion Simon was
suggesting of bypassing local government was interesting; but that we also need local government. Perhaps we need to consider the idea of
abandoning planning itself?
Mark said that we should not be against
planning. {There implicitly are two very different notions of planning involved
here: the top-down, large-scale, imposed
version of planning that actually attempts to design entire cities, and the
planning that is about creating the conditions for growth within cities—usually
by focusing on designing the public realm (streets, parks, grids)—rather than
the city as a whole; the former has
historically shown itself to be a colossal failure and waste of time, whereas
the latter is both necessary and, if done well, successful.} We need to give up the
idea that everyone is going to agree.
There is tremendous capacity available, but it has to be connected
within the planning process.
Wim said that collaboration was necessary
to produce solutions. There are
different models around the world. How
do we get constituents together? The
clock is ticking: huge numbers of people
need solutions, and they will need them soon.
Edgar reminded everyone that there is a
cost-point factor; but is it something about which you reach consensus? There
is also a question of scale. How does
one aggregate the voice of the unrepresented?
How does power aggregate in cities?
Institutions must be considered social-technological systems, as John
Urry was describing.
DAY
2 : 7 December Friday
Morning
Session
Culture
and innovation in the electric city
Chair: Jeff
Mulligan, Chief Executive, NESTA
Richard Sennett (at right), Professor of Sociology at the LSE
and University Professor of the
Humanities at NYU, and one of
the founders of the Urban Age, gave the keynote entitled, “Stupefying the Smart City.”
The first results
…each activity has an appropriate
place and time. Urbanites become
consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations.
Foster’s idea is that there is a
one-way flow from the central command center (CCC) to the…urbanite [who] can
report information, but the CCC makes the interpretation of what it means and
how the [urbanite] should act on it. …no
knowledge of the city has to be fought for.
So there’s no cognitive stimulation through trial and error, no personal
encounter with resistance. User friendly in Foster’s pan…means choosing menu
options, rather than creating the menu.
…creating a new menu entails…being at
the wrong place at the wrong time. In
nineteenth-century European cities, for instance, new markets for semi-legal
goods developed at the supposedly dead zones near the city’s walls; so in
twentieth-century American cities like Boston, new ‘brain industries’ developed
at the edges, in places where zoning never imagined their growth.
Songdo
in South Korea is similarly ‘stupefying’ in its deadeningly inflexible
over-planning and lack of diversity: there is nothing to be learned from
walking the streets, no horizontal value in the space—and it is in the
horizontal plane that we extend outward our contact with other people. Contrast this to NYC (he showed a slide of
Third Avenue), where, even with its regular grid (and terrible vertical plane),
the diversity, individuality, and irregularity of the horizontal—and the
individual units into which the space is sub-divided—creates ambiguity, an
incompleteness in the horizontal, that requires active interpretation—and which
results in a stimulation and a sense of neighborhood. {Those of us who believe
that the correct role of planning is to create a framework for and the
conditions for growth and development, leaving the specific infill to be
created by the vitality, creativity, and individual choices of the inhabitants
themselves, know that this has always been the case: all of the truly successful city planning
(including marvelous and still-successful examples like Sawai Jai Singh’s early
18th century planned city of Jaipur) focuses on designing the public
realm, allowing for the private, organic, diverse—and at times
chaotic—development of what emerges within and around that planning.}
The uniformity and explicit over-specification of form and function
takes away the genius of the city and diminishes its traditional sources of
economic innovation and the richness of its social and cultural life. Richard used the example of the Central
Operations Center in Rio (created jointly by IBM and Cisco) as a good version of
technology being used for information gathering and co-ordination in a way not
he claimed was not guilty of the kind of stupefying pre-planning he was
describing—dealing with complexity on the ground, rather than trying to
preclude it. {I was not able to agree with him at all on this. I also had problems with his conception that
urban space needed to be “not understandable” directly: while I agree that good spaces require and
invite an active interaction with themselves, there are extraordinary spaces that
have always created amazing levels of active engagement by virtue of how directly graspable they are by those
within them (the Quattrocento spaces of Brunelleschi may provide the most
powerful examples of this—particularly creations like his 1419 Sagrestia
Vecchia or his Cappella Pazzi from the 1430s).
Other than these two quibbles, however I found Richard’s talk powerfully
on target.} (Richard’s talk is available in a video online)
Adam Greenfield, Managing
Director of Urbanscale, NYC, raised the question, what is a
“smart city.” If we look at the
marketing analysis in the literature of businesses that offer smart city
technology (e.g., IBM, Cisco), we see
definitions like “the integration of public and private demand across networks
of infrastructure,” “the interface between real estate and technology,” or,
worse, “occupant support and convenience systems” We need to be careful of the whole Le
Corbusier watchfulness from above; and we have to be cautious about for whom
this is being designed—because the answer is that it is being deployed for the
benefit of a managerial elite and administrators, not for the inhabitants of
the cities. In fact, the “smart city”
has nothing to do with cities: it is a
way of using turn-key solutions which businesses already have, and applying
them to cities without regard to the specific realities on the ground. It ignores the whole Jane Jacobs idea of
spontaneous order from below. In
thinking about cities, we must remember that it is always “this” city—and that it must always be for all of us.
Jeff said that we must remember that
cities always historically have some “plumbing”; what is the role of
infrastructure?
Richard said that the end point should be as flexible
as possible, creating systems that can grow.
Adam agreed: “the smarter the network, the
dumber the people connected to it.”
Richard pointed out that some of the
direction of all of this is driven by the fact that there is money to be made
in “closing” the system, whereas it is the openness of systems that it
crucially important for cities.
Wolfgang Pietsch, Munich
Center for Technology in Society, drew attention to the impact of “big
data” on the social sphere. Everything is
becoming connected; and, in the future, there will be an integration of the
physical and social worlds that will permit the collection of ever larger sets
of data concerning all aspects of human existence—and this is already
happening. This allows the establishment
of meaningful data for prediction and control in the social spheres. The fact is that in the area of weather
prediction, more data, increasing computational power, and better models have
clearly led to vastly better ability to make accurate predictions (today,
five-day predictions are as good as three-day predictions were 10 years
ago). In the realm of social
forecasting, we have huge amounts of data (much collected by inadvertent
providers, and done by large, private companies) and great computer
capacity. These data sets improve
ability to make accurate predictions about social phenomena. He reminded us about Francis Bacon’s quote
from 1620, “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is
not known the effect cannot be produced.”
One needs to recognize that predictability leads to control (e.g., the Obama 2008 re-election
campaign successfully used a sophisticated, custom-built, constantly-evolving
algorithm with hundreds of variables to predict any given voter’s allegiance
and level of enthusiasm). A new
instrument of power has arisen—the massive amount of data controlled by a small
number of companies. The problem with
what the analysis of these huge data sets makes possible goes far beyond one of privacy: the issue is
how this power should be used and who should be able to use it. (Wolfgang’s talk is available in a video online)
Jeff referenced the “Fourth Paradigm”
(Microsoft’s proposed addition [available free online] to the first three paradigms
[experimental, theoretical, and computational science]): the paradigm of the
analysis of massive data sets).
Carlo Ratti, Director,
MIT Sustainable City Lab, agreed
that Songdo and Masdar are not good examples. He raised the question of how
technology is changing design. He used
as an example Formula One racing: 10-15 years ago, it was about having a good
car and a good driver; now, thousands of sensors collect data that is analyzed
during the race to provide real time control that is essential to the
outcome. Cities are going in this
direction: sensors are collecting data
that can be analyzed and acted on—allowing cities to speak to us, a technology→design→people
model. An example MIT created for the
Zaragoza World Expo in Spain, thinking about how can we use water differently:
created a building in which the walls were made entirely of sheets of water,
programmed to take varying shapes, to display patterns, images and text—and all
responding to input from sensors as visitors approached from different
directions (a technology→people→design paradigm). He described one evening, however, where the
computer control of the water walls broke down, when the patterns failed to
respond to sensor data about where people were in relation to them, and how
interesting the result was—and how actively engaged visitors became in trying
to deal with the randomness of it. MIT
now provides Wi-Fi all over its campus, and this has changed the work patterns
of people using the campus; but we can also get information from where and how
people are using Wi-Fi. When technology
is everywhere, one tends to forget about it, allowing us to go back to focusing
on what we’re passionate about—people and spaces. {You may wish to read the article co-authored by Carlo and Anthony
Townsend in the Conference Newspaper}
Jeff asked whether this technology will transform
the social sciences.
Judy Wajcman, Professor
of Sociology, LSE,
answered, certainly not: there are issues about “big data,” the same things
we’ve been hearing about—not always
so efficient (e.g., the financial
crisis). We have been talking about the
electric city, but we haven’t said much about the electric home—domestic
applications in single-family households,
The engineering sense of what a house is is not about what houses are
really like.
Ayesha Kahanna, Managing
Partner, Urban Intel, said that
treating people as objects causes problems.
We have been giving away a lot of personal data; people need to be
included in the debate about what happens to these data. Carlo said that once invisible, technology
becomes dangerous; we need to take control of the responsibility which we too
easily give away. We can improve the
quality of life in the home.
Mark Major, Founding
Partner, Speirs & Major,
spoke about light and lighting and the social aspects of them: the nighttime
economy of the UK now exceeds £ 66 billion.
Light plays a major economic role.
Jeff reminded us that we also need to
consider the role of darkness.
Mark said there was a conference on
darkness in Chile. We have to be aware
of light pollution—cities that never sleep.
There will be a need for darkness in the city of the future, much as
there was a need for green areas in the 19th century.
Michael Kimmelman (at
right), Architecture Critic for the New
York Times, was struck by the fact that what was most interesting was when
the technology of the water house broke down and people began developing their
own form of interacting with the randomness of what was happening. We cannot just rely on design from above. Brasília is an interesting case: Oscar Niemeyer (who had died at 104 the day
before the conference) once said, “You might not want to live in Brasília, but
it’s a real city.”; but it remains true that the
top-down design of that city has never really worked in terms of urban
life. There is also the relationship between
commerce and information that must be considered. He said that resilience is the creative
answer. It is often said that the events of Tahrir Square were about technology
and virtual reality; but really it was all about people coming together in actual
space. We are constantly overestimating
the effects and power of technology, although we will find ways to use it. After hurricane Sandy, there was the urgent
question of the need to redesign the actual city. We have to avoid the overestimation of technology
rather than the real environment.
Adam said that at times like Sandy, people
discover capacities they did not know they had, using the Occupy Sandy movement
as an example.
Richard called attention to the problem of the
fact that the government was building a “center for innovation” in the area of
the conference; think about it: in this
area innovation has been occurring despite
what was here. Build dedicated space to
creativity, and this area is over! The great center for people meeting in this
area had been the Pret-á-Manger…because it had great, free Wi-Fi.
Jeff raised the question, how do we
smarten the city?
Michael said that it was by democratizing
resources. Libraries become critical
elements in working class and poorer neighborhoods. We need community centers for the poor, the
older population. We need a technology
that has changed the nature of the space, which changes the institutions.
Carlo said that it is all about people.
Mark said that it was not just new
technology, but also older ones that we are getting smarter about.
Ayesha claimed that bottom-up / top-down
dichotomy was a false debate: we need both.
We need the physical and the technological together; and this requires
huge investment.
Michael said that we need to have
organizational expertise and institutional decision making that is not entirely
democratic.
A
woman from the audience noted that young people are actually not expanding their networks; it has
been found that electronically they are really interacting only with people
they already know. There is a need for
physical space in order really to expand connection.
Wolfgang noted that the economic crisis was not about collecting data sets, but
about different sorts of manipulation altogether. You do have to be worried
about the kinds of control that are made possible by these data sets; it is a
question of how to provide for the freedom to act and choose.
Richard asserted that the issue of technology
created a different configuration for the study of the city that requires the
development of a psychology of understanding it. The more technologically focused we get, the
more we need to think about the psychological issues.
Jeff ended the session on an optimistic
note: it has been observed that IQ scores are rising 1.4 points/yr, and that
this increase correlates with urbanization.
Enhanced conceptual reasoning seems to be the issue—something that urban
life encourages, but that that technologies may not normally encourage.
Designing
place for the digital age
Chairs: Michael Kimmelman and Ricky Burdett (in photo above, with Alejandro to the right, and Bjarke’s back in foreground).
Alejandro
Zaera-Polo (at right), Founder,
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
Architecture, Dean of the School of Architecture, Princeton University, spoke on “The Impact of Digital Technology on the
Spaces of Cities.” He has been part of an experiment at Princeton, Culture
Now, aimed at assessing how architecture could contribute to American
Culture. The concept and reality of
internet space is challenging the very foundations of architecture: what happens when instead of physical form
and place, things have an IP address—when urban space is replaced by other
space that enables the sharing of content and knowledge? He said that that that paradigm for architecture of the
past few decades is changing: the old paradigm was of large buildings
constructed out from custom-made components; the new paradigm is becoming one
of individualized products—a kind of assemblage of discreet and
accreted assembled parts. The
shift away from patron-based architecture occasioned by the internet allows
customization and crowd-sourced production, in which the people become the
creators. He pointed to a parallel
between the informal cities of Latin America which are assembled organically by
their inhabitants and the growing utilizing of shipping containers as buildings
or building blocks for buildings.
Sharing is a pivotal issue—in information, apartments, or even finance
(as in micro-finance). Internet
applications like Foursquare and Google are beginning to focus on physical
location—which is a sudden departure from the “worldwide” quality of the web,
instead moving toward localized networks.
A regeneration of certain neighborhoods of Detroit has been occurring
built around the use of Indaba (a music sharing site). But these approaches are less effective in
effectuating physical output; more typically the projects are temporary, or scaffolding-based. To survive in this new paradigm, architects
will need to become more entrepreneurial.
Michael commented that we began looking for a
style. There is a question of
capital. We have discovered, as the
economy has come apart, the question of who is going to pay; and this has led
to much smaller things. But these often
are not very architectural. What will
architecture be doing?
Alejandro answered, “Same as always.” It will formalize these processes into
streets. We have to put things out there
and see what takes. We are moving toward
an architecture that is more entrepreneurial.
Michael said that there was a problem with
the incompleteness, temporariness.
Alejandro said some things will be
permanent. We need to establish a new
canon for architecture—an accretion of selves.
Ricky said there needs to be a modesty about what architecture is about; accretion brings
a sense of time. One needs to pay
attention to 5, 10, 20 years—to look ahead in a way we often do not.
Alejandro said that architects can learn to
produce incompleteness.
Erick Spiekermann,
CEO, EdenSpiekermann (at leftt),
spoke on “Mapping and Designing Urban
Systems.” He described
Michael disagreed about the High Line and
defended it as a successful part of a people-workable structure. He agreed though that, as with architecture,
it is necessary to listen to people.
Alejandro added that architects can detect and
formalize certain latent things in a way that make these processes explicit.
Erik said the question is what we do by
design.
Michael questioned what the moral role of
“design-ness” was; how do we understand morally the issue of regular bicycles
as contrasted with £ 3,500 Mercedes electric bikes.
Erik said we must be translators.
Bjarke Ingles (at right), Architect and Principal, BIG, spoke on “Meaning and Symbolism of Green Architecture and Urbanism.” As for sustainability, the question usually is how
much of our life we
are willing to sacrifice for it. What
if we could increase the quality of our lives through sustainability? He used
as an example what he and his firm had done for Denmark’s Pavilion at the
Shanghai Olympics: they created a Danish “blue bicycle path” through the
pavilion, on which visitors could ride using Danish City-Bikes; they brought
harbor water from Copenhagen to fill a swimming pool, to demonstrate that the
city had succeeded in raising its quality of life by cleaning up the water in
the harbor to the degree that swimming in it was now the reality; and, because
the Chinese used three Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales in their public
school curriculum, he convinced the government to allow him to bring the city’s
statue of The Little Mermaid to be part of the exhibit. Sustainability can have aesthetic advantages,
as well (e.g., the energy efficient
building BIG did for the energy company in Shenzhen—energy efficiency achieved
using low-tech methods with good aesthetic results). Working with public participation is
important: in response to the riots in Copenhagen following the Prophet
Mohammed carton uproar, they mobilized participation and ownership in a public
space project they did in a challenged, multi-ethnic neighborhood in Copenhagen
by having residents nominate elements from their home countries for inclusion
and weaving them into a park with color-coded ethnic diversity of form and
object—and even sound. He spoke about
social infrastructure and “re-appropriating the industry of the past.” In BIG’s Vancouver project, they took an
urban wasteland shredded into pieces by the intersecting highways and utilized
the constrictions of the setback regulations to inform the shape of the
building they created, which expands out from the tiny, restricted triangular
footprint of its base in a beautiful curvilinear way as it moves upward—and
they exploited the undersides of the bridges at its base to create a public
space with the ceilings functioning as projected photography gallery. He also described the Loop City master plan
project BIG designed for Copenhagen—including the fantastical, huge (it will be
the biggest and tallest building in Denmark) power plant building they designed
for the waterfront that will use trash for fuel, will have a ski slope (Denmark
has snow but no mountains) on top of it, and that will purposely make visible
its carbon emissions (even though it will be the cleanest waste-burning power
plant in the world) by releasing them in the form of measured smoke rings (when
it has accumulated 200 kilos of CO2, so that five will equal a ton)
from its enormous smoke stack. He said
that knowledge was power, and that he always strove to make abstract elements
very concrete. The more information
people have, the more informed their decisions can be. (Bjarke’s talk is available in a video online.)
Michael asked how one is to differentiate the
multi-cultural park he did in Copenhagen from Epcot Center or Disney
World. What actual social change will it
produce?
Bjarke replied that the park was
created out of everyday objects chosen by citizens, and thus it was a more truthful portrait of the people who
actually live there. It is without
irony, but full of humor and surprise.
It turned out to be more tasteful than we had imagined—and it is very
highly used.
Michael asked whether he saw it as a place
that would be politicized.
Bjarke said that it was an extreme exercise
in inclusion. A lot of different people
from a lot of different backgrounds co-habiting a limited amount of space—it
works because it was a collaborative effort and it created a sense of space for
everyone. Interesting to see what it
looks like when we have people fulfill part of their desires.
Ricky asked how he gets these projects
accepted. How did you convince them to
put out the amount of money necessary to do that power plant? {a very
interesting—and complicated—question, especially given the fanciful nature of
the elements, and the project’s enormous scale}
Bjarke said that over the past decade they
have been very active. It is the
proverbial debate about architecture: we have to listen to the needs of the
people; but then we have twisted the realm of the possible.
Ricky said that Bjarke has helped shift the
paradigm. He concluded the session by
asking the three speakers what the one word would be that they would use to sum
up the interesting perspectives they had presented. He asked Alejandro, who hesitated, and Ricky
suggested “assemblage”?; and Alejandro shrugged and
nodded.
Erik answered, “legibility.”
Bjarke said “concreteness.”
Implications
for the public realm
Chair:
Deborah Saunt, Director, DSDHA Architecture
and Urban Design, introduced the two illustrious men of great stature—both
of whom have been central participants in the Urban Age Program—who were to
discuss together the issue of the public realm.
Richard Rogers, Architect
and Chair, Rogers Stirk Harbour +
Partners, said it always has to be more about space than about
technology. When he did the Pompidou
center, it was not just to make a building, it was to
create a place. There is immense optimism about designing
society with technology, but, at the other end of the spectrum, for creating
design-driven social change apart from technology—both are true. The printing press is probably the biggest
example of all time of how a technological innovation developed a profound set
of social changes.
Richard Sennett said that it was difficult to picture
what was going to happen with current technology; he wished he could live
another 50 years to see it—and how the creation of complexity will play out
over that span of time. He predicts that
the scale of things will shrink: that
what is called “public realm” will be more like 30m2, since we are
so much more able to locate other people, we don’t need that much room.
Richard Sennett said we don’t need technology for
that. Technology allows us to experience with different scale, however.
Deborah asked what about getting lost in the
city.
RR it depends on your sense of
direction. We are moving in a different
direction, but that doesn’t change.
RS said that he loves getting lost. He never uses GPS…except when he wants to get
somewhere. What he treasures is the
surprise—the essential experience of complexity.
RR said that movements and aspirations
have not changed that much.
RS said we need to talk about the
“demon” of the relation between technology and social class. There is a huge issue about technology for
poorer people.
Deborah asked whether there was a guiding
principle for dealing with this.
RR answered that is would be a question
of dealing with and shaping financial pressures.
An
urban response to climate change
Chair:
Tony Travers, Director, British Government
at LSE, and Director, LSE London.
Anthony Giddens (at
right), Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, and Emeritus
Professor (and former Director),
LSE, gave a wonderful keynote on “Re-Industrialization in a New Electric Age.” We are in a new age, but it is not an electric age—the “electric city” is
not a novelty at all: the modern city
(which dates from the late 19th century) is already everywhere an
electric city (he referred importantly to Phillip Schewe’s 2006 book, The Grid). The places the real change comes from—and the
two great convergent themes of living in cities today—are: 1) “the grid”
(which, of course, is virtually synonymous with the computerized communications
system, once we think of the grid as everywhere and recognize all the things
that are dependent on it), which has become the very condition for industrial
civilization, calls for endless consumption of energy—it unfortunately takes
power for granted, and, since we still rely more than 90% on fossil fuels for
power, it leads to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that eventually will
undermine the very civilization we have built (the underlying science for which
he finds fundamentally irrefutable); and, 2) the whole arena of environmental
sustainability. The reality of the world
living beyond its means will give rise to three major consequences. The first is the massive rise of energy
politics (although energy had been politicized for a long time, formerly it was
only in relation to Middle Eastern politics)—which has become more open,
involves more people, is more contested, and is more consequential. To arrive at the needed balance of security,
sustainability, and job creation, we will require a smart grid—particularly
since the demands of new technology are intermittent. The second is the need to view the city as a
center of production, not only of consumption, which involves a truly
transformational shift: computers are
beginning to exist not only in the virtual world (in which we design things, or
write things), but they also are entering the world of physical reality (e.g., 3-D printers, which can actually
be used to manufacture an amazing diversity of objects in an urban setting)—but
this is just the early edge of a world in which computers will increasing make the world. Digital fabrication could reverse the whole
previous movement of manufacturing from high labor cost countries to low labor
cost ones. The motto could become: think
globally, manufacture locally. The third
consequence of our civilization’s massive dependence on energy is city as dystopia: when he first wrote his 2008 Politics of
Climate Change” (available online), there had been hope that something
could be done to control GHG emissions and climate change; unfortunately, we
have lost control of the climate change process—and we have lost hope. Even at best, we will not be able to avoid
many of its consequences. Even a small
change in global temperature will lead to much more extreme weather (more
violent storms and more severe droughts)—leading to a necessity to deal with
some of the dystopian possibilities for cities.
We have to start building in resilience to deal with these now
unavoidable consequences. Poorer
countries cannot afford to do this; and, even in wealthy, westernized,
industrial countries, it will require vast resources and effective long-term
planning—and politicians in democratic countries are not so good at long-term
thinking. We have moved into a new phase
of history, and one that faces risks different from any that have gone before,
and which could destroy civilization on a global scale: it is a high opportunity/high
risk future. What is important about
dystopian visions is how to avoid them, and that requires recognizing the
reality of the risks. (Tony’s talk is available in a video online) {You
might wish to read Tony’s excellent article in the Conference
Newspaper.}
Tony asked whether the decreasing trust
people have in politicians make this more difficult.
Tessa Jowell, Member
of Parliament, UK, asserted that
“trust” is too high a bar. We are,
however, a trusting society, and we can do things to increase confidence—which
is preferable to trust as a measure.
Craig Calhoun said that if we are a society that
runs on trust, we are in trouble, as we have serious problems in public
trust. There are massive risks that are
real and unsettle us; but risks are not good at guiding meaningful change. He raised the question of what is effective
in shaping response in existing political organization. Cities are sites of considerable social
self-organization; but they are also structures of inequality which externalize
the negative byproducts of what we do.
We need to ask the resilience question in relation to the poorer,
low-technology cities. Repurposing may
end up being more important than imagining new things. We need to imagine things leading to socially
collaborative action to enable us to create a politics that would allow us to
take advantage of what technology has to offer.
Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor
of Bogotá 1998-2001, said that cities will grow hugely, especially in the
developing world. Sustainability is
strongly related to inequity. Mexico
City has doubled in population, but grown seven-fold in land area—and this is
not a pattern that is consistent with sustainability or equality. We need to make the decision to make cities
for everybody.
Maarten Hajer, Director, Netherlands Environmental Assessment
Agency, said that there is an order of magnitude issue that has not been in
the room, and it is the real problem of energy.
The last half of the 20th century was all based on fossil
fuels, and we need something new. We
need a coalition of the willing: some big corporations, some NGOs, some
cities. The fossil fuel era will not end
because of a lack of coal, just as the Stone Age did not end because people ran
out of stones. There will have to be a
reorientation of values; societal energy will have to be channeled in the right
directions. Arguments framed in solely
technological terms tend not to be effective in changing people’s attitudes and
behaviors; people have to be engaged as individual human beings, with
consideration being paid to their fears and desires. There needs to be a
collaboration between citizens and governments. Citizens must have the
opportunity to get organized, and then, together with government
administrators, search for solutions. We
have to tax carbon; we have to get the incentives right—and all this needs to
be seen as doing good. {You may wish to read the article
co-authored by Maarten and Hiddo Huitzing in the Conference
Newspaper}
Tessa said there is a theme: the big
challenges (shaping cities, climate change) require new politics and new
politicians.
Anthony said we have to recognize the reality
of risk, which is a different thing. The
science on this is extremely solid.
Trust in politicians’ programs first requires trust in science. Cities need to be sites of production, and
they need to be equitable—we need to have there be something in all this for
poor people.
Craig said that we need solutions that
don’t depend on a master plan; and then we have to imagine the scaling up. It may mean we end up seeing a partial
disintegration of institutions as we know them today.
Enrique said that more quality of
infrastructure leads to more equality—and the same is needed for
sustainability.
Maarten said that the risk is that politics
gets caught up in unproductive ways. We
need to make sure we make work for people and make the quality of life better
for them.
Governing
urban transformation
Chair:
Greg Clark, City and Regional Development Advisor.
Philipp Rode (at right), Executive Director of LSE
Cities, presented “Facilitating
Transformation: A Global Survey of City Governments,” in which he presented
the data that LSE had gathered providing a global overview of energy
consumption and pollution patterns (with comparisons of density, transport, and
governance) between established Urban Age Cities (London, NY, Berlin, Istanbul,
Mumbai, and São Paulo) and a selection of ‘green pioneer’ cities (Hong Kong,
Stockholm, Copenhagen, Portland, Singapore, and Bogotá) {The data can be found clearly
presented in the Conference Newspaper.}
Progress to date has been mixed: cities have been good on recycling,
green space, transportation; but they have to do a lot better about energy
consumption. The reality, however, is
that cities are leading green innovation in the world. Half of them are very innovative, but they
are constrained by budget restrictions.
(Philipp’s talk is available in a video online)
Dan
Hill,
CEO of Fabrica, spoke on the “Local
Impact of Virtual Actions.” What
citizens are doing is important. He
personally has been involved in many failures (e.g., The Cloud for the Olympics, which he worked on with Carlo
Ratti, a kind of “giant smart meter” which was to show what London was doing in
real time, which came in second to Anish Kapoor’s entry, so not a total
failure; Baranagroo, which he worked on with Arup and Richard Rogers, that not
a complete failure, but in which it was incredibly hard to get things done; and
the Sydney Metro, a spectacular failure, which was cancelled by politicians
after spending AUS$ 700 million). The
reason it has been so hard to get things done is that, although we have ideas
and technology, there is a crisis of decision making. We see an institutional collapse. The question remains what the sustainable
long-term decision making structure should be.
As Maurice Steinberg put it, “We have 18th century
institutions facing 21st century problems.” Technology means that complaints come in more
quickly; this changes how governments need to deal with them—how many
complaints are enough to justify acting?
(The metric clearly has changed.
He used the example of a skateboard mini-park in a neighborhood in in
Helsinki which was physically altered to shut it down shortly after it opened
due to complaints from residents, but that was then physically restored to
useable condition after a second round of complaints came in protesting the
closing of it. He showed a slide of a
construction crew using large machinery to do the costly repairs necessary to
remove the barriers they had just spent money constructing in order to prevent
the use of this facility—a facility which itself had just recently been created
at great public expense!) There is no
idea how to govern in these new conditions.
An active citizenry is essential—very bottom-up and emergent. We need crowd funding for projects (e.g., Brick Starter, modeled on
Kickstarter: a crowd funding platform that would enable people to suggest ideas
for things they want to get done in their neighborhood, and then to fund and
share the process of getting these things done). How does one share the details of getting
things done? Perhaps there can be some form of brokerage for active citizenry. Crowd funding is not a democratic process.
The internet can be a mechanism for citizens to get things done; and the
process presents the possibility for citizens to engage with the fabric of
their city. We need to have activism
that leads to activity—and that activity can result in active government. Active government needs to be the goal,
because we need an institutional response to change, What we are really talking about is a
new 21st century social contract: we have to deal with what the city
is, who the city is for, and how we decide that. {Dan’s talk is available in a video online)
Rohan Silva, Senior Policy Advisor to the
Prime Minister, UK, spoke on “A National Strategy for the Urban Tech
Revolution.” In creating an approach
to the technological city, we need to understand the area and go with the grain
of it, rather than try to superimpose a vision from above. He showed a slide of Royal Avenue in Chelsea,
and said that this little piece of the neighborhood was particularly interesting,
as it is what London might have looked like had Christopher Wren’s grand master
plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 been adopted. But, instead, the merchants and residents who
inhabited the area around Kings Road (just behind Royal Avenue) decided on
their own to rebuild along the lines of what had existed there before the fire. This is an example of the kind of bottom-up
approach we try to use in dealing with Tech City. He also showed a slide of a square in Soho with its single water pump, which was the site that
John Snow deduced was the epicenter of the Broad
Street cholera outbreak of 1854. By
collecting and analyzing data {without
any knowledge of microbial theories of disease}, Snow determined the source of that epidemic. This is an example of the use of spatial
mapping to inform policy—and it is why we in London place such emphasis on
creating such institutions (e.g., the
Open Data Institute in Shoreditch, and the Intel
Collaborative Data Institute) in our Tech City program. {Snow’s
use of epidemiological mapping as the basis for his deductions also marked the
beginning of the modern awareness of the relationship between the built
environment and public health, and heralded the modern age of public health
intervention via water supply and sewage handling. (q.v., my comments on Ricky Burdett’s talk
at the Hong Kong conference on Health and
Well-Being)} The
creation of Tech City and ideas like entrepreneur visas are successful
approaches; but we must always embrace the specific sense of community of the
places involved. When thinking about the
formation of clusters, we must look to the past to understand the what the place involved is about—we must think about
history to inform our policies for the present.
{Rohan’s
talk is available in a video online}
Cities
panel: the legacy of urban leadership
An
extremely lively panel discussion was chaired by Greg Clark and Andy Altman,
Chief Executive for London Legacy Development Corporation
2009-2012.
Andy began by noting that mayors are at
the intersection of vision and practical need.
We want to look at how someone can use that platform for systemic and
long-term change.
Joan Clos, Executive
Director of the United Nations Human
Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and Under Secretary General of the United
Nations, and former Mayor of Barcelona, said that
the lack of common view makes things extremely difficult. We were able to achieve a needed reform of
the DNA of Barcelona because there was a crisis (the price of oil, the
obsolescence of our economic industry).
We decided that culture was one sector to encourage. In the 60s and 70s, visitors to Barcelona had
been industrial; we redirected efforts toward attracting tourists. The move was heavily criticized, but now it
is the city’s only booming industry. For the Olympic games,
we took five pieces of public land for hotels—which was only possible due to
the consensus born out of the existing crisis.
He advised: Never overlook the opportunity of a crisis!
Tony Williams, CEO
and Executive Director, Federal City Council of Washington, DC, and former Mayor of Washington, DC,
said that people come to cities for better lives for their families. He spoke about his successful Anacostia River
development, and the need to build bridges to the community to engender
support. He said you know that you are successful
when you have altered the content of the complaints. (Once you begin to hear specific complaints
about a program that no one had before even recognized the reality or existence
of, you know the project has largely succeeded.)
Andy said there is always a tension
between top-down and bottom-up planning; but what is the balance between vision
and how you can govern in terms of democratic action?
Joan noted that when you are out in front,
you are always very alone.
Tony said that one cannot be risk-averse
and be a leader.
Carl Cederschiöld, Mayor
of Stockholm 1998-2002, said that leadership has to do with having a vision
and being ready to make the decisions necessary to make it a reality. It is a process that has gone on for a long
time.
Greg said one needs to be able to take
that space to affect the plan.
Isabel Dedring, Deputy
Mayor of London, said that there is a risk for large institutions: in
London we are making changes for what are going to be 8 million
constituents. How do we engage? How do
we connect with the people who are interacting on Twitter, etc.? This challenge can become a way to get change—dealing with
actual people rather than with institutionalized lobbying groups.
Greg said, “So we’re talking about dealing
with digitalized citizenry, not a digitalized government?”
Isabel said that we need to find ways to
take advantage of it.
Antonio Vives, Deputy
Mayor of Barcelona, said that he was hearing about management, but that
he’s a politician. He put forward a
couple of ideas: we need to talk more
about politics (ideas, vision); we’re in the last stage of a capitalist cycle;
we have many capable citizens, but we cannot just respond to people looking at
their own belly buttons—we have to have vision.
We need industry in the center of town, We need participatory democracy now.
Andy spoke about a problem about
politicians bringing about visionary leadership: they are elected for a term,
and much of the vision required is much longer-term. Where are the ideas going to come from? Do we really understand the 21st
century city? How do we sift through the massive amount of data?
Antonio emphatically warned, “NO! We have to
be careful that we are not caught by the technology industry!” They want to sell what they already do—and it
may have little relationship to what our city actually needs. We need to develop “best practices”; the
problem is that we have to become educated clients, we
have to know what we have to ask for.
Greg said that cities have the same
metabolism, even if they have different DNA.
Tony said that cities can do a better job
sharing basic information, they do not have to pay to
develop what other cities already know.
There is no dichotomy between running cities well and having
vision. We need there to be a connection
between vision and practicality, execution.
Carl said we need to define real
goals. We need to have a process for
exchanging information. Government
leaders need to do the best they can, and they also need to employ intelligent
staffs—but, from the position of leadership, hopefully one can make intelligent
decisions.
Joan said that we cannot come out with an optimism that all is going well. That it just wrong: things are not going well. What is
happening especially in emerging cities is just wrong: it is neither equitable not sustainable. Gated communities make money; but they
represent the horrible end of the paradise that we’re selling. Nobody can truly get by on their non-legal
money.
Andy asked Joan: in your current UN
role, in which you see so many cities, how do you see that we can affect change
out there in these cities?
Joan answered that we are not
well-equipped to help them now. They
certainly do not need Le Corbusier; they do not need towers in the park. What they need is political help in order to
create city institutions to deal with the realities. People fight for land; there is social
conflict when we are talking about incomes of $1,000 per capita.
Isabel said we spend a lot of time fending
off what is not appropriate for us.
There is an enormous north-south issue; but there is also an individual
issue, if management is the tool for delivering vision.
Antonio related the story of the blind
cow—eating grass and not knowing why.
Why is the current prevailing model so wrong? Because we haven’t built an
alternative that is viable, business-oriented, and socially-oriented.
Greg summed this up by saying, “We dream
of Barcelona, but we end up building Los Angeles.” Most of the urbanism in the world is just
wrong. The questions involve how to get
people to change their behaviors, how to approach density, how to deal with the
challenge of most cities being in coastal regions, economic crises.
Carl said there were two questions: 1) can
cities do it by themselves?—we know they shouldn’t be opposed by national
governments, but, to do truly large-scale things, cities usually need the
support of national governments, with the government serving as a sort of
midwife to get change done; and, 2) the economy is totally dependent on using
internet connected technology, and we supplied the basic infrastructure for
corporations (e.g., IBM, NOKIA) to
establish themselves—leading in Stockholm to over 30,000 people working in that
sector, leading to the revitalizing of the economy.
Isabel said we need design solutions. Bureaucracy doesn’t produce innovation. Design can sell, it can transform the
debate. There is also a business model
problem: it is easier to deliver a big project than 100 small ones.
Antonio said we need a new economy, new
opportunity; energy self-sufficiency; 3-D printing-based production.
Joan said the model fails because while
everyone knows how to build a building (we know the business model), we do not
know how to build a city. We understand
good architecture, good technology—but we do not
understand the city at all. We do not
have a business model. It is a question
of how to build public space. The third
world will show us the way; but we need to understand the idea of the common
good. In sub-Saharan Africa, 60% of the
people live in slums. We speak about
youth unemployment, but we forget that the median age of the population is
18—and they are unemployed.
Tony raised the question of what gives us
the right. We are a republican government,
not democracy; we have to tell people what to do. That’s what they elected us for, and if they
don’t like what we do, they don’t re-elect us.
Greg asked Andy to sum up what he has
heard.
Andy said that he is worried, and
particularly about what Joan said: that, on the ground, cities are developing
out there without the necessary institutions—and that it is not working. The big positive is the role of
leadership—especially of the mayors out there.
Mayors represent the place where the opportunity to effect change
exists, but that they need the help of the federal government; nevertheless,
mayors can foment change, can create change.
Leaders learn by respecting the DNA of their cities, but by also recognizing
that there are vast new possibilities out there. How leaders understand it and how they put
the new platforms in place to allow development will be what matters most.
Closing
remarks
Wolfgang Nowak, who, after this conference, is
stepping down as Managing Director
of Deutsche's Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, began his
remarks by showing a photograph of Boris Johnson on a bicycle, leaving the
I have never let myself be trumped in
an argument by someone simply because he has claimed the privilege of greater
age. By the same token, the mere fact
that someone is twenty and I am over fifty does not in itself convince me that his
achievement should make me faint with admiration. Age is not the decisive factor here. What matters is the trained ability to
scrutinize the realities of life ruthlessly, to withstand them and to measure
up to them inwardly.
Wolfgang
exhorted us all “ruthlessly” to “train our abilities” “to scrutinize the
realities of life.” He then thanked Frau
Herrhausen and her daughter Anna, both of whom were present throughout the
conference. He thanked Richard Sennett,
who invited him to coffee all those years ago and suggested the idea for the
Urban Age; he thanked Philipp Rode; but in particular he thanked Ricky Burdett,
who he said was “the soul of the Urban Age,” and Ute Weiland, who he said was
its “guardian angel.”
{Wolfgang left to an extended and
enthusiastic standing ovation. He was a
major force in all of the history of the Urban Age, a good friend, and he shall
be sorely missed. Wolfgang’s farewell message (and Ute Weiland’s concluding remarks) are in a video online}
Ute Weiland, Deputy
Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, gave an emotional thanks to Wolfgang, whom she said has
been an inspiration for all of us. She
thanked Ricky and Philipp, and 120 others who had made the conference
possible. She said she hoped to see us
all at next year’s Urban Age Conference in Rio, and she then closed the proceedings.
