Category: Part 1 – City Patterns

Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 3

St. John's Today - The Battery

As for any city, the shape of St. John’s is derived from its geography, its purpose, the activities within and in connection to other cities (see part 1 and part 2).  There was no master plan for St. John’s to become what it became.  The shape and character of St. John’s did not take place because of a single dream, or a single person, or even a single authority.  In times of colonial expansion, the geography of St. John’s provided ice-free shelter at the Eastern edge of North America.  The settlement was established where it made sense to be.

In the end, colonial authorities and the people living in St. John’s gave it its shape.   Military personnel, governors, port authority officials, businessmen, church leaders, servants and the patterns of how families met their needs all shaped the city.  They organized themselves to make sure they had what they needed to survive and thrive as individuals, as a settlement and as an Empire.   Collectively, they knew what it would take to run the fishery from the port of St. John’s and they did it.

St. John’s continues to adjust and organize as conditions change; it keeps what it values and moves on and away from what it does not:

  1. The Rooms, St. John’s seat of cultural identity that provides public access to history, heritage and art, overlooks the harbor from the site of its seat of military identity: Fort Townshend.

    The Rooms, overlooking St. John's Harbour (http://cruisetheedge.com/galleryimages/9%20The%20Rooms.jpg)
  2. The fish flakes no longer surround the harbor, but the unplanned city survives as a cultural hub and tourism asset.  It is woven into today’s St. John’s.  The public access to pathways on Signal Hill from Outer Battery Road passes over a home’s deck, less than a metre from the home’s front door.
  3. The St. John’s Port Authority continues to serve local, regional and international trade requirements.  It’smission is to provide reliable, economic and efficient port services in support of Canadian trade, fostering regional economic development and serving Newfoundland and Labrador’s distribution requirements.

Purpose and Life Conditions

Figure 1 - City Purposes

Life conditions vary from city to city, each adjusting and organizing itself – and adjusting its purpose as appropriate.  The St. John’s example highlights five distinct purposes (1-5 in Figure 1): individual survival, collective survival, power, authority and prosperity.  (More on this spiral in Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse.)  Each of these has its own trajectory that shapes St. John’s over time.  In practice, each of these purposes involves integration of the local needs of individuals and the city, with relationships with other cities – a necessary condition for the city’s survival that is clearly still a focus for St. John’s.

The St. John’s example illuminates principles about how cities fundamentally take their shape:

  1. The purpose of a city guides its form and shape
  2. The purpose of a city, as it adjusts and shifts, becomes diffused
  3. As the purpose of a city becomes diffused, its purpose expands to serve the diffused needs
  4. As the purpose becomes more diffused, decision-making is made by a wider group of individuals to accommodate this expansion
  5. All of the above occurs within the context of the city’s life conditions

St. John’s was not planned to be what it is today, but it is certainly  not unintentional.  Is that enough to say that it is unplanned?  It did what it needed to do in each stage of its development.  Does ‘planning’ mean that it should have done more than respond to the life conditions at each stage of development?  Or are there degrees of planning that correspond to evolving city purposes.

The overriding purpose of a city is to integrate the needs of its people, with its context, to create a habitat in which people will survive and thrive.  This is the fundamental context in which we all work.  And a profession (new work) emerged among us to help us collectively accomplish this: city planning.

‘Planning’ a city is simply an activity that supports our collective work to organize ourselves to ensure our habitat serves us well.  The activity of planning emerged when our life conditions required additional order; Our planning activities will adjust as we need different kinds of order.  

“Is an unplanned city unplanned?” will conclude with a description of the evolution of the role of planning and planning practitioners as our cities evolve.  


Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 2

… the continuing story of St. John’s, Newfoundland.  A wonderful example of how our life conditions, our habitat, connects to the purpose of settlement and cities.  (Here is Part 1.)

Five hundred years ago, St. John’s was a sheltered, ice-free harbor, a place for ships to rendezvous at the eastern point of North America.  As power and might were driving European colonial expansion, securing the lucrative Newfoundland fishery became a military imperative.  When Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived in St. John’s harbour in 1583 with 5 ships and 260 men, he announced to the men of thirty six Spanish, Portuguese, French and English fishing boats that they were under English sovereignty.[1]  The port of St. John’s was fought over: the Basques took it from the French; Dutch from the English; and several wars between the English and French wars culminated in English possession of St. John’s in 1762.

Zoom in of Sir Frances Owen's 1798 Map

The early recorded shape of St. John’s is as military life on the edge of North America.  A map of St. John’s in 1784 shows two forts (Townshend and William), the town, consisting of a series of buildings along the harbor.  Sir Francis Owen’s survey map of 1798 shows more fortification: numerous batteries, a block on Signal Hill, Fort Amherst and Fort Waldegrave.  He also notes the hospital, court house and custom house.  The settlement is still small – still a series of buildings along the harbour.  The church illustrated, but not named.  Other familiar names of the places in St. John’s are named:  Kitty Vitty [sic], Georges Pond, Cuckold’s Cove.

For the Empire, the purpose of this settlement of 3244 people is military presence to claim its stake in the fishery and it is organized to do so.  For people living in the settlement, the purpose of the settlement is more immediate: creating the conditions for survival.  The settlement specifically is a means for survival and livelihood (of the Empire and individuals) by making a living, harvesting fish from the ocean and trading it with Europe.  Fishing is a dangerous way to make a living: isolation, cold winters, scarce food, no health care, minimal contact with “the world”.  From birth until death, endless hard work on land and water provided the basics needed to survive this harsh environment.  The settlement is organized to meet these needs: a hospital, homes, wharfs, public houses and even a church, to support the settlement’s ability to make meaning of life and hardship.  The settlement is organized to survive and thrive.

By the end of the 1800s, Newfoundland secures its position as the worlds largest exporter of salt cod.[2]  In St. John’s, this means more houses at the edge of the harbor and the fish flakes on hand to preserve the catch.  As trade with others grows, more docks and wharfs appear and more houses and boats.  And the trades to support this work: pharmacies, offices, stores, warehouses, trades and suppliers.  A plan of St. Johns in 1856 shows a much larger physical settlement to accommodate a population of 30,000[3], almost 10 times that of 1798. The unplanned, disorderly city we recognize in today’s St. John’s, between the water and New Gower Street, has appeared.  However, the map itself reveals extensive order and thoughtfulness.  What the settlement needs is on hand:

  • Fortifications to protect the settlement and interests of British Empire
  • Wharfs and docks to accommodate the fishery
  • Land and buildings to accommodate
    • authority and governance  (government house and grounds, custom house, court house, public wharf)
    • various spiritual needs
    • needed services (confectionary, hotels, auction mart, fishing rooms)
    • future needs (‘site taken by telegraph company’)
    • land transportation networks
  • Clean water supply by aqueduct from Georges Pond
  • Information about who occupies premises, such as Theodore Cliff’s Auction Mart, William Woodley (Fishing Room), Brooking, Son & Co., or J.G Kidder (Boston, U.S.)

The people of St. John’s, and the authorities supporting St. John’s, provided sufficient order to meet the needs of the emerging city; the activities of fishing, preserving, storing and shipping the catch needed a town with it to support the industry. As years passed, citizens and governments alike noticed when conditions changed and something new was needed, and likewise, things no longer needed were discarded.  And so the city evolves, constantly adjusting to changing life conditions.

In the 150 years since the ‘unplanned city’ that we now recognize surfaced, life conditions continue to shape St. John’s.  Geography continued to play a significant role: Marconi’s first transatlantic (wireless) telegraph is sent to Signal Hill in 1901 from Cornwall, England.  A Coronation Souvenir Map, 1937 shows a city still expanding.  In World War II the fortifications were again used to protect transatlantic shipping routes and America’s most Eastern point of land from the attack of German U-boats.  Torpedo nets were set up across the narrows to protect the harbor.  New gun batteries were placed at Fort Amherst, and the American military base, Fort Pepperell, was built. The territorial impulse expanded from the British Empire to the Allied Forces.

Our times change the activities of the city: the decline in demand for salt cod and the increase in demand for frozen fish in the mid 1900’s industrialized fishing patterns; the decline of fish stocks resulted in the 1992 fishing moratorium and economic hardship.  The late 1990s brought offshore oil production – 100 million barrels of oil in 2010 for Newfoundland and Labrador – and St. John’s role as the primary offshore energy supply and service center for East Coast Canada.  Today, cruise ships regularly visit St. John’s as part of their ‘Operation Titanic’, ‘Voyage of the Vikings’ and ‘Top of the World’ expeditions.

St. John’s sits right where the land meets the water, connecting the past with the present and the future.   The sheltered, ice-free port is strategically located 500 years ago and today.  In reality, this port city never existed in isolation; it has always been about connections, a meeting place.  It served as a rendezvous site and safe harbour for European nations 500 years ago.  It supported the connection between Europe and the North America through the fisher.  It connects communities by providing supplies and services with other Newfoundland and Labrador communities, with Canada and the United States, and ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean from points all around the world.  And to be all of that, St. John’s became a city.

The shape of St. John’s is derived from its geography, its purpose, the activities within and in connection to other cities.  It may not have been planned to be what it is today, but it is certainly  not unintentional.  Is that enough to say that it is unplanned?  It did what it needed to do in each stage of its development.  Does ‘planning’ mean that it should have done more than respond to the life conditions at each stage of development?

In my next post, I will bring the pattern to light: that there are evolving purposes to cities.  

Cited Sources –

[1] Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada: Canada’s History Illustrated with Original Maps, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., Vancouver (2002) p. 35

[2] Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage: Fisheries.  Available at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/society/fishery.html

[3] In 1857, 30,476 people resided in St. John’s. Statistics Canada. Nfld Table I – Dwellings, Families, Population, Sexes, Conjugal Condition, etc., 1857 – Newfoundland(table), 1857 – Census of Newfoundland (Population/Sexes/Conjugal Condition) (database), Using E-STAT (distributor).
http://estat.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.exe?Lang=E&EST-Fi=EStat\English\SC_RR-eng.htm

Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.


Is the unplanned city unplanned? Part 4

What is the role of planning and planners if the overriding purpose of a city is to integrate the needs of its people, with its context, to create a habitat in which people survive and thrive?  Simply, ‘planning’ a city is an activity that supports our collective work to organize ourselves into, and in, cities with the objective of ensuring that our habitat serves us well.

Modes of organizing

Figure 1 - City Purpose Spiral

In Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 3 , I introduced a spiral of evolving city purposes (Figure 1).  With each level of purpose of the city, there is a corresponding mode of organizing.

500 years ago, when St. John’s harbor was settled (see Part 1 and Part 2), choices were made to ensure people’s individual survival and that of the settlement. They took advantage of a geographic location in proximity to Europe and a calm harbour that didn’t freeze, two geographic factors that contribute to the harbour’s role in transatlantic shipping today.  Specific to the settlement itself, they ensured a supply of fresh water and materials to build shelter.  Decisions were made in response to context to ensure survival, and once immediate survival needs were met, they began organizing themselves.

Figure 2- City Organizing Spiral

Four levels of organizing (Figure 2) are evident in early St. Johns: reacting (survival), gathering (collective survival), doing (power and might), and planning (authority and moral codes).  In the early days of St. John’s people did what needed to be done.  Activities were coordinated – the port authority, the court house, government house, custom house.  Resources were coordinated – water supply, roads.  Likely in ‘do’ mode, decisions were made by the governor about where to locate the church, the various government buildings.  In ‘do’ mode, forts were constructed.  In ‘do’ mode, the homes and fishery in support of the fort were constructed.  As authority was needed, it arrived.

Once our survival needs are met, we are able to expand our view and consider others.  We gather with others to make meaning of what has happened and what will happen.  We work together to survive and begin the journey to thrive – in the pub or church.  When things need to be done, we meet to sort out what to do.  Some individuals will just do what needs to be done and set up fish flakes wherever it works.  Build a dock where it works.  This can feel unruly, and when sufficiently so, someone will try to give structure to things – in the case of St. John’s we the Port Authority, government house, custom house, the court house.

In St. John’s, the ‘doing’ also takes place at the scale of nations: the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese all want to claim the fishery and access to the fishery.  In ‘doing’ mode, they build kingdoms and lay claim to territory.  As time goes on, hints of plans take root in St. John’s.  And plans come with authority to make sure that the plan is implemented.  St. John’s’ early maps reveal how this took place: pipes for water supply, the custom house (and its rules), road construction, property ownership, and who occupies premises.  In response to our life conditions we organize as appropriate (Figure 2).

A sixth purpose for cities

The fifth purpose for cities is to generate prosperity for its citizens, in thriving economies, a mitigation of the rules that emerged from authorities, and a renewed sense of entrepreneurial spirit and creativity.  In St. John’s this id evident in the corporate structure for the St. John’s Port Authority: users of the port, City of St. John’s, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Government of Canada.  This is partnership, not a central authority simply consulting with stakeholders.  And while not a ‘city’ organization, it certainly shapes St. John’s.

A sixth purpose is emerging for today’s cities (Figure 1): to create the conditions for people to fully access our diversity of knowledge.  We are growing into an understanding that city hall is not the only player who organizes a city but that there are many others involved: chambers of comer, community foundations, advocacy groups, developers and builders, citizens, health authorities, school systems, provincial and federal government, citizens, etc.  All and each of these players shape our increasingly complex cities.  They are increasingly demanding a role in the process of creating our cities.

The planning profession – new work

The formal act of planning our cities emerged as new work when we required additional order in response to life conditions of a certain time, geography, challenges and social circumstances.  Planning in Canada is a fairly recent phenomenon: The Town Planning Institute of Canada was established in 1919, later turning into the Canadian Institute of Planners in 1974.  Further evolution of the profession has involved the regulation of the profession by provincial governments in recent decades:  Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan.

Today, we see the formal act of planning land uses in municipal legislation: zoning by-laws, area structure plans, municipal development plans and official community plans.  In their work, planners help us organize our social and community services, build economic capacity, address transportation and infrastructure needs, manage cultural and heritage resources, ensure environmental protection.  The Canadian Institute of Planners defines planning as:

the scientific, aesthetic, and orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities and services with a view to securing the physical, economic and social efficiency, health and well-being of urban and rural communities.  

While this definition is complicated, it is clear that the planning profession is in place to help the city be the best it can be for its residents.

Two roles for planning today

The challenge for citizens and planners today is to recognize two different kinds of planning support to cities:

  1. Provide the answers – traditional, linear, planning expertise.
  2. Create a habitat for exploration – support the city’s awareness so it can respond purposefully, appropriately.

The difference between the two is simple: planners have expert knowledge vs. citizens have expert knowledge.  There are times when the specific expertise of planners is needed.  This is “top-down” activity, which is the right thing under certain circumstances.  The second role, however, requires acknowledgement that a city is trying to organize itself and there is work to be done to help the city see itself (more on this, what Marilyn Hamilton calls integral vital signs monitoring, in later posts).  To get what we need from our cities, we each need to be in tune to what our cities need of us.  This means honing our telling and listening skills in our work in the world. We need to notice not what we want to do, but what is being asked of us.  This is where the next evolutionary step will emerge for the profession – a profession in service to cities and their inhabitants.

Planners are relevant when supporting the work of a whole city to organize itself.  Individually and collectively, planners support our work to improve our habitat.  Planners are well positioned to create the conditions for cities to see changing life conditions and for cities to figure out how to adjust.  Our work, then, is to create the conditions for ourselves, and our cities, to see and respond to life conditions.  Some of this work takes the form of planning as we know it, and some will take other forms.  The purpose of planning is to support city efforts to notice, adjust and organize to ensure people survive and thrive.

To answer the question, ‘Is the unplanned city unplanned?’, I note that all cities are organized to meet a purpose in a given context.  ‘Planning’ is only one mode of organizing.  The unplanned city is unplanned, but not created without purpose.  This is significant.  Planned cities don’t achieve their plans exactly anyway.  The real matter at hand is knowing the purpose(s) of cities.  Whether planned or unplanned, all cities are organized.

My next post will explore the voices that make a whole, integral city.

Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 1

To tackle the question about whether we are planning or organizing our cities, it is necessary to first look at the purpose of cities.

The large, evolutionary purpose of cities is to create a habitat in which we can generate new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  We build the very habitats we need in the form of cities.  Our cities are our nests.  Within this large purpose, there are stages of purpose of settlements and cities. At each stage, we are driven to more than merely survive: we wish to thrive and move on to a next stage. This takes place as we constantly look for new work (new ways of thinking, making and doing new things) in relationship with our habitat (physical and social).  At each stage, we build the nest we need.

It is time now to again build the nest that we need.  In order to do that, we need to discern the pattern that can be seen so far.

St. John’s

St. John's - the Battery

In North America, St. John’s, Newfoundland is a perfect place to marvel at how human settlement changes as the purpose of the settlement changes over time.  In his opening remarks at the 2011 Canadian Institute of Planners conference in St. John’s, Mayor Dennis O’Keefe invited conference participants to explore and pay particular attention to the ‘unplanned city’.  He made this invitation in jest, for you can’t miss the unplanned part of this city.  There is a crazy mix of buildings and roads, houses perched on rocky slopes hovering perilously over the water.  The steep hills that every engineer I have worked with – if asked for approval – would scream rejection.  Streets everywhere connecting and ending with no discernable pattern.  Streets impossibly skinny, too short, too curvy.  Today, much of this shape remains as St. John’s unplanned city.

This unplanned city is mesmerizing. The word unplanned immediately conjures in my mind some form of  ‘accidental’ or ‘inadvertent’ city, but St. John’s is not an unintentional settlement.  It was very purposeful, and that purpose guided the very shape of St. John’s. In fact, the purpose of St. John’s as a settlement has shifted over time, with each step in its evolution leaving its mark.

Fish Flakes in St. John's (http://www.heritage.nf.ca/society/images/coll_03_07_006_600.jpg)

Mayor’ O’Keefe’s jest might have slipped by me were it not for two things that startled me while exploring the unplanned city.  First, the St. John’s Port Authority is over five hundred years old.  Second, seeing a map describing land ownership with the words, “from the high water mark to the back of the fish flakes.”  The life conditions of historic St. John’s are radically different from what I know on the Canadian prairies.  I am not used to imagining European settlers’ lives in North America over 500 years ago.  While the words, “from the high water mark” are familiar, the words, “to the back of the fish flakes” belong to a way of life in another era, wholly unfamiliar to my life on the Canadian prairies in Edmonton.

Life Conditions

I see the evolving purpose – and shape – of cities from the vantage point of their life conditions.  With the words ‘life conditions’, I am drawing on Clare Grave’s work on evolutionary value systems, and the notion that humans are driven by the dynamic interaction between our internal states and our external worlds.  Our life conditions, our external worlds, are our habitat:

  1. The historic times we live in (the era)
  2. The geographic place (the physical conditions)
  3. The challenges we face to exist (priorities, survival issues, threats to safety); and
  4. The social circumstances in which we find ourselves (status, lineage, political systems).

St. John’s reveals clear examples of how life conditions have an impact on the purpose of a city, and the shape a city ultimately takes.  And as life conditions change, the city’s shape evolves as needed.

In my next post, I will explore the evolution of St. John’s to discern how our life conditions – our habitat – connects to the purpose of settlement/cities.  
Is the unplanned city of St. John’s unplanned?

 

 

Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

 

 

 

 

Planning or organizing?

This fundamental question is for everyone who lives, works, plays in and visits cities: are we planning our cities or organizing them?

The way we organize ourselves evolves as the purpose of our settlements and cities evolves.  Over the next several posts, I will describe how the purpose of cities evolves and how our choices in how we organize ourselves reflect those purposes.  There are patterns in this understanding that highlight how as citizens – including the formal, professional planners – we shape our very habitat to meet our needs, and these needs change constantly.

I am not convinced that the word planning is the right word to describe the work we do collectively to create cities that serve us well. It may be the right word for a profession that does some of the planning work on our behalf, but not for our collective activity to create cities for today’s purposes.

I expect I will hold onto this question about planning or organizing for several posts.  To begin, in the next post I will explore this question: What shapes the purpose of a city?

Source – 

Whyte, David, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, Riverhead Books.  New York (2009)

 

Time to build the nest we need

The staggering rate of population and city growth alone are enough for me to recognize that something, at some point, is going to give.  We are going to have to adjust to something.  And given the rate of change, we are going to have to learn how to adjust quickly.  That means we have to welcome change, quickly examine what adjustments are necessary, and take timely, appropriate action.  Debating whether or not something is happening, such as green house gas emissions, is a distraction from what we need to do: learn how to organize ourselves to be adaptable.  Adaptability will ensure we survive and thrive and, as it turns out, adaptability is what got us here in the first place.

(This post concludes a series of 14 posts that constitute my first efforts to blog my book, Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.  For readers wanting to go to the first post, here is a link.  These first posts assemble into Chapter One: The City Impulse.)

Figure A - City Emergence Dynamic

There is within us an evolutionary impulse to do more than merely survive.  At the core of this impulse is our work – the efforts we make to innovate and find new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  And this impulse to innovate generates cities (and cities generate innovation too).  Developing cities, then, is a survival skill.  And the role of our work – and our approach to our work – in cities can not be understated because it creates cities.  All of this happens in the context of our physical habitat (see Figure A).  Our ability to evolve, along with our cities, is a survival skill.

The dynamic relationship between our economic life – our work – and our habitat is only as healthy as the feedback that flows back and forth.  Cities are, in fact, a result of this relationship. In this dynamic, our social habitat is the conduit between our economic life and our physical habitat.  It is the sphere where we allow, or disallow, connections to be made between our economic life and our physical habitat.  It is where we create the conditions individually and collectively to notice what is happening around us and integrate our world with our work, our work with our world.  Or, more appropriately, where we integrate our cities with our work, our work with our cities.  Our cities need quality feedback.

Innovation hinges on looking at things in new ways, but it is the innovative quality of our work in the context of our habitat that drives whether a city declines or thrives, not just the fact that we are innovative.  More of the same work – without innovation and adaptation – makes us busy, but it does not mean we learn and grow.  More and more new work, for the sake of innovation, does not mean we adapt either.  Innovation in the context of our life conditions, which are constantly changing, means we adapt – and evolve.  Innovation + adaptation means we are thinking, making and doing new things.  This is a critical understanding in light of the challenges we face as a species with a quickly growing population.

As citizens we have choices about the work we do and our awareness of whether the work we do is responsive to our life conditions.  We must be brave enough to look at life conditions, let alone acknowledge them.  We must be brave enough to notice what is happening and to respond appropriately.  This bravery is needed at many scales – in citizens, in organizations, in cities, in society.  How do we create the conditions for this kind of courage?

Figure B

Jane Jacobs suggested that it is sensible to foster desirable new work and select from those worth fostering further.  Our evolutionary path isn’t about simple generating more and more and more new work, endless innovating.  The word ‘select’ implies that someone will do the selecting and that we know the criteria to choose the work that will work.  But we will never have criteria for this kind of work because we have never been here before.  Each moment ahead of us is new, and the criteria we have used for previous situations are criteria for previous situations – not the present or the future.  But it is a far more diffused, yet simple, process than that.  We need to know the direction we face and we need to ‘notice’ what works along the way, to get us there.

The work ahead of us is about creating cities – our habitat – that allow us to change the work we do and how we go about doing it.  It is about creating cities, right now, that work for us.  The challenge is recognizing that our work, whether paid or unpaid, and our desire to improve our work is an innovation-generating evolutionary impulse.   This impulse is the force that creates  and recreates cities, which in turn creates the conditions for further innovation.  We shape the city and in return it shapes us.  We build the nest that nurtures us.  It is time to notice how we go about organizing ourselves to get what we need from this relationship.

Figure C

We have never been here before.  We are at a point in time unlike any other and our efforts to understand the world in the ways we have always tried to understand the world are not accurate.  We face together a world full of uncertainty and unpredictability.  Any actions we take as individuals and as collectives have unexpected ripple effects in ways we can not contemplate or anticipate, which means that each of us is connected to others in significant and unimaginable ways.  We are in this experiment of humanity together.  To be dynamically stable – to steer well – we need to be willing to receive feedback and we need to explicitly seek feedback, even if it is telling us information we do not want to hear.  We need this feedback to do our work well, and our cities need this feedback as well.  We simply need to be awake to notice things around us.

This will take great courage, because to invite honest feedback is to invite hearing that we are not getting the results we would like.  It is time for us to organize ourselves in such a way that we are clear about our destination, that we provide ourselves with the support we need to be courageous enough to be awake on the journey, and we create the conditions for success within our world of unpredictability by self-organizing so the best possible way forward will emerge.  It is time to consciously create our nest city.  It is time to jump into the driver’s seat of our own evolution.

The next series of posts will revolve around what it means to plan our cities.  Are cities really planned?  What patterns can be discerned in how we go about creating our cities?  The dynamic that generates cities is not linear, yet our current efforts in North America to create sustainable cities are limited to linear approaches.  The next round of posts will make the case that a new way of designing for cities that serve their citizens well is emerging.  You can aid an abet its emergence by exploring these questions:

 

What can my city do for me?

What can I do for my city?

What can our city do for us?

What can we do for our city?

 

 

Note –
For those interested in exploring the preceding posts that form Chapter One: The City Impulse, here they are in order:
  1. Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?
  2. Driven to do more than merely survive
  3. Cities are engines of innovation
  4. The development of cities is a survival skill
  5. The work we do creates our cities
  6. Evolving cities is a survival skill
  7. Be a part of feedback loops in your city
  8. Cities: the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat
  9. Cities need quality feedback from habitat
  10. Dynamically steering cities into the future
  11. Work at scale to serve the city
  12. Inter-city tournaments
  13. The city as a nest

 

The city as a nest

Thinking of our cities as nests means we understand that our cities are what we build for ourselves.  Like other species we build our most immediate habitat: our shelter from the elements.  We also build structures that, once our survival needs are met, nurture our families and our well-being.  As a collective, we build larger and larger communities that address the needs of more than just a family.  Over the course of our evolution we build infrastructure to protect ourselves and our livelihoods (fortifications) and we build infrastructure to ensure order (transportation systems, government facilities).  We also build infrastructure to enjoy the opportunities that present themselves to enjoy life (recreation facilities, art galleries, sports arenas, etc.).  All of this is enabled because of our relationship with the resources that surround the beginnings of settlement and the subsequent work we have developed and expanded over decades, centuries and millenia.

Consider a simple definition of nest – a place or structure made or chosen:

  • in which to lay and incubate eggs or give birth to young
  • where a number of animals of the same species and their young occupying a common habitat: an ants’ nest
  • where an animal or insect breeds or shelters: an ants’ nest

The qualities of a nest are various.  A nest has some density.  Perhaps as a snug retreat, or tucked away all by itself, it is where a concentration of a species calls home.  A nest is also warm, safe and comfortable.  Whether a nest for birds, or a nest of shredded paper to hold a fragile bowl, a nest is a container that holds, protects and supports its contents.  A nest is pocket-like, usually a more or less circular structure.  It is a refuge from the elements.  It is home.

At a basic level, “nest” describes the habitat humans build for themselves very appropriately.  Our cities are made by us.  We build our homes and cities for ourselves as a species and with each generation.  More and more humans are choosing cities as their habitat.  In addition, cities provide heightened care for our young (specialized health care).

The qualities of a nest also coincide with those of a city.  People conglomerate in the city.  The city – at its best – provides shelter for more and more humans as more and more humans make cities their home.  At a minimum, we go to cities with the intention of making a better life, pursuing our work, looking for opportunities.  Geographical constraints aside, our cities take a circular form.  Cities are the habitat that holds, protects and supports the generation of new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  Cities cultivate innovation, the very thing we need to ensure the cities we build are able to hold, protect and support us, citizens of the city.  We make the nest – the city – in which we settle.

In exploring definitions of nest, I found that as soon as the word nest is associated with humans, a shadow side emerges: a place filled with undesirable people, activity or things; a place or situation that is full of bad people or activities; or a place that fosters something undesirable.  The examples: a nest of spies, a nest of thievery.  It certainly is the case that as more and more good things happen in the city, more bad things will also take place.  The city is not a perfect phenomenon.  Our work in cities must acknowledge and attend to the healthy and unhealthy aspects of our nest.  Which do we wish our city nests to nurture?

We build our nest cities to serve ourselves – to survive and thrive.  We build our nest cities to allow us to grow and develop – to emerge into what we need to be in order to survive and thrive.  We have a choice about whether to create cities that serve us poorly or well.  They are the place from which we leap to new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  They are the place from which we fly to new nests, as we reshape our cities and what happens in them now at an unprecedented rate.

Figure A

As we think about our nest cities and our relationship with them, we must consider the nested hierarchy of systems that make up the city (Figure A).  (Three posts have explored the nested hierarchy of city systems: Work at scale to serve the city, The development of cities is a survival skill, and Cities: the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat.)  A city is full of similar things of different sizes that fit inside each other, where the smaller element fits in a lower position in a hierarchy: a nest of tables, organisms classified in a series of nested sets.  This involves a set of things in graduated sizes that fit together.  The notion of hierarchy offers yet another way of looking at the city and its systems.

There is a lot for a Nest City to hold.  It is simple and complex and it is ever changing.  Knowing this changes how we look at our cities.  It changes how we design our cities.  It changes the very process by which we create our cities.  Nest City requires us to host ourselves and our evolution well.   

Nested elements of a city: economic, social and physical

Resources that may be of interest

Definitions:

Synonyms:

Inter-city tournaments

As I spent  the long weekend at a soccer tournament, I pondered what it means to be at a tournament – for both 11 year olds and for cities.  Immediately to mind is Marilyn Hamilton’s work on Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive.

In her blog, Hamilton writes Howard Bloom’s story of the honey bee, and the roles in the beehive.  There are four roles that form a strategy for individual adaptation, hive innovation and species resilience.  These roles ensure the beehive is adaptable to its surroundings:

  1. Conformity enforcers – 90%.  Find the pollen by doing what the majority of beehive is doing.
  2. Diversity generators – 5%.  Find alternative sources of pollen.
  3. Resource allocators.  Reward successful behaviour of diversity generators and resource allocators by putting resources where the ‘return’ is favourable.
  4. Inner judges.  Work with the resource allocators to ensure the hive meets its sustainability goal of generating 40 pounds of honey per year.  When conformity enforcer bees come back to the hive with less pollen they engage with the new information from diversity generators.
  5. Inter-group Tournaments.  The competition between hives that share territory (their eco-region).

For Hamilton, “the Inter-group tournaments operate at the level of species survival – ensuring any hive that gets an edge in the innovation and evolution curve is the one most likely to survive and pass on its learning.”  Inter-group tournaments advance not just a hive, but the species.

So how does a soccer tournament for 11 year olds fit into this picture?  To begin, let’s contemplate the basic transaction.  A team of 16 kids is learning how to play the game of soccer. They are serious about the game and have joined a club team to play competitively.  They have a coaching staff that is keen to give the kids opportunities to play the game and to play against teams that challenge them.  For the coaches of this team in particular, the tournament is not about winning at this age, but about having time to play – in games, rather than practice – to try out the technical training they receive between games.  In most tournaments, the team gets to expand its horizons.  They get an opportunity to play with unfamiliar teams.  They get a chance to advance their game – technically, physically, mentally – as individuals and as a collective.
They are at the tournament to better themselves.  That may mean winning, it may not.  The purpose of this Inter-group tournament, for this team, is to improve the game for each player and the team.
This is where the city comes in.  Competition between and comparison of our cities is part of a naturally occurring aspect of human life in that it compels us to be the best we can be.  We always have a choice about what the purpose of the “tournament”.  For some cities, it really is about survival in the strictest sense.  For others, it is simply about a learning journey and putting ourselves in situations where we are challenged, for their is no improvement without challenge.
For our cities, if we stop striving to improve, we risk losing our ability to survive at all.  The honeybees and the coaches of 11-year-olds have some insight for us:
  1. Most of us will conform with the behaviour of others around us.
  2. A handful of us will regularly seek out new ways of doing things.
  3. There are people in positions to reward (and withhold reward) our performance.
  4. There are people in positions to assess our performance.
  5. We advance our contributions with competition.

For our life in cities (and elsewhere), this means:

  1. It is natural and appropriate to conform and be part of a team.
  2. It is natural for some of us – but not all of us – to look for new ways of doing things.
  3. There are naturally occurring boundaries on our efforts (referees, coaches, supervisors, parents).
  4. It is appropriate to assess performance related to an identified goal.
  5. We learn about ourselves – and where we need to improve – when we see how we “stack up” against others.

In the end, this little blog is a reminder for me that cities, and the relationships within and between cities, are complex adaptive systems.  As the bees adapt to ensure they create 40 pounds of honey each year while also supporting their habitat that allows them to do so, I wonder what the similar goal is for humans and cities.  The purpose of the tournament over the weekend was not to win the tournament, and this makes a huge difference to the learning opportunity for the players and the team.  A city, on the whole, isn’t out to “win” either.

What performance goals do we set for our cities?  

What efforts to we make to reach those goals?

How will we know when we reach them?

References

Work at scale to serve the city

In Wednesday’s post, Dynamically steering cities into the future, I reached the conclusion that it is only with feedback that we can adjust our path appropriately when needed.  Without feedback, any adjustment is simply uninformed action.  The world is changing in so many ways, it is not even possible to know what is changing and what it will turn into.  The true work at hand is learning how to dynamically steer our cities into the future.  We need to know our destination and then find the adjustments that will get us there.  It means being open to feedback and willing to take action – at any and all scales.  There is lots of work for us to do.

Figure A

The intelligence of the city lays at many scales, and each of us work at many scales in each moment, each day, in each of our lives.  In two posts (The development of cities is a survival skill, and Cities: the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat) I have referred to Marilyn Hamilton’s nested hierarchy, or holarchy, of city systems (Figure A).  This is one of four key maps Hamilton uses to chart the intelligence of a city.  This particular map articulates the city as a human system made up of a series of systems that are each, themselves, whole.  (If you would like to read more please explore her book, Integral City, or the Integral City website.)

I recognize each of these ‘wholes’ in my economic life as I work (paid and unpaid) at several scales:

  1. As an individual, I follow my passion and look for people with whom I can exchange my passion for what I need for my livelihood.
  2. As a family, we work together to create a social and physical habitat that will support us, right down to this summer’s project: a new roof.
  3. My extended family goes for a backcountry hike each summer.  This takes a lot of work to organize, and the payoff is time spent with each other and reconnection.
  4. I work as a consultant to a variety of organizations: cities, NGOs, corporations.
  5. I serve my neighbourhood organization as a volunteer.
  6. Much of my consulting work serves the whole city and its well-being.
  7. I am conscious of my actions that strengthen the connection between my city and its eco-region in my consulting work and our spending choices as a family.
There are three additional scales at which I serve cities: I serve as president of the Alberta Professional Planners Institute, a body of 903 professionals serving human settlements Alberta, Nunavut and Northwest Territories.  In a year’s time, I will be serving as APPI’s representative on the board of the Canadian Institute of Planners.  I also serve as a founding member of a fledgling group, the Center for Human Emergence: Canada, part of a global constellation of organizations aiming to create the conditions for human understanding of, and responsibility for, the health of people and the planet, recognizing that everything and everyone is interwoven.
At each scale, I can tease out the size and character of my habitat.  As the scale grows, my habitat becomes larger and more complex.  While the illustration in Figure A conveys that each city system is nested within larger systems, it does not convey that each larger system includes several, many, or thousands, or millions of the smaller systems.  As the scale increases, the complexity increases. Over time, as our cities become larger and larger, they become more complex, but the importance of smaller city systems does not decline.
Our work as individuals remains as critical as it ever was, for this is the scale at which we make our contributions.  The city is only as healthy as each whole system – including each of us – that make up the city.  Our work at every scale matters.
My next post will tie back in to where this first series of posts began – cities and innovation – and conclude this series of posts on the city impulse with these questions (at two scales):
  1. What can my city do for me?
  2. What can I do for my city? 
  3. What can our city do for us?
  4. What can we do for our city?

Dynamically steering cities to the future

Figure A - City Dynamic

In yesterday’s post, I reached the conclusion that the quality of the relationship between our economic life and our social and physical habitats dictates our ability to generate cities that meet our economic, social and physical needs.  We create cities for the purpose of our individual and collective growth.  We create them to support our evolution.

Feedback Activity

Consider this simplified illustration of the city dynamic (Figure A), where the red center is our economic life, and green and blue are our social and physical habitats.  (For more information on the relationships between these three elements, please visit Cities need quality feedback.)  The feedback between our economic life and our habitat is the information that flows back and forth.  Feedback between our social and economic life is critical, as is feedback between our physical habitat and our economic life.  The more activity between these spheres, the more responsive a city is to the needs of its inhabitants.  For example, the illustration of activity in Figure B is less healthy than that of activity in Figure C in that it offers less feedback.  Less feedback may mean lower adaptation of our economic life to meet the demands of our changing social and physical habitat.

Figure B - City Dynamic (less activity)
Figure C - City Dynamic (more activity)

This perspective of the city’s habitats nests the physical, social and economic worlds.  This understanding builds on the lineage of our current understanding of sustainable development, rooted in the World Commission on Environment and Development’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, often referred to as the Brundtland Commission.  (Two links that might be of interest: the story, the report itself.)  The inheritance offered by this report is the insertion, into our collective planetary consciousness, of the relationship between our physical, social and economic lives.  This is now, rather conventionally, shown graphically as a Venn diagram (Figure D).

Figure D - Sustainable Development

The dynamic of the city habitat as I have described it here and in previous posts rearranges our understanding of sustainable development.  Looking at cities from an evolutionary perspective, our physical habitat holds everything. Within that we have evolved socially to create opportunities for new work, a feature of our economic life that generates cities, and in turn recreates our physical habitat.  The city dynamic consists of endless feedback loops, going in all directions all at once (Figure C).  Each sphere is critical, but with distinct roles to play.  Unlike the Venn Diagram, each element is never fully on its own.  It is all interwoven and interrelated.

The nature of these relationships is such that the healthier the city, the more interactions across and within the layers.  Remember these three patterns about how new work (innovation in our economic life) works (see earlier posts for more on this – development of cities, and our work creates cities):

  1. The development of new work means new ideas in response to life conditions.
  2. The expansion of new work means implementation in response to life conditions.
  3. The link between development and expansion of new work is habitat: life conditions.

These principles and how they behave give us clues about how to organize ourselves, such that we tune into, and be in tune with our habitat.  The interaction between these spheres is where the future lies for our cities.  How we organize our cities to gain this feedback and respond to it is a necessary survival skill.  With feedback, and appropriate responses to that feedback, we can adjust our path; without we can not.

Feedback and Adjustment

We need to approach our city systems in ways that allow for feedback and adjustment.  Brian Robertson, and his work on holacracy, describes this as dynamic steering, where a system receives regular, real feedback and immediately adjusts.  Imagine the system is you riding a bicycle.  As you move along, you start to tip, you adjust.  You see a pothole head, you adjust.  You see what is coming and you adjust, but the truth is you never know ahead of time what will come and what the appropriate adjustment will be.  Yet you are able to do it.

Most systems we are familiar with, such as organizations, operate in predict-and-control mode, where we anticipate what is going to happen and make the adjustment prior to even seeing if the event unfolds as expected.  We also make adjustments after events, assuming that future events will be the same and will need the same reaction.  Predict-and-control mode does not allow for appropriate responses to life conditions because it allows only minimal feedback between the habitats of the city.   Imagine riding a bicycle with arms out stiff in front of you; it doesn’t allow you to be responsive.  We need cities to be responsive.

In our cities, as when we ride a bicycle, our ability to keep our eyes on where we are going matters.  Our ability to notice when we have moved off track matters.  Our ability to choose to get back on track matters.  Our ability to do the work at hand matters.  Our very approach to our work matters.  It also means that we have to have a bicycle that is in good working condition and does what we ask it to do.

In today’s cities, with today’s challenges, we have an opportunity to be explicit about the cities we are creating and how they shape us in return.  We have an opportunity to integrate our economic, social and physical worlds in such a way that will allow us to respond to the changing conditions in our world.  Debating climate change is moot when the world is changing in so many ways.  It is a distraction from the true work at hand – learning how to dynamically steer our cities into the future that allows life to flourish.  Learning to be even more adaptable than we have been is key.  It means being open to feedback and willing to take action – at any and all scales.  There is lots of work for us to do.

The next post will touch on the scales at which we work in our cities.  Does the scale we work at matter?