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?
The overall frame for Nest City is John O’Donohue’s blessing, The Time for Necessary Decision. The chapters of the book follow the trajectory of the blessing by moving from seeing patterns (Part 1), to the organizing patterns we create in cities (Part 2) and the ways to integrate our organizing patterns to achieve cities that serve us well (Part 3).
In the column to the right of each post, if you click on “Categories” you will be able to navigate to all the posts in a Part or Chapter of the book. I have categorized the most recent posts that form Chapter One – The City Impulse, and I have sorted out the older posts into Chapters as well. Please feel free to explore and comment.
Here is the gist of each Part (and group of corresponding chapters):
Part One – City Patterns builds a broad foundation for my argument: cities build evolutionary capacity. The foundational ‘impulse’ patterns are introduced, explaining why cities exist, how they are created and the underlying values that evolve within and with us as our cities grow and develop.
Part Two – Organizing for Emergence explores the organizing patterns of humans as we create and live in cities. We set plans to reach a destination. We experience uncertainty along the way. Then a whole new and unexpected future comes to pass. The first level of city “nestworks” are presented.
Part Three – Nest City integrates the three elements of destination, journey and emergence presented in Part Two. This is a second level of city “nestworks”, cog-like features of the nest city: city making, civic practice, city emerging and a sweetspot at the heart of city nestworks.
The next series of posts originate from Chapter Two – The Planning Impulse and focus on the impulse within us to “plan” our cities. Are our cities actually planned?
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.)
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:
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
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:
Conformity enforcers – 90%. Find the pollen by doing what the majority of beehive is doing.
Diversity generators – 5%. Find alternative sources of pollen.
Resource allocators. Reward successful behaviour of diversity generators and resource allocators by putting resources where the ‘return’ is favourable.
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.
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:
Most of us will conform with the behaviour of others around us.
A handful of us will regularly seek out new ways of doing things.
There are people in positions to reward (and withhold reward) our performance.
There are people in positions to assess our performance.
We advance our contributions with competition.
For our life in cities (and elsewhere), this means:
It is natural and appropriate to conform and be part of a team.
It is natural for some of us – but not all of us – to look for new ways of doing things.
There are naturally occurring boundaries on our efforts (referees, coaches, supervisors, parents).
It is appropriate to assess performance related to an identified goal.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
I work as a consultant to a variety of organizations: cities, NGOs, corporations.
I serve my neighbourhood organization as a volunteer.
Much of my consulting work serves the whole city and its well-being.
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):
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):
The development of new work means new ideas in response to life conditions.
The expansion of new work means implementation in response to life conditions.
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?
A city that meets our needs pays attention to three critical relationships within the city’s habitats:
between economic life and social habitat;
between social habitat and physical habitat; and
between economic life, through social habitat to physical habitat.
In the first relationship, between our economic life and our social habitat, we make personal investments to come up with ideas and turn them into new work. Likewise, how we organize ourselves shapes our collective investment in the idea – the labour we put to it, the skills we put to it, or simply the ‘human potentialities’, as Jane Jacobs put it, shape what becomes of the idea. In the workplace or in a community, for example, new ways of thinking, making and doing new things emerge when welcome; they likely remain invisible or nonexistent if the social habitat is hostile.
At a societal level, sometimes we just are not ready yet for new things until conditions change. Sixty years ago my home was built with no insulation. Energy prices were low and the notion of human-caused climate change did not exist. In contrast, today we have building codes with minimal requirements for energy efficiency and government grants to upgrade older homes. As our social habitat changes, so does our work. And as our work changes, so does our social habitat. Notice the adjustments we have made to life with computers, the internet, social media, etc.
This relationship between our social habitat and our economic life is critical to Jacobs’ refueling principle: “… no matter how efficient a cow may be, if it doesn’t self-refuel, it’s a dead cow. Self-refueling is so fundamental to survival, and to all other process of life made possible by survival, that conceptions of whether it is a good or bad thing are pointless.”[1] The ideas that survive in cities (new work) must be applied or used for economic life to thrive. This is the essence of refueling – capture the good ideas, let new ideas emerge from them, try them out, see if more new ideas emerge. The more this takes place, the stronger and healthier our economic life. In our social habitat, we must create the appropriate ‘equipment’ to capture and make use of the ideas, as well as finding additional ways to capture ideas. The social habitat supports, hinders, or removes our ability to self-refuel. This is where we demonstrate our tolerance for diversity, new work and change.
The second relationship in the city habitat is between the social habitat and the physical habitat. This is where we notice our physical conditions and whether they are changing or not. This relationship is about our receptivity to our physical reality, when we notice how habitat creates us and how we create habitat. An open relationship between our social and physical habitats is exemplified by our ability to take in the good and bad news.
The third relationship in the city habitat, between economic life and physical habitat involves travelling through the social habitat. Our social habitat creates the conditions for a relationship with our physical habitat and our economic life and between our physical habitat and our economic life. In this relationship we recognize explicitly that the city affects our work and that our work affects our city. We boldly look for feedback to link the three spheres.
Each of these relationships involves our social habitat, where there are degrees of mutual support and information exchange. On a continuum, we are either open to the exchanges between habitats, or closed. Like a tap, the choice is open with maximum flow, or closed with no flow. In the middle the tap is open partway, with flow constricted. And the degree of relationship compounds: the first two relationships must be open in order for the third relationship to take place. If one is open only partially, the third relationship will also be partial; it is only as open as its constituent relationships.
As a whole, the city is a habitat that encompasses our economic, social and physical habitats. Our social habitat allows the new work that creates and recreates our cities to take place in the context of our physical habitat. This means that new work is needed to create a social sphere that allows the necessary data to go back and forth between our physical environment and our economic life. 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.
This framing reorganizes how we think of balancing the well-being of economic, social and physical factors for sustainable development. My next post will explore the value of reorganizing these elements.
To organize ourselves to ensure our species is able to sustain itself, we need to fully contemplate the relationship we have with our work, and our work’s relationship with our habitat. Figure A illustrates this relationship.
The development of cities is a survival skill. When I say this, I mean the development of diverse and innovative work in cities is a survival skill. It forms what Jane Jacobs’ referred to as our economic life – the force that creates and sustains cities. The work we do creates our cities. This post begins to articulate further the relationship between our economic life – our work – and our habitat.
Economic Life
At the center of the illustration is economic life – the sphere where we work. Our work, at a minimum, is to ensure personal well-being of self and family. It most often involves a relationship with something, or someone else. If no one did any work, if no one ‘lifted a finger’ we would not exist. There is always work to do. We have to make an effort to survive; it doesn’t just happen.
The location of work varies greatly: it can be at home, out in the fields or the barn, on a construction site, in an office, or on a train. Our work is generally a transaction for something in return. When times are tight, work may be building shelter and growing food for family. If the skills to do this are not on hand, we work for others in return for those skills, or do something to barter for those skills. Moreover, the work done in cities is a transaction that results in money for the worker that is exchanged for shelter, food, clothing. And, if affluent enough, the worker purchases additional things for enjoyment. Or we may make work transactions with no money changing hands and instead a service changes hands, such as when we volunteer for a community event or work in our homes. There are paid and unpaid jobs everywhere.
The common thread in our work lives is a transaction with others. Very rarely, as a species, do we live alone. We are regularly in contact with others and we have chosen to live in communities, towns and ever-growing cities, and the source of our contact is in the exchange of work. Our economic life, the sphere in which we exchange our work with one another, is at the heart of the dynamic from which cities are created and recreate themselves. But it is not as simple as being in contact with each other. New work must be generated.
At the scale of the city, our economic life is the accumulation of all our work, combining and interacting, transacting. Our work creates our social, physical and economic worlds; this is what builds our cities. We inherit our physical habitat, but our work changes our habitat. We build settlements, roads, swimming pools and airports. We all build and create: individually we plant flowers, maintain our homes, build garages; collectively we build highways, schools, and businesses. The outer ring of the illustration is our physical habitat, which is both the habitat we are given and the habitat that is physically created by our work.
Physical Habitat
The outer ring of this illustration is the physical habitat in which we live. A city’s very existence hangs on its environmental (physical) context. Our economic life is very connected to our physical habitat. A settlement begins with the inheritance of a resource. As I write from Alberta, Canada, I am compelled to notice that my province’s economic life today relies on the oil and gas resources within our boundaries. As we have developed this resource, our physical habitat has changed along with our activity. Oil wells, mines, equipment and roads cover the landscape. We have grown cities and built new cities to accommodate the extraction of oil and gas for cities across the planet.
Our physical habitat also includes the spaces we do not include as traditionally being within the city. It must include all of the land that supports the city: the land and water from which food is grown and water is provided for citizens. It includes these resources and others that allow us the life we have: transportation, buildings, recreation, business, government, etc. It includes the impact of our activity, individually and locally, as well as collectively and globally, on our planet.
At the outset of a settlement, the physical habitat gives us the opportunity to develop new work with a resource. We have also, historically, created new work to accommodate a changing climate. New work in the context of our habitat continues to be an operating principle today. The habitat for most humans is now the city, which generates the conditions for more diverse work, which means we generate more change to which we must adapt. The physical habitat we build – cities – generates the conditions for more new work, which grows our cities. In the middle of these two elements is our social habitat, the connective tissue between our economic life and our physical habitat.
Social Habitat
From our African ancestors until now, it is clear that we are social creatures that gather and work together to ensure we do more than simply survive. Whether implicit or explicit, the reason we gather is that it affords us the ability to create the conditions to find new and improved ways of doing things. Together, rather than alone, we best face the challenges put to us. Not only do we physically create cities to face our challenges, but we also create a social habitat conducive to this. The quality of our social life – our social habitat – has an impact on our economic life and our ability to create the conditions to thrive. Cities are where we organize ourselves with social structures to create the world we live in, and, of course, be recreated by what we create. Cities are the world in which we look after self and other.
The City Emergence Dynamic
Our economic life is at the heart of our ability to create and recreate cities that respond to our changing world. Our social and physical habitats are always in flux and we shift and adjust our behaviour – our economic life – to learn and evolve. Building cities is a never-ending quest to do much more than survive. This quest takes place at many scales in the city, in what Marilyn Hamilton has articulated as a nest of city systems (Figure B). Moreover, our very work to adjust (at any scale) creates new conditions to which we must respond again, and again, and again… Cities are the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat.
In this week’s posts, I will explore:
the relationships between economic life and habitat in more detail; and
how these relationships show up at scale (self, neighbourhood, city etc.)
We only know how well our city is doing when we have feedback loops, giving us data on our city’s performance. I have been exploring to date the relationship between our economic life – and our ability to create diverse, new work – and our city habitat. The only way to fully comprehend the relationship between our work and the cities we build (our habitat) is through feedback systems.
A couple of simple feedback loops have popped up in my city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada this week about the city we are building. The topics: a growth coordination strategy and design guidelines for our new neighbourhoods.
The City of Edmonton released this week a draft Growth Coordination Strategy, highlighting the necessary steps to coordinate the city’s population growth to ensure environmental, social and fiscal sustainability. This is an effort to consider more information as we make decisions about how to build our city. The local news media have covered this story, providing feedback to the wider population: Edmonton Journal, Metro News, Even City Councilor Don Iveson has information for constituents on his web site. Little bits and pieces were on the radio this morning, and a bit on twitter under the #yeg hashtag. It’s emerging as a public conversation about what we are building, who pays for it and what it costs.
In the meantime, Edmonton is developing design guidelines for Edmonton’s new neighbourhoods. The City is asking the public what they think are the building blocks of great new neighbourhoods. At the beginning of this project, the City is offering a way for the public to reflect on the city we are building. Everyone can see the collection of photos people are posting on flickr or pinterest. Everyone can see the twitter feed using the hashtag #yegDNN. There is even a blog for the project. Most importantly, citizens are discussing in IdeaShare the city we are building and what they want from it. (Here is a link for more information on this project.)
The work of creating Edmonton to day did not rely only on planners and engineers. Politicians make critical decisions about infrastructure. Business owners and leaders make decisions about where to locate their business. Builders and land developers choose what to build. Citizens make decisions every day that impact the physical shape a city takes, and certainly the spirit of a city. NGOs also make key decisions that affect how a city takes its shape. So how do a couple of reports in City Hall serve the role of feedback loops?
City Hall prepares reports, which is one form of feedback. It also creates opportunities for citizens to discuss and reflect on our city. Even if you don’t read the document, the media coverage is helping us collectively reflect on what we build, where we build it, why we build it and what it costs. If you are a citizen of Edmonton, I invite you to take a look at the Growth Coordination Strategy. More importantly, they will be asking for citizen feedback.
In the case of the design guidelines for new neighbourhoods, the IdeaShare is a fantastic way for citizens to see what we collectively think about the city we are building for ourselves. If you are looking for ideas, you might want to check out Edmonton’s promising practices that have been documented. There is no report yet for this project, but you have an opportunity to help it take its shape. More importantly, you can reflect and be part of shaping our city habitat here in Edmonton.
In future posts, I will be articulating more intense feedback loops. In the meantime, look for ways to provide and be a feedback loop. Be a part of the city’s feedback system. That work will certainly create city habitats that serve us well.
