Tag: Cities

Evolving cities is a survival skill

Over millennia, settlements and cities have started and thrived when and where the physical context was right, in an appropriate ‘habitat’.  They have declined – and ended – when the physical habitat changed and the city didn’t or couldn’t adjust.  A city may decline when the economy struggles, but the ultimate decline comes when there are physical limitations, such as no food or water.

A city and the citizens that make up the city rely on its physical habitat for its wellbeing.  We rely fully on our physical inheritance and the decisions we make about what to do with our inheritance.  Authors James Lovelock, Bill McKibben, Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery argue that as a species we have overextended ourselves; we have overused our inheritance.  The result may be an over correction, as nature does with any species that reaches too high a population.  It is not difficult to imagine this possibility given the rate that our population growth (overall and in cities) is accelerating.

Perhaps, unlike other earlier civilizations, we will cultivate our capacity to be conscious to what is happening around ourselves, to adapt, and survive.  The stakes, though, are higher this time.  This time the physical context we have to adjust to is planetary in scale, not local.  The floundering of ancient civilizations did not mean the extinction of the human species.

In the 1960s, Lovelock first articulated Earth system science in what became Gaia theory.  Seeing Earth as a living system, he defines our home as “not the house or the street or the nation where we live, but the Earth itself.”[1]  Earth, or Gaia, is an emergent system on which climate and organisms are tightly coupled and evolve together.”[2]  As things change, we adjust to them.  Gaia does the same thing.  We change her and she adjusts.  Lovelock’s point is that she will self-regulate to survive.  She doesn’t care if we survive or not, so if we wish to survive we need to heighten our abilities to adapt to the changing world.  To do that, we need to heighten our abilities to notice our habitat.  If cities are engines of innovation – and innovation is the engine of cities – our understanding of cities and habitat must advance.

Keeping an eye on our habitat, and responding appropriately, is a survival skill – one that we as a species can choose to hone.  Earlier this week, I wrote that the development of cities is a survival skill.  Perhaps this would be better stated this way: the evolution of cities is a survival skill.  Ancient civilizations met their demise because of a lack of ability to adjust to changing life conditions: weather, food supply, environmental disasters or economic conditions.  Our habitat can change for years over large geographies, such as the North American drought of the 1930s.  Our habitat can change in hours, such as the forest fire that swept through the town of Slave Lake, Canada in the summer of 2011, destroying a third of the town.  In the longer term, there is debate about whether we are on a trajectory of environmental demise as a result of climate change caused by human activity (which I do believe).  But the debate is moot.  Regardless of the cause, using any metric, it is hard to ignore that the world is no longer the place with which we have become familiar and that it is constantly changing.

The very nature of cities is changing.  As cities grow, the very systems we put in place to organize ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, are in flux.  The physicality of cities (what we build) is changing. Cities grow and adapt to the needs of citizens over time.  The economic systems we create also change constantly: sometimes dramatically.  Our social systems are also changing.  All of these systems emerge as a result of our work.  As much as these systems and structures create who we are, at the same time we are creating them.  We shape ourselves in relation to our environment, our physical, economic and social habitats.

So far, I have explored our economic life and it’s relationship in a physical habitat.  In my next post I will add a third city habitat – the social habitat – and lay out the dynamic relationship of these three city habitats. 

 


[1]   James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, p. 2

[2]   James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, p. 113

 

 

The work we do creates our cities

The development of new kinds of work is a collective survival skill for our species.  It enables us to shift and adjust to the changing conditions of the world.  Cities pay a particular role in this process, as physicist Geoffrey West has found: people collectively become more innovative as our cities get larger.  (See my post Cities are engines of innovation.)  Cities, then, are not just an engine of innovation, but a habitat for innovation.  Moreover, it is a habitat that make for ourselves. We make the very habitat that serves our survivals.

Figure A - Collective Work in City Habitat

In yesterday’s post, Development of cities is a survival skill, I reached the conclusion that a city with a well-developed economic life – where new work is created in response to changing conditions, in relationship with other work at various scales of complexity – is a city that has the ability to adjust and adapt and evolve.

Our collective work in cities, our economic life, takes place within – and in response to – the city habitat (Figure A).  We develop new ideas because we see a need for something different and better to happen.  When we implement new work, it takes hold and expands our economic life.  We choose, consciously or unconsciously, to implement new ideas to address the challenges we face, when the time is right.  A diversity of new ways of thinking, making and doing new things is key for both the development and expansion of economic life.

Cities begin with new work in habitat.  All settlements and cities begin with the implementation of new work with, as Jacobs puts it, at least one useful inheritance from Earth’s past development and expansion.[1]  All settlements and cities begin with new work in response to surrounding conditions, or habitat.  For our African ancestors described by Spencer Wells in Driven to do more than survive, it may have been the use of bone, making a longer lasting hunting tool that allowed hunters to explore.  Settlement at St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada 500 years ago drew on vast cod stocks and a geography that placed the sheltered, ice-free harbour at the Eastern most point of land on North America (ie closest point to Europe).  Within this habitat new work was developed and implemented.  

New work builds on an inheritance of resources, existing work, new work, ideas, etc). The initial resources for settlements’ economies, writes Jacobs, “aren’t earned by export work, but all the same they’re earned in a different way – earned by combining gift resources with human effort.”[2]  A settlement begins with the resource, then subsequently what we choose to think, make and do with it.  The settlement at St. John’s built upon the gifts of abundant fish and geography.  The ongoing health of cities continues in this pattern: we must do something with our inheritance.  What we do with what we receive is critical; if we do more of the same, we stagnate.  If we create and implement a diversity of new work on the shoulders of existing work, we expand.  Exports do not suffice as the driving force for economic expansion: it is what we do with the inheritance, the energy received, before it is discharged as an export. [3]

The relationship between our economic life and our habitat is significant because our city habitat creates the basis for our economic life (our inheritance) and it creates the conditions for us to pursue new work.  Despite any rules or regulations we set up about what can happen where in cities, we self-organize to create habitats for new work.  Stephen Johnson describes this well:  “Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots.  Cobblers gather near cobblers, and button makers near other button makers.  Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out.”[4]  People look for habitats that will support their desire and ability to pursue their work.  Cities serve us by creating a habitat to both develop new kinds of work and expand a greater diversity of work.

As our work evolves in relation to our physical habitat, it physically changes it.  Our choices every day – our work –  affect our physical habitat.  As we mine coal, or farm, we change the landscape, as we do when we build buildings, roads, parks, etc.  Each generation receives a habitat and each day, month, year and lifetime we continue to create our habitat.  It is given to us and we create it.  And then we create more new work to adjust to the new habitat we have created.  Cities, simply, are the habitat we build to create the conditions for new work and innovation.  Steven Johnson again: “Good ideas… want to connect, fuse, recombine.” [5]

The city is the natural habitat we both inherit and create with each generation.  Our economic life, the relationship between our work and economy, is a force that sparked the creation of, and our migration to, cities.  It continues to do so (see Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?)  New work creates cities and in return the conditions for new work are created again.  There is a cycle: our work creates our habitat (city), which in turn creates new work.  Cities are engines of innovation.  They are also engines of our migration – our evolution – when our innovation is developed and implemented in the context of our habitat.

Today, I am left with two questions:

  1. To what extent is our work, even new work, blind to our changing habitat?
  2. How would we change how we organize ourselves to consciously choose to create habitats for ourselves that serve our present and evolving needs and desires?

 

[1]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, p. 54

[2]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, p. 56

[3]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, p. 52-53  (preceding sentences in this para)

[4]   Johnson, Steven, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, p. 108

[5]   Johnson, Steven, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, p. 22

 

Note – For more on the evolution of St. John’s, please see my article, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Purposeful Evolution of Cities,” Plan Canada, Winter 2011, Vol. 51 No. 4, p. 26-31.  Digital archive not available.

The development of cities is a survival skill

At the scale of self or the city, economic life is the development of new ideas in response to changing life conditions.  Something changes and either consciously or unconsciously, we adapt our ways of thinking, making and doing.  New work emerges.  This is the force that drives the growth of cities.

Last week’s posts were the first of my efforts to blog my book – Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.  I started out with this question: Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?  I presented the intense proliferation of cities on Earth and our population growth.  In my second post, Driven to do more than merely survive, the work of Spencer Wells is front and center.  Using genetics, he has charted the migratory odyssey of the human population from a small African Village 10,000 years ago to our current population across the planet.  In an evolutionary eye-blink, our population has blossomed.  In an even shorter timeframe the number and size of our cities has grown significantly.   In my third post, Cities are engines of innovation, I reach the conclusion that cities are engines of innovation AND that innovation is an engine of cities.  As we find new ways of thinking, making and doing new things at every turn, we constantly create new work.  This is our economic life, the heart of innovation in cities.

Drawing on the work of nineteenth century embryologists and evolutionists, Jane Jacobs highlights the patterns in the generation of new work, informing us about the economic well-being of cities and how they come about.  The insight I gain from Jacobs work[1] falls into 3 categories:

  1. Habitat
  2. Relationship
  3. Meshes at scale
Figure A - Our Work in Habitat

Our habitat shapes our work, and as our habitat changes, our work changes and adapts with it (Figure A).  When fuel prices rise we become compelled to seek new technologies for fuel efficiency.  When a child is born our work within the family shifts.  When a resource is found, we find ways to extract and make use of that resource.  When the global economic marketplace struggles, we look for new ways to organize ourselves.  New work arrives in response to our habitat – our economic, social and physical contexts of the time and place.   New work does not arrive for the sake of change, but is purposefully in response to something –  known or unknown.

Figure B - Collective Work in City Habitat

New work is in relationship with other new work.  To begin, all new work builds on previous new work that has become conventional, or commonplace (Figure B).  All new work offers something different and may become the next commonplace work upon which future new work can be built.  As Jacobs puts it, new work has lineage and will serve in turn as the basis for new work.[2] The development of new work also depends on the co-development of other new work; there is significant interdependence.  Nothing happens in isolation.

The pattern of the development of new work is not a tidy linear process, but an endless mesh of interconnections that are both seen and unseen, an open-ended process that creates diversity and increased complexity.[3]  When repeated over and over, greater diversity and complexity are created.  Moreover, this pattern takes place at all scales of time and size: at the scale of self, family, city, nation, or planet; an hour, a day, a lifetime or 3000 years.  In Figure B, the work of each individual is included in the economic life of the city.  The self is nested in the city.

Figure C - Hamilton's Nested Hierarchy of City Systems

For Jacobs, the ‘development’  of new work means a qualitative change – new kinds of work, a greater diversity of work, new ways of working.  The cumulative effect of these qualitative adjustments is a world that becomes larger in scale and more complex.  Our world has evolved from a village to a territory, nation, planet and universe.  Each rise in scale brings new understanding and more complexity to which we respond.  And our responses create more complexity to which we respond.  And our responses create more complexity to which we respond, etc.  Marilyn Hamilton, author of Integral City, and Integral  City Meshworks blogger, has caught this phenomenon of cities and scale.  Imagine a nested holarchy of city systems (Figure C), where each holon (circle) is a system responding to its own life conditions.  As Hamilton puts it, “The city as a human system is a nest of systems; one cannot just look at the city as a whole or integral system without recognizing that it is made up of a series of whole systems.”[4]

At the end of my last post, I wrote that growing cities turns out to be a survival skill.  This is why:  A city with a well-developed economic life – where new work is created in response to changing conditions, in relationship with other work at various scales of complexity – is a city that has the ability to adjust and adapt and evolve.  

Cities in particular, where we are constantly changing our habitat, require us to adjust and adapt: develop new work.  For each of us, our work, and our approach to it, adds the necessary diversity to the economic life of our cities.  As Jacobs point out, new work is the qualitative development of economic life, the expansion of economic life is the quantitative implementation of new work.  

In tomorrow’s post, I will examine the word ‘habitat’. and its relationship with the quantitative expansion of economic life.

 

 

 

 


[1]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, and The Economy of Cities

[2]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, p.24

[3]   Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, p. 17

[4]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, p. 65

Cities are engines of innovation

The human journey thus far appears to have been sparked by new ideas.  In yesterday’s post, it distilled down to thinking, making and doing new things.  The spark of new ideas continues.

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that as a city grows, it becomes more innovative.  A city 10 times the size of a neighbouring city is 17 times more innovative.  A metropolis 50 times bigger than a town is 130 times more innovative.   For Steven Johnson, the city is an engine of innovation because it is an environment that is powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion and adoption of good ideas.  His conclusion about West’s work: in one crucial way, “human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip… despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis… [is]… more creative.”  (Readers interested in a quick synopsis of Johnson’s thinking on the conditions that create innovation will enjoy this 4 minute you tube video.  A strong connection is made between innovation and cities specifically can be found in his book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.)

As a species, we have an impulse to innovate, to seek new ideas and new ways of doing things.  We strive to improve the quality of our lives.  It turns out that cities are engines of innovation and, as noted in my May 1, 2012 post, Are people growing cities or are cities growing people, these engines of innovation are running fast.

Consider that innovation is simply new work – new ways of thinking, making and doing new things as described in yesterday’s post.  New work, and the constant generation of new work, is a way for us to adapt to our changing world.  If our work always stayed the same, our species would not have travelled and settled across the planet.  We would not have created agriculture and cities.  New work allows us to evolve.  It spurs our migration to, and the growth of, cities.  In return, cities create the conditions for more new work.  Cities are the habitat we create for ourselves to create the conditions for us to learn and grow, endlessly seeking to improve our lot in life, through our work.

The work we do as individuals, and upwards in scale as a species, is first about our survival.  It is what we do, for example, to make money to pay for housing, to feed and clothe our families and to meet our recreational and material interests.  But our work, when we generate new ways of thinking, making and doing, offers something larger.  Our work offers opportunities for self, family, neighbourhood, city, nation, species, to adapt to the changing world.  I imagine these kinds of work in our ancestral tribe of 11,000 in Africa:  find food, prepare food, provide and maintain shelter, look after children, look after the physical and spiritual well-being of the people, and provide wisdom and leadership, as necessary.  In contrast, the kinds of work in today’s cities continue to evolve.  It includes these and many other kinds of work as we continually seek and find new work.  Yet all of these iterations of new work in cities come about when our basic needs are met – when we have time to explore, invent and pursue our passions.

Work is hard.  It may be drudgery, a grind.  It may be a place, but it is more ubiquitous than that: we work at things all day, every day.  When something succeeds, or functions well, we say it ‘works’.  The truth is, work is a ‘work out’.  To get the results we seek we need to be willing to put in effort and ‘work’ at it.  When we do, presumably, it will ‘work’ better.  We have a desire to ‘work’ things through so they ‘work’ better, perhaps easier.  When we search for new work, it becomes a learning impulse, a desire to find new and better ways of doing things that are of interest to each of us.  Whether paid or unpaid work – it is simply what we do as we make our way through life.

Figure A - Our Work and the World

Our work is what we offer the world, whether to make ends meet or because we love to do what we do.  We exchange our work with others for goods and services in return for things we need.  What we offer and what we receive constantly informs and influences us.  Our work offers knowledge and skills to others, who in turn offer us opportunities to do our work.  If we choose, we develop our work further, looking for new ways of thinking, making and doing.  This relationship is what Jane Jacobs called our economic life (Figure A): the transaction between our work and the world.  This relationship is an exchange – a transaction – that is not limited to money, and is much broader.  It is, simply, a relationship between me and the world – the economy.

Work for me these days includes chairing a series of meetings for the City of Edmonton as a group of employees and stakeholders write a growth coordination strategy. For this work I am paid.  My work life also includes writing, shoveling my neighbour’s sidewalk, taking my turn to get my son and his friends to soccer practice and my share of housework.  While I am paid for the work with the City, I am not getting paid for the other work, but I do get something in return: I have a good relationship with my neighbor who keeps an eye on our home when we are away, my son’s teammates families take turns driving to practices, and my whole family contributes to the physical well-being of our home so we are all able to participate in activities we enjoy.

This dance between self and other, and what we offer to each other, is our economic life.  Collectively, when we add more and more people into this relationship, I can imagine the relationships in a city: our economic life (Figure B).  When we develop and offer new work, we offer something far greater than we imagine: we create the conditions for more people to create new work and follow their passion.   We create a habitat for innovation.

Figure B - Economic Life in the City

The answer  to Tuesday’s post is that people are growing cities AND cities are growing people.  This is taking place because we create habitats for innovation, cities, which in turn bring new challenges for which we need innovation to resolve.  By doing new things we are changing the world around us, necessitating more adaptation and new work.

Cities are engines of innovation and innovation is the engine of cities.   

It turns out that growing cities is a survival skill.

New work generates cities and the capacities we need to adapt to our changing world.  And the very habitat we build for ourselves – our cities – is where we create that new work.

My next post will explore more specifically the relationship between the development of new work and cities.  Another take on Jacobs’ work a few decades later…

 

Driven to do more than merely survive

Spencer Wells’ genetic time machine sheds some light on my last post’s question: Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?  As a geneticist and anthropologist he has explored the journey of the human population from our origins as a small tribal village in Africa to a population that has expanded around the whole planet.  (For an engaging synopsis of his work, I suggest watching his documentary, “Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, on YouTube.  For specific details, you will find his book, of the same title, of interest.)

Using genetic markers in our DNA, scientists found in 1987 that all humans share an African great-great… grandmother who lived approximately 150,000 years ago.[1]  She is the common female ancestor to everyone alive today.   Further research reveals another common ancestor in an African great-great grandfather 60,000 years ago.[2]  For Wells, these two points in time, where genetic data coalesce, indicate that there were no modern humans living outside Africa prior to the latest estimated date: “all modern humans were in Africa until at least 60,000 years ago.  That is the real shocker: 60,000 years may not seem very recent, but remember that we’re dealing with evolutionary time scales here.”[3]

Wells plots the evolutionary time scales over the course of a calendar[4] year, conveying the speed at which our migration took place, from 23 million years ago to today.  On ‘New Year’s Day’ apes appear, and it isn’t until the end of October that our first hominid ancestors walk upright.  From that point, more time passes, until December 28, that our first modern human ancestors appear in Africa.  It isn’t until New Year’s Eve that modern humans leave Africa and populate the world.  As Wells puts it, it was the first big bang of human evolution, and it took place in an evolutionary eye-blink.[5]   In a mere 10,000 years, the planet’s continents, with the exception of Antarctica, were inhabited.[6]  We travelled “from eastern Africa to Tierra del Fuego, braving deserts, towering mountains and the frozen wastelands of the far north.”[7]  To travel, we constantly adapted to life in conditions that were unfamiliar; we grew and evolved our understanding of the world as we migrated – and in order to migrate.

We are left, however, with a big question: what sparked our ancestors’ mass migration on New Year’s Eve?  Wells himself wonders if one single fortuitous event changed the course of human evolution, if the right person was in the right place at the right time that provided the spark, but the truth is we just don’t know.[8]  This all took place before our traditional recorded history, but we do know some things that help us identify the spark.  Three archeological shifts took place at this time, around 60,000 years ago: “First, the tools used by humans became far more diverse and made more efficient use of stone and other materials.  Second, art makes its first appearance, and with a presumed leap in conceptual thought.  And finally, it is around this time that humans began to exploit food resources in a far more efficient way.  All-in-all, the evidence points to a major change in human behavior [sic].” [9]   In essence, we began to think new things, make new things and do new things.

Anthropologists surmise that a critical prerequisite of our new abilities to think, make and do new things is a result of changes to our social habitat.  In this case, advancement of our language skills, which allowed us to develop complex social networks, was almost certainly the spark that brought about the changes in behavior [sic].[10]  A change in our ways of communicating changed our social behaviour, and with it our very culture, tipping the scales to learn new things, drive our capacity to migrate across the planet.  That migration continues into today’s cities.  Learning – thinking, making and doing new things –sparked the initial migration and it continued to spark the emergence of independent settlements, agriculture and civilizations.  Consider Ronald Wright:

By 3,000 years ago, civilizations had arisen in at least seven places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, India, China, Mexico and Peru.  Archeology shows that only about half of these had received their crops and cultural stimuli from others.  The rest had built themselves up from scratch without suspecting that anyone else in the world was doing the same.  This compelling parallelism of ideas, processes, and forms tells us something (p. 64) important: that given certain broad conditions, human societies everywhere will move towards greater size, complexity, and environmental demand (p. 64-65). [11]

The broad conditions that allowed for our migration across the planet, the simultaneous development of independent civilizations and our current city growth are threefold:

  1. Our capacity and interest to create new work (think, make and do new things);
  2. Our capacity to create a social habitat that supports the generation of new work; and
  3. Our capacity to respond to and create a physical habitat that supports our social habitat and the generation of new work.

The relationship between these three elements is a set of never-ending loops that put us on an evolutionary path: our work recreates our social and physical habitats; our social habitat recreates our work and our physical habitat; our physical habitat recreates our work and social habitat.  We are driven by our desire to do more than merely survive.  Our desire to advance is what compelled us to migrate across the planet and, without knowledge of each other, develop independent civilizations – in the form of cities – across the planet.  We desire to thrive, and our ultimate response to this quest is to create habitats for ourselves in which we will thrive – cities.  Our habitat is the conditions we live in.  It is our economic life, our social life and our physical context, each of which are intertwined in such a way that they are the very forces that guide our growth and development as a species.

There are two things to note about Wells and his work.  The first is his passion for new understanding and for sharing his work with others.  Because of his work, and of those who precede and work alongside him, we learn about the world and add to their understanding.  He is fully engaged in the generation of new work and inviting others to do the same.  He is fully engaged in economic life.  Second, we are now noticing that the progeny of our tribe of 11,000 are reconnecting and reintegrating.  Once distant, foreign nations are now connected through global economy.  Our ease of travel allows migration and mixing of cultures.  Our technological advances allow instant and widespread communication through social media such as Twitter and Facebook.  We are deeply connected socially and economically across the planet.  Physically, we are mixing cultures and nationalities to a degree that noticing and following the genetic markers, as Wells has done to find our ‘path’, is getting increasingly difficult.  Even without Wells’ work, we are socially and physically integrating ourselves.  With his work, we see that we are reintegrating ourselves; we always were of the same tribe.

Our migration into cities is an evolutionary impulse that brings with it a level of connection and integration that we are just starting to get used to.  The rate of population growth in cities is clearly on a trajectory that will continue to generate unfamiliar life conditions.  Just as our African ancestors experienced whole new worlds as they migrated, the world we live in is changing literally around us.  The rate of change is unprecedented.  Physically, the number and size of our cities that we build to live in is an indicator.  In our social habitat, the changes offered by technology connects us as we never have before.  In our economic life, we generate new ideas in our cities at an increased rate.  Understanding and accommodating the changes is unimaginable, just as travelling the unknown world was unknowable for our ancestors’ initial migration.

We are living in new times; we have never been here before.  Yet despite not knowing exactly what’s happening or what’s to come, we are headed in a direction: we migrated across the planet, we migrated into cities and we are now growing our cities.  To really answer the question about whether people grow cities or whether cities grow people, we must dig a little deeper into the forces that generate our migration.

My next post will consider this question:  What moves us?


[1]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 33

[2]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 55

[3]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 55

[4]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 55

[5]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 55

[6]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 145

[7]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 145

[8]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 184

[9]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 85.  Wells draws on Jared Diamond’s anthropological work around ‘The Great Leap Forward’ and others’ work around Diamond.  He also draws on Richard Klein’s work.

[10]   Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, p. 85

[11]   Ronald Wright, A Short History of Everything, p. 64-65

Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?

There is something about cities that compels us to create them at an unprecedented rate.   In the year 1800 only one city, Beijing, had over 1 million inhabitants.  One hundred years later, in 1900, there were twelve.  Only fifty years later, in 1950, there were 83.  By April 2012 we have reached 486 cities with over one million inhabitants. (For updates, see Thomas Brinkoff: The Principal Agglomerations of the World.)

Our cities are more numerous, but also getting larger in scale.  In 1950 only two of the world’s cities were home to over 10 million people each: Tokyo and New York.  Mexico City joined the ranks in 1975 and today, we have 27 cities with over 10 million people.   11 of these cities are larger than 20 million, with Tokyo clocking in at an unprecedented 34.5 million.

The growth of the number and size of our cities is taking place alongside an equally dramatic increase in the world’s population.  The United Nations estimates that on October 31, 2011 the world’s population reached 7 billion, and it only took 12 years to grow from 6 to 7 billion people.  Our first billion took quite a bit longer: in the year 1 we numbered 200 million and it took until the year 1850, reaching 1.2 billion, to add a billion.  It took almost 2000 years to grow that first billion, compared to 12 years to grow our most recent billion.  And this population growth is increasingly take place in cities themselves.  For the first time, people living in cities now outnumbers those living in rural areas.  The United Nations’ State of the World Population 2011 estimates that one in two people live in cities today, and in 35 years, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities.

Our population continues to grow at a staggering rate (see worldometer for real time statistics) – and cities are where we are housing them.  This leaves me with a big question about cities: Are people growing cities or are cities growing people? 

This is the first of many posts as I publish Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities here, in the blogosphere.  Over the long haul, I will explore our relationship with cities, the very habitat we create for ourselves to survive and thrive.

My next post will explore the work of geneticist Spencer Wells and the evolutionary journey the human population made across the planet – before we began to build cities.


 

 

A great poem shapes the arc of Nest City

John O’Donohue’s blessing, For the Time of Necessary Decision, served me at a most critical point in writing Nest City.  When I was trying to sort hundreds of pages of information into a cogent way of organizing my thinking, my mom gave me his book, To Bless this Space Between Us.  When I read this piece, I saw immediately that the arc of Nest City follows the blessing in the form of 10 chapters and an epilogue:

1.  The City Impulse

2.  The Planning Impulse

3.  The Thriving Impulse

4.  An Uneasy Journey

5.  Destination Alive or Adrift

6.  Emerging Thresholds

7. (Un)Known Possibility

8.  The City Making Exchange

9.  Enduring Civic Practice

10.  The Emerging City

Epilogue – The Soul’s desire

 

 


 

Nest City – a slow release

 

Nest City: the Human Drive to Thrive in Cities is the title of the book I have been working on now for a few years.  I have 100,000 words that now sit in a structure that makes sense. I know where it is going and my ask now is to make it clear and compelling.  I have very purposefully over the last 9 months chosen not to blog very often; it seemed to be a distraction from the writing time I need for the book.

But I have received several signals from the “universe” that it is now time to get the blog back to life with renewed purpose.  It is now time to start taking steps out of my safe little nest where I have been working so feverishly and start putting my writing efforts out into the world.  The signals:

  1. The signal: Agent rejection #1. My first proposal to a literary agent was declined.  This is normal, but it made me rethink the traditional “publishing” trajectory of finding an agent, who finds an editor who wants to publish your work, and so on.  This serial world is at odds with the messy and meshy world that I live in.  Response: Diversify my efforts to find my audience.
  2. Signal: I keep reading about small publishers.  My goal is to put my material out into the world.  Once out there, it will grow if it is meant to grow.  While it would be a thrill for my ego if my writing went viral, the reason I am writing is to find and support people who are working to create cities to be the best habitat they can be for as many people as possible.  Response: Just start small.
  3. Signal: Writing about blogging keeps coming my way.  The Writer’s Guild of Alberta‘s most recent edition of WestWord has an article on blogging. My takeaway: blogging time feeds other writing time.  Response: It is time to blog and put my ideas out there.
  4. Signal: People want to read Nest City.  After one of my sessions at the Manitoba Planning Conference this year, a participant asked me where she could get my book.  I had no answer and no way to connect people to my work.  I am being asked to very explicitly put my work out into the world. I do not need to wait for a book to be published to do this.  Response: It is time to share what I’ve got and invite feedback. 

SO.  I intend to release my work here.  Each Tuesday, in short little pieces, I will release the pent up energy that is vibrating in my whole being.  It will be a slow release…  to feed our capacities to build cities in which we nest and from which we go on great adventures.

 

United Airlines’ Plan G

I am on a mission to explore the evolutionary purpose of cities for human life.  This week I am checking out one of our big cities, New York.  This is a big nest we have built for ourselves.

On my way, I am struck by United Airlines’ annual green issue: that it is mainstream enough to be in an airplane’s seat pocket, and the wicked ideas. Thanks to United Airlines for sharing the ideas and technologies that people pursue in their work.  Here are some highlights (I have flagged links to other sites if interested to follow up further on each of these):

  1. Turn sidewalks into power plants.  Britain’s PaveGen has created sidewalk tiles that convert kinetic energy of pedestrian footfalls into power.  Check them out in high-traffic areas of London at the 2012 Olympics.
  2. How about SolaRoad?  Dutch company TNO is using bike paths in the town of Krommenie in northern Holland to test glass-covered, solar cell-embedded concrete panels to generate 50 kilowatt hours of electricity per square metre.  They are aiming for 85,000 miles of road!
  3. Mass market solar shingles.  Dow Solar has expanded its Michigan plant to produce Powerhouse shingles, making them more accessible to home owners.  Solar panels are not on the roof, they are the roof.
  4. City co-farming.  The Plant, in Chicago, produces food year round in an abandoned meat-processing factory.  Aiming to solve economic environmental and nutritional problems simultaneously, the vertical hydroponic farm (greens and fish), bakery, breweries exchange ‘waste’.  I call this co-farming.
  5. Buildings that clean the air.    Aluminum producer Alcoa has a line of panels with titaniaum dioxide.  10,000 square feet will clean as much air as 80 trees.  Next one is even better….
  6. Plant upward.  The world’s first vertical forest is under construction in Milan – Bosco Verticale.  The balconies will be full of trees, shrubs and flowers.

Cities have no end of ingenuity to offer.

The inviting city

A city can leave its mark in an instant.  For former Canadian Governor General Adrienne Clarkson’s parents, Rio de Janeiro was a happy moment on a perilous and uncertain journey in their migration to Canada from Hong Kong in 1942.  (For more details, see her book, Room for All of Us.)

While the Red Cross’ Gripsolm was docked in Rio, her parents explored the town and found cafes full of couples dancing the samba.  Her mother forever carried the urge to return to Rio and ‘really learn to samba’.  I can only imagine the mark a festive dance in a festive place would make on a young refugee couple making their way from a way of life that put their existence in peril, still on a perilous journey heading to uncertainty.  In my imagination, I see the young couple fearful for themselves and their two small children (Clarkson was two and a half), concerned about the family left behind, their well-being on the Gripsolm, and if all the effort to flee to Canada would be worth the effort.  Perhaps this brief moment in a city that loves to dance reminded them of what makes them feel good despite the circumstances.

Cities are constantly inviting us to enjoy them.  What is not constant is our reaction. Rio invited these young refugees to feel good, and significantly, they fully accepted the invitation.  I imagine other refugees declined the invitation to explore Rio and did not step off the ship.  Others will have explored the city and engaged in various degrees.  Some will keep walking when they hear the music.   Others will pause and listen.  Others will go inside and see exactly what’s happening.  Others will move to the front of the crowd for the best view.  Others will take their turn on the dance floor.  Others will take a turn making the music.

It is up to us to make a decision about what we make of the invitation.  It’s not possible to take everything in, nor are we interested in everything the city has to offer.  That is the beauty of the diversity of the city – there is something for everyone.

But it isn’t only about being invited, it is also about making invitations.  In Rio, someone set and prepared the venue.  Someone invited the musicians.  Someone provided food and refreshment.  Someones cleans up afterwards.  Following what makes us feel good, we all play various roles in the myriad of invitations the city makes to its citizens and visitors.

Whether inviting or being invited, the choice at every turn is simply degrees of participation and finding one that suits.  I am not a musician and I’ll dance a little.  To fully enjoy, I am often happy to watch or walk by knowing that something compelling could be around the corner.  In other instances I put myself on the stage or serve on the clean-up crew.

In cities, we each take our turns making invitations and being invited.  We offer and we receive joy.  The choice at every turn is when and how we participate in the dance that is the city, knowing that we will feel good.

As Clarkson puts it: some of the most frivolous things in life are the most important.