exactly

Contrary to what another poster surmised, I don’t live in a cabin, but a large, modern open-concept house in the “exurbs”. I have space, privacy, peace-and-quiet, lots of land where i grow apples, pears, blueberries, and various vegetables, full internet access and about a 20 minute commute to work, which like many modern high-tech companies, is also in the exurbs.

One thing that many people in ths discussion don’t realize is that in many ancient cities people used to spen most of their time in their own neighborhoods, doing business with local merchants and shopkeepers and seeing many of the same faces all day long. Ancient cities tended to be divided or organized along ethnic or religious lines so people lived in the same quarter, ghetto, etc, as others like them.

I concur. I believe studies have been done to show that humans live most copacetically and productively in groups of not more than 150. That’s a miniscule number when you consider that a “small” city is 100,000 people. If we can’t migrate back to a small village/tribe society, perhaps we should be considering micro-neighborhoods, where all the basic needs are met by the members of the m-n: food production, etc.

Trying to live in a more integrated way with the earth’s natural environment might impel us back toward small communities.

I was looking up Mike Davis’ contact info when your comment came in. I’m researching Part II of this conversation: slums as cities of the future. I just read through the Pitch a Show Thread and I can’t find your water pitch. Perhaps you should resubmit it.

If you had a time machine, where would you take a visitor from the past? Would you offer the 2000-odd year old city of Rome as a vision of the city of the future? More likely you would offer as example a city that scarcely existed (or not at all) in your guest’s time.

Perhaps the title should be changed to “Existing City in the Future”?

When looking for the model “City of the Future”, you need to look where the cities are not … yet, but will be later.

New York was once the city of the future, as shaped by sea travel. Chicago was once the city of the future, as shaped by railroad travel. Los Angeles was once the city of the future, as shaped by the automobile. To find the next model “City of the Future” you want to look where the influence of the Interstates and the Internet finds it’s fullest expression.

To look past the immediate future, you need to look outside today’s old cities. You need to look at the spaces in between. Drive out of Los Angeles. Do not be fooled by the lack of a readily discernible center. the suburbs of today are greater engines of economic activity than major cities of the not-so-distant past.

Drive up Interstate 15. Note the tremendous growth surrounding Las Vegas. Drive a bit further and you hit rapidly growing St. George, Utah. Stop and pick up the real estate fliers as you travel down the interstate. Clearly something major is afoot.

Between the 1930’s and the 1960’s, something like 1/3 of the US population quietly moved from farms to cities and suburbs. Seems that we are in the middle of another big quiet change. This time folk are moving outward, away from crowds, crime. pollution, and overpriced real estate. The Internet and all those shiny-new trucks on the Interstates have further lessened the need to live in major cities and their suburbs.

What happens when the oil runs out? Will this all come tumbling down? The answer is found in the price of oil. As the price rises, the production of oil from alternate sources (shale, coal) becomes profitable, and the reserves suddenly increase. Also as the Internet allows folks to travel less (commuting, business trips) demand and pollution are both lessened.

To find the model “City of the Future”, you need to look outside the cities of yesterday.

Cities have offered the best and worst of human experience. I am no utopian but I think that we would do well to remember both the wisdom of Jane Jacobs and the basic outline of smart growth in re-imaginaing our cities.

Climate change/global warming, population growth/diversification, the demands of the next economy, and democracy in the US, will keep cities at the forefront of our culture. It is for these reasons that cities will be around for awhile. I respect plnelson for his views and he seems at home in his cabin, but I think cities are natural and far from obsolete. Cities are not for everyone, but they are essential for our culture.

Climate change will lead to fewer cars and trucks on the streets and more localism and regionalism. The changes in our lifestyles raised on this blog regarding less car use and life post peak oil are coming in the form of green buildings, localized energy production, and close looped city ecosystem where “one persons waste is another’s food.” (Michael Braungart)

The nature of buildings will change too. Not only in terms of design – that is the look and feel of a 21st century post modern/green building in old industrial cities that will shock the preservationists – but also the mechanics of buildings as our next buildings will be designed for the long-term and disassembly so the parts can be reused and thus less goes to the dump or floats on a barge in the ocean to be dumped somewhere else. Most recently built buildings have a financial shelf life of 10 years after which the investment has been paid off and it is often torn down for another 10 year building. In all cases, the rubble is sent to the landfill. This practice will change too.

Buildings will be built with different processes too. Take a clue from Christopher Alexander from his most recent work The Nature of Order, where he calls for buildings to unfold based on what the land wants built on it and be guided by generative code that is spiritual and ecological in origins.

More localism and regionalism will have cities cooperating more in the exchange of goods and services. One city will do the urban farming and exchange food for something produced in the next city over. Intervale in Burlington VT produces 8 % of the cities fresh food. It is what Jane Jacob describes in Cities and the Wealth of Nations about how cities thrive when they trade directly with each and thus form regions from the exchange.

Population growth brings another force for change. In the US we will grow from 300 to 400 million people in the first part of this new century. Cities will house most of these people because it is cheaper than elsewhere. To accommodate the rising population, buildings will have to become more compact and dense and go up in height. Population growth will continue to bring more diversity of immigrants. Recent immigration is less European/Mediterranean as it was in past times, and more diverse cultures—African, Islamic and Asian – with many diverse customs and symbols, requiring us to think and act more inter-culturally where we work together directly (Charles Landry).

Some people will make a living by using the Internet and never leaving home. But most next economy companies will be multi-disciplinary because our problems demand so. For example to create a next century business requires the coming together of art and science. No longer is a new business in the heart and mind of one entrepreneur, but in the hearts and minds of many. Thus, companies will be federations of know-how’s from many entrepreneurs. And companies with this complexity of talent will require dense places like cities for the partners to meet, talk, and have the face time required to create the trust which is the spine of this new kind of business.

In Yeats poem, “The Second Coming” he says: …”The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; The center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…The center of democracy will hold only when we see and feel the faces of others. As Levinas says: “the bare face of another is where ethics lies.” If we truly see the face of others we cannot turn away from our service to the common good. If we all head for the woods and isolation and assume cities are dead, Yeats center falls apart.

As James Hillman often reminds us, in City and Soul the Greek polis is the origin for city where the polis is the throng and energy of the crowd mixing it up. Despite our feisty need for independence and to be alone, there is something equally hard-wired about us to be with others. This is the human dilemma: to handle this creative tension of self and others and it is how character is formed.

Our “public intentions” can only get us so far, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s integration with the landscape would be commonplace (note: Falling Water is literally falling).

Warsaw is ugly because it was rebuilt in the Stalinist image after Hitler ordered collective punishment upon the self-liberating Poles of 1944. That was, sadly, “successful” urban redesign.
Detroit has a paragon of urban redesign in Lafayette Park, envisioned and made real by the great van der Rohe, yet only as a result of the power of eminent domain freeing up enough land as I-75 destroyed the cultural centroid of the antedepression black middle class of the city.

I fear that the next city to be designed entirely by a visionary architecture will be Tehran, when the big one strikes the fault that is its home.

Before I sound cranky, let me say that one word encapsulates the only tangible “design” characteristic — short of the intangibles — that could save all of our cities: biomimicry. My idealized urban design = ecology applied to integrating the natural and human-made.

The broader point raised by PLN, I think, is this: In considering the public policy implications of new urban planning tools, should we also be considering whether our public policy should be working to prompt people into cities, or should it be working to resist the “city model”? For example, where I live in Virginia, transportation issues loom large in the public debate — anyone who has driven on Route 66 during rush hour understands why. The debate now centers on widening roads, controlling development, expanding light rail, etc. But should it also focus on providing incentives for employers to rely more on telecommuters? Are there other steps it should take to promote dispersion where dispersion is now possible?

Are you claiming that the evolution of human beings is independent of thinking?

plnelson: “We’re a very adaptable species, but we are not infintely malleable”

I agree, but could thought imply or contribute to some degree of malleability in evolutionary devlopment? Looking at this in terms of evolution, what role does thinking play? Is it simply a side-effect of our physiology? Has it had any effect on our physiology? Has it had any effect on say biota, and if so, could that affect our evolution?

While there is no doubt that genetic traits sculpt how we respond to our environments, but sometimes those genetic traits head us down the wrong pathways. For instance, sweet flavors have been hypothesized to trigger a “nutritious” flag in our brains, brought about by the high sweetness of fruits, which tended to be enriched in the antioxidants and vitamins and other phytonutrients that our bodies had evolved to require for metabolism. However, in the age of high-fructose corn syrup, genetic instinct serves us poorly, and lead to problems like diabetes. That’s one example of why I say that we shouldn’t just rely on what our genes tell us, though they definitely influence us.

My concern is that appeals to genetic traits, which tend to dictate individual phenotypes, do not fully explain behavior (nor should they) of individuals, and are a long way from explaining social dynamics. Computer simulations of residential patterns show how segregation can arise only from people preferring to share at least one border with someone of the same color, with no antipathy towards other colors. Since our cultures and economies shape collective behaviors to a large extent, I don’t think that appeals to genetics will give us the picture of what we should have, so much as what we should NOT have.

I think you and I agree that some urban forms are not what our brains are evolved to. I would generalize that to modern life (e.g. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006 Apr;160(4):354-60 shows that children without ADHD who have high television exposures when young tend to have lower visual attention and cognitive engagement upon stimulus than lower-exposed peers). The hypothesis here is that fast-moving and rapidly changing images are not easily processed by developing brains, whose visual stimulus is continuous in nature.

Taking a cue from a field of which I know nothing, “ecopsychology,” I think brains need natural shapes and structures to develop good spatial and visual memory skills — hence the chic new term “nature deficit disorder” for urban youngsters — definitely something to it. And into adulthood, I think the “social ecology” of cities can have huge impacts on us all. Compare the Netherlands and Germany, where bicycle ridership increases with age to the U.S. where it declines… no doubt that has something to do with obesity and the incidence of diabetes.

As to the claim that cities have pushed us past the limit of human “malleability,” I think it falls flat in examining epidemiologic evidence. U.S. lifespans and survival rates for many diseases have increased substantially in urban areas over the past few decade, and no doubt some part of this is due to the concentration of medical resources where many people can access them. I do believe that urban design limits how healthy we can truly be — a good number of epidemiologic studies have found that living alongside a lot of traffic (or being in it) increases heart and lung disease incidence and death rates from traumatic injuries. While reducing these consequences is an very important benefit of “redesigning” cities in the right manner, I think that the “imperatives” for doing so come not from the stresses of urban life, but on the horrible toll that we take on the planet and on the interconnectedness of thh human family.

If you want my opinion as to why the health impacts and other direct stresses of transportation aren’t going to change things, just take a look at how the Department of Transportation has responded to the significant body of epidemiology saying that traffic is bad for health — deny, play up uncertainty, and obfuscate!

But we only did that because the advantages of cooperation outweighed the disadvantages imposed by the noise, pollution, crowding, etc, of cities. Also note that in ancient cities most people mainly interacted with others in their own section or quarter of the city, ie., people who were basically like them.

MY point is that we no longer need to make that tradeoff. We can have the large-scale cooperation and sharing of ideas and effort WITHOUT needing to deal with the donsides of urban life thanks to modern methods of communication and transportation.

It doesn’t matter whether you THINK evolution “should” influence how we live. The fact remains that we are the products of evolution. The enzymes produced in our gut, the shape of our teeth, our nutritional needfs WRT to vinamins and types of proteins we can synthesize, etc, determine what we can eat and stay healthy. The designs of our nervous systems; the number of faces we can easily remember, the way we form clans and tribes, our emotional and sexual responses, the way we react to social stress, etc, etc, are ALSO the products of our biology. We are not deer; we are not cats, we are not dogs – they have their own neurophysiological wiring and we have ours.

There are many aspects of modern 21st century life that we are not well-adapted to. The result is that levels of stress-related illness and behavioral and personality problems are astronomical. 7 million children are on Ritalin, millions more are on antidepresants, millions of young women are anorexic – the NY Times did a scary story last year about what life in a modern summer camp is like as all the kids line up each morning to get their drugs. And the adults, too, are on drugs or in therapy by the 10’s of millions.

We’re a very adaptable species, but we are not infintely malleable – to be happy and healthy we need to respect who/what we are as a species.

The Cooper Union has an interesting online presentation exploring The Ancient City Within NY CHI LA that illustrates one of the competition project’s inspired look back at history to understand more about the present and future of cities. It assumes a lot from Rome, as most western civilization does, though there is evidence of cities 2,000 years earlier in the Indus Valley.

I don’t think that how we evolved should define how we should live, lest we run headlong into the naturalistic fallacy (something on the order of “is implies ought”). Just as easily, someone could argue “we live this way because we evolved this way.”

I don’t think evolution has anything to do with city design, though it should. The late ex-anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin noted rightly that in nature, evolution creates greater diversity of forms, and that industrial civilization ‘to date’ has reduced the diversity of forms where it occurs. So while the internet has brought us diversity of opinion, it may be contributing to the acceleration of linguistic extinction.

Merging those radical leftist thoughts with the perhaps apolitical thoughts of “natural capitalist” Amory Lovins, if we promote “biomimicry” in our cities by engineering our lives to produce zero waste and imitate ecological systems, we could get back to increasing the natural, architectural, and social diversity of our cities.

But I think you’re right, ”pnelson”, in that some modern city forms do induce stress by overloading stimuli. However, I think most successful cities are “cities of neighborhoods,” where localism can still thrive.

It’s interesting to note that many large sports facilities, e.g., Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA, (also a site of rock concerts) and new museums, e.g., Mass MoCA, have been build outside the cities. And then, of course, in music you have Tanglewood and Marlboro, etc. The biggest, most famous rock concert in history was Woodstock. And I work for a company that supplies a lot of the equipmwent used in biomedical research and there’s certainly nothing about biomedical research that requires it be done in an urban environment.

Young people still flock to New York to get in the thick of things; surely large masses of people and infrastructure are important in generating creativity and energy

Young people flock to cities because apartment living is cheap and you don’t need a car. Most of them flock right back OUT again as soon as they have the means. Nowadays the biggest, most creative “masses” of young people are the ones found online. There’s a limit to how many creative geniuses you can fit into one coffeehouse or apartrment livingroom but there’s NO limit to how many can fit into an online community. If there is a 21st century version of the Algonquin Club or the Lost Generation it probably ends in “.com”.

Can we retrofit large cities in situ to be more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, rather than dismissing them?

As I said, I think the REAL problem with urban environments is that, biologically. we are not-wired up to be well-adapted to living among large groups of strangers on a diurnal cycle vasttly different from the one we evolved with over millions of years. I think it creates stresses that cause many of the health, personality, and behavioral problems we associate with urban life. Basically we’re hunter-gatherers and while you can take the hunter-gatherer out of the savannah, you can’t take the hunter-gatherer out of our genes.

Can we retrofit large cities in situ to be more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, rather than dismissing them?

I don’t think so. I think those places have captured the imagination precisely and only because they were the only way for creative people and thinkers to achieve a critical mass. Today they are polluted, noisy, and expensive. They always were, of course, but in the past that was the price you paid for stimulation. But in the age of the internet this is no longer necessary.

I’m an artist, poet, and software designer. I live out in the sticks where I’m surrounded by nature; I can look up into a night sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. But I collaborate daily with people from Bangalore to East Fairfield VT, and from Provincetown and to Paris.

At the same time, all through history, our imagination has been captured by the large leading cities (Rome, London, Paris, New York, etc.). These have persisted for centuries or millenia; maybe there is something valuable in them that will persist no matter how many internet-enabled cellphones we carry around.

They made sense for a brief period in human history when having lots of people in close proximity was the only way to achieve a critical mass of intellect and ideas during a period when communications technology was primitive. Cities also made sense at that time for group defense against attack.

But fundamentaslly humans are not wired-up to interact on a daily basis with thousands of strangers. We evolved in small groups of primates and later small groups of hunter-gatherers and our brains and social behavior are optimized for seeing a relatively small number of familiar faces regularly.

Furthermore, cities are noisy and have unnatural day-night lighting cycles, which further adds to the psychological distortions they impose on humans.

On top of all that, cities separate people from the natural world, giving them less understanding of, and less sense of connection with the natural environment. This undermines any understanding of the damage humans do to the Earth, which facilitaes their ability to keep doing it, willy-nilly. And it’s not just the Earth – in cities you cannot see the night sky, which cuts people off further from their grasp of their place in the universe.