Issue 51: The Future of Cities
How is it already mid-February?!
Today’s Polymathic is all about the Future of Cities, a topic that’s been near and dear to my heart for a long time. I’ll share content not as a list but in the form of a narrative. I’m trying something new. By the time you spend a weekend reading the articles/essays/books, you will look at cities differently. Let me know what you think of this style.
But first I’d love to get your help,
here’s a link to signing up for Polymathic Monthly for you to share with one person. It would be great if you did.
I’m starting a podcast with my great friend/product genius and community builder, Reza Shirazi. Reza and I have met up twice a month for close to 8 years and ‘waxed polymathic’. The podcast is all about the Future of our Cities. Sign up to receive the first episode here. And share this link too!
And don’t forget, buy Michel’s book ‘Cultura’ here 😀
With the sponsorships and announcements out of the way ;), here we go!
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We all want basic things from our cities;
a chance or a shot at a better life,
nourishment of mind and body,
energy (actual and emotional) and
a community we create (family) or curate (friends).
But crumbling infrastructure - physical and societal - currently plague our cities. A fractured government (talking about the US) is unwilling to spend the money necessary to repair the physical infrastructure. Tens of billions of dollars have been allocated to roads, water and electrification. But it’s not enough.
At the same time, we, the people, continue to yearn for the basic needs our cities can provide. Even as planners like Robert Moses have consistently failed to understand the social capital + fabric holding together our cities. Still we continue to do our best to repair the broken societal infrastructure.
One of the things we’re now realizing about our cities is the link between our public spaces and public health and, critically, we need to recognize that how we design our spaces further splinter us into opposing ‘tribes’ (Brookings Institute research).
In our move toward tribal affiliations, fans of Balajis Srinivasan are flocking to ‘network states’; online tribes that buy real land and live under a ‘moral innovation’ or a ‘moral code’. I call BS. It’s exclusionary. Especially when one of your moral codes is ‘intelligence’. One of these network states is Itana (light in Yoruba) located in my home Nigeria. I could rant all day but history tells us that these ideas have been around for a long time and they tend to fail. They didn’t work then. They will not work now. The underlying ‘we’re prosecuted or superior and need to get out of town’ vibe is not the basis on which to build a city. Ayn Rand’s imaginary Galt Gulch, an inspiration for the proponents of these network cities, was not even a city but a collection of random homes with no social fabric between the ‘residents’. Unfortunately for us, Randians abound at the highest level of the government some of them rail against.
Rather than waste time building exclusionary cities, we should figure out ways to improve the ones we have, providing holistic solutions to social issues and adapting to address climate change (‘Systems Thinking for Addressing Social Change’). And it’s time to imagine better futures for our cities. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’ novel, climate change is the culprit in a game of ‘how do we adapt and survive?’, revealing some interesting ideas and fascinating people.
In fiction (like Robinson’s) and our current reality, economic sustainability goes hand-in-hand with climatic sustainability. Climate and economics are impacting residents of cities differently. The wealthy can relocate or have multiple abodes depending on how habitable the city is. Walkable communities (like we had before) make it easy to live healthier lives even in a country like the US where suburbia has taken over. Expect this to get worse even as wealth gets created at two ends of the barbell - trillion-dollar companies on one end and super-wealthy individuals on the other - our cities are splintering into tribes of haves and have-nots. What we forget is that, even as we live in our own homes, our mini systems, we are still part of the macro systems that we rely on.
So where should we look to see where our ‘city communities’ might be going? An unlikely candidate, gaming, might be showing us the way how to address some of these issues. Games and gaming culture foreshadow our tech and sociocultural behaviors as shared in this video by Jane McGonigal. Both positive and negative. For example,
streamers and gamers are connected and generating revenue from everywhere in the world; a foreshadowing of how income accumulation can happen for anyone anywhere in the world despite ‘location’.
Gaming involves online groups and communities which eventually spill over into IRL community events; a la Pokémon Go. Businesses will have to accept that their best employees will choose where they live and connect with their tribe in person for meaningful bonding or working in short bursts. Similar to how connectivity and community clusters were built.
And companies will have to figure out how to keep the best talent as we enter a world where the barbell of income splits into talent that can command any amount of money, and some of them will chase after ‘Trophy Jobs’, even as companies (grow wealthier) and use technology to get rid of Bullsh*t jobs.
An Ipsos ‘What The Future’ survey (PDF download) shows that overall ‘cost of living’ is the #1 reason people choose where they live. Closely followed by crime and then housing costs. Climate change is the fifth right after healthcare costs. Economics and climate well before even political leanings. Consequently, talent will move wherever they want to, regardless of what companies say or desire. But that might be the point for these companies as they get rid of talent they wanted to fire in the first place. What we don’t want (though) is for this freedom that the top talent has to remove the freedoms of the people in the places where they move to. As we are seeing places in Mexico City, Medellin and Bali sound more like Bushwick. Let’s not be ‘those’ people the locals side-eye by just our mere showing up.
A couple of seemingly random things I worry about:
we need to deeply understand the climate conspiracies of tomorrow are being seeded today.
And how our cities are losing their unique flavor and, for the most part, urban centers across the world are blending into the same ‘blandness’ due to technology and globalization. An issue urbanists have been vigorously complaining about for at least a decade now.
Everything is related when it comes to thinking about systems. So while these two things might seem trivial, they are not inconsequential in their effects on the social and infrastructural issues (respectively) that our cities face.
I stay extremely positive about the future of our cities even as we come up to elections that will define the next few years. We have all the technology we need (Drawdown). As we face challenges in our cities we must call on the depths of our humanity and our ingenuity. I couldn’t think of a better book to close this out on if not Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.
Till next time. Be well. Be kind.
Seyi