Cities and Survival

This book marks a watershed in our thinking about cities. Other books have dealt with the relationship of nature and the city and the connection between landscape architecture and urbanism. But I know of no other that weaves together ecology, anthropology, urban design, and social activism with anywhere near the complexity and nuance of the essays in this book, while looking at cities across the globe, ranging from the wealthiest communities of Silicon Valley or in the Roppongi district of Tokyo to some of the poorest slums on the planet in cities like Nairobi or Mumbai. The editors call this “now urbanism,” defining it as a “critical and complex practice that is simultaneously local, regional, and global” and that “views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the present city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers.”

I also think it will be how we think about urbanism from now on. I say that, in part, because “now urbanism” reflects a much larger shift going on in human civilization that will have an enormous effect on life in both the developed and developing world. That shift involves moving away from the mechanistic, hierarchical view of reality that arose during the Enlightenment and that prevailed through much of the 20^th century and moving toward an ecological, networked view of reality, in which the “web” has become not just a place to seek or send information, but also a metaphor for how we now see ourselves and the world around us.

We no longer envision the brain, for example, as a giant computer but instead as a neural network, we no longer see organizations as well-oiled machines but rather as social networks, and we no longer describe the natural world as a competitive struggle for survival but now as an integrated web of life. In an intellectual context in which ecology has become the new reality, it makes perfect sense to see cities the same way. As the authors here demonstrate to great effect, an ecological urbanism opens up all kinds of new possibilities and enables us to see things in completely new ways.

Ecology of Cities

In the older, hierarchical, mechanistic worldview, for example, officials either ignored slums at the bottom of the economic pyramid or wanted to eradicate them as some sort of urban malfunctioning. The newer, networked, ecological worldview turns that thinking on its head. We now see informal settlements, as KDI puts it, “not as catchments of waste and poverty, but as spaces of renewal, entrepreneurship, and activism – as well as critical components in the reshaping cities.”

As many of the chapters in this book make clear, we have a tremendous amount to gain from the ingenuity, resilience, and determination of the residents of these settlements, and a terrific asset to work with, given the rich networks of human and social capital that these communities have to offer. Rather than ignore or eradicate slums, we need to go to them, learn from them, and work with their residents not only to improve the lives of the people living there, but also to draw from them strategies that we will need to apply in cities everywhere, increasingly faced with what slum dwellers have long figured out: how to do more with less, often much less.

Systems of Survival

As such, cities have become about survival, not just the survival of individuals and families trying to improve their lives, but also the survival of whole districts in the city and of cities and regions themselves, trying to meet the growing demands on urban budgets and infrastructure with shrinking tax revenues and resources. The old hierarchical, mechanistic way of running cities has, at least in part, created this condition. When those at the top of a hierarchy think they have the answers and when they believe that a city should work as if it were a machine, too much of the good will of the people of a place goes unused and too many of the best ideas of the residents of a city get overlooked. Likewise, when we see cities and the various groups within them engaged in a competitive struggle, we fail to see the myriad cooperative and mutually reinforcing relationships that actually exist there.

“Now urbanism” completely reframes that situation. From this perspective, cities do not have deficits, but incredible abundance, with far more capital – human capital, social capital, and natural capital - than they have yet to figure out how to tap. And survival does not involve a ruthless struggle among the fittest, but a creative, entrepreneurial opportunity of reinterpreting, reimagining, and repurposing almost anything and everything. In a web-like world, cities thrive according to how well they help their residents build and sustain their networks of relationships, which requires not a lot of money, but a great deal of sensitivity to the wealth that these human interactions create and a willingness to get obstacles to that wealth formation out of the way.

Panarchy Predictions

Cities also hold the key to our survival as a species. That may sound like an odd statement, given our dominance over most other species and the apparent invincibility that our technology has provided us. But as we know from ecology, the very moment one species in an ecosystem becomes so pervasive, it also becomes extremely vulnerable: an idea explored in the work of the ecologists Lance Gunderson and Buzz Holling. (Gunderson, Holling, 2002) Their theory of “panarchy” recognizes that ecosystems become susceptible to collapse when one species becomes too dominant, efficient, and reliant on other species – as humans have become on this planet.

That makes the question of how we organize and operate cities – the most complex human ecosystems – so crucially important. If we continue to conceive of cities as highly efficient, interconnected, resource-intensive systems and design and operate them as we have in the past hundred years, we will only push ourselves more rapidly to a collapse of the human ecosystem, as panarchy predicts. If we follow the pathways laid out in this book, however, we can begin to move in a very different and less vulnerable direction. This involves, as Ben Spencer, Susan Bolton, Jorge Alarcon et al. write, an “’emergent’ or ‘bottom up’ design … of small scale, low cost, ecologically responsive interventions in community infrastructure,” and it entails, as the book’s editors say in the introduction, “selecting those interventions that suggest a path towards increased health of coupled human and natural environments.”

Urban Scaling Laws

This incremental, accessible, sustainable, and participatory approach to city building also shows why scale matters. If our dominance as a species threatens our viability, then breaking down the scale of what we do has not only practical value, but also real survival value. That relates to the work of Geoffrey West and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, which Jon Christensen discusses in his chapter. (West, 1999) The biophysicists there have discovered a universal scaling law in nature in which the metabolism or energy used by an organism equals its mass to the ¾ power (E=M^3/4). This holds true for all plants and animals, with one exception as I will get to in a moment. And the ¾ power means that organisms are “sublinear,” realizing a roughly 15% increase in efficiency as they increase in size.

As West’s colleague Luis Bettencourt has also argued, and as Christensen notes in his chapter, cities achieve these same efficiencies of scale as they grow larger, using less energy and their infrastructure more efficiently. But they also have a “superlinear” tendency to speed up the pace of life and the rate of innovation as they grow in size, which counters the tendency of large organisms to slow down as size increases. (Bettencourt, 2013) This also leads to an increasing rate of negative effects like crime, pollution, and disease, which makes it essential – especially in an era of growing megacities – that we design the metropolis in ways that minimize such undesirable impacts. To do that, we need to engage the talents of everyone including the poorest residents of a city, use the environmental services of a region as effectively as possible, and put in place as much green infrastructure as we can. In doing so, we can not only reduce crime, pollution and disease, but also improve the lives of people, the habitat of other species, and the quality of life of every urban resident in the process.

Human Outliers

This will also require, though, an adjustment in how we define quality of life. As West has observed, the universal scaling law of nature has one outlier: us. Because of technology, human beings now have the metabolism or energy use equivalent to that of a blue whale. (Lehrer, 2010) When we consider a world made up of over 7 billion blue whales – over 7 billion of us – no wonder we have stressed the planet’s ecosystems, affected its climate, and over-consumed its resources. This makes the study of informal settlements of the sort we have seen in this book doubly important. We need to understand how people can lead the lives with so little not only for humanitarian reasons, but also because we will all need to learn how to do this – either by choice in order to avert a collapse or by necessity if or when the collapse occurs.

Cities, then, represent a survival strategy for our species. But that strategy will work only if we maximize the involvement, ingenuity, and imagination of absolutely everyone in the city, since we never know who will have the best idea, the most creative insight, or the most ingenious solution to the challenges we face. Which, in turn, makes poverty something we can no longer afford. Every person who does not have an opportunity to realize their potential reduces the opportunity of all of us to achieve the kind of innovation that can mean the difference between our surviving or not. The stakes are that high.

Urban Futures

This recalibration of what constitutes a good life would be hard enough without our also having to deal with two of the most momentous and unprecedented changes that our species has ever faced. The first involves dramatic demographic change: the rapid rise in the number of people now on the planet, having increased from 2 billion to over 7 billion people over the span of a single human lifetime, and the equally rapid rise in the number of people now living in cities. As Chelina Odbert and Joseph Mulligan state at the start of their chapter, “For the first time in history more people are living in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, it is expected that 70 percent of the world’s population will be urban.”

The second monumental shift we face involves climate change and related effects on the natural environment. As Denise Hoffman Brandt observes in her essay, there exist both “gradual effects of climate change (sea level rise, increased precipitation, higher temperature averages) and “extreme events” (storm surge, heavy downpour, heat wave, and high winds).” These have all happened with greater frequency and force than even many in the scientific community anticipated. And all of them will disrupt the “envelope of regularity,” as William Morrish puts it, “the safe and supporting urban landscapes” we seek to create for ourselves even as “our acts have produced a wilder and unpredictable nature throwing past environmental rhythms out of sync.”

Avoiding Extinction

How we deal with the intersection of those two trends – our rapidly growing and urbanizing human population with our rapidly changing and destabilizing climate – will determine whether we survive as a species or whether we join the myriad other species facing what Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin call the planet’s “sixth extinction” event because of our fragmentation of their habitat and our disruption of the ecosystems that they depend on. (Leakey, Lewin, 1996) We should not discount the possibility – nor ignore the paradox – of our succumbing to the very things that we have brought on others. Few species rely on so many other species as we do to meet our needs and the more we undercut their viability, the more we threaten ourselves.

The survival of the human species may seem like so remote a possibility or an event so far off into the future that most people might not think it worth worrying about. After all, we live in an era of “urban triumphalism” as Jon Christensen so succinctly describes – and so ably debunks – in his chapter. And we have at our disposal an unbelievable level of technological prowess. As William Morrish observes in his essay, “As a society, we’re producing and capturing more data each day than was seen by everyone since civilization began.” But the very urbanity and technology that insulates us from the threats to our existence also ironically create the conditions most likely to bring us down.

Our Viral Predators

As I have argued elsewhere (Fisher, 2013), the most immediate threat lies not in climate change per se, whose effects, however severe, will remain relatively gradual in their overall impact on humanity. The real threat comes in our having created the most efficient disease transfer technology ever devised: transcontinental jet airplanes. A virulent influenza pandemic of the sort that epidemiologist Michael Osterholm sees as “immanent” – or worse, a hemorrhagic fever of the sort that we have no immunity against or ability to stop – can now quickly move around the globe, infecting people before they know it in a rapidly spreading infection that may ultimately affect every human being. (Osterholm, 2005)

The Vulnerability of Cities

The prospect of such a pandemic relates to this book in several ways. First, it seems likely that the deadliest viruses will arise because of poor sanitation and the ease of disease transfer from animals to human in one of the world’s informal settlements. As Ben Spencer, Susan Bolton, Jorge Alarcon and their colleagues note, “An estimated 863 million people, approximately 1 out of every 3 people in the cities of the developing world, live in informal urban settlements ... By the year 2050, this number could reach 3 billion, more than a third of the world’s total population,” and as those numbers increase, so do the chances of a zoonotic disease developing and spreading.

            Second, the pandemic will travel to cities first; the larger the city and the busier its airport, the sooner it will arrive there and the earlier the infection, when we have the least capacity to fight the disease. At the same time, it will likely strike the wealthiest populations – those who travel more than the poor – first, countering the illusion of those in the developed world who may think that they have the means to protect themselves from any such illness. “In the event of a major pandemic,” writes Dr. Grattan Woodson, “healthcare services and especially hospital services will be rapidly overwhelmed. It is likely that the healthcare system will be the first societal institution to collapse.” (Woodson, 2005)

The Self-interest in Slum Improvement

Third, the best way to stop a pandemic involves arresting it at its source and slowing its spread, all of which plays to the themes taken up in this book. We greatly reduce our chances of a new zoonotic disease arising by improving the living conditions and sanitary systems of the world’s poor. Several essays here make that point in various ways, ranging from the idea of the Venezuelan Urban-Think Tank to divert the money spent on space travel for the improvement of informal settlements to the efforts of Spencer, Bolton, Alarcon, et al. in developing “small scale, low cost, ecologically responsive … infrastructure” in a Peruvian favela, to the work of KDI in engaging multiple stakeholders in participatory, multi-sector efforts to create networks of public spaces in a Nairobi slum. Given the danger that the diseases bred in these informal settlements present to the entire human population, the cost of upgrading global slums seems minor compared to the likelihood that those who have the most to invest will also be among the first to pay the price in not doing so.

Deep Engagement in Places

The other factor in reducing the possibility of a global pandemic comes from limiting or at least slowing the mobility of those who would travel from one part of the world to another. Here, the analogy of cities as ecosystems, which appears in several chapters, has particular importance. Judith Stilgenbauer writes about the landscape ecologist Richard Forman, who views “the landscape as a mosaic consisting of a matrix, patches (as the basic units that evolve and fluctuate), and corridors forming networks.” That idea of a landscape composed of a mosaic of patches and corridors, when applied to urban form, results in a very different kind of city than the highly vulnerable, globally connected, and environmentally unsustainable metropolises we have built over the last century. The remarkable localism of so much of the work discussed in this book makes that clear. When we conceive of cities as mosaics of ecosystem patches, then urban life and professional practice involves not recklessly jet-setting around the world, carrying invasive species and infectious viruses with us, but instead engaging deeply and over the long term in particular communities, as several authors in this book have described in places as diverse as Lima, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Tijuana.

Moving Bytes, Not Bodies

William Morrish also highlights the flip side to this localism: the global digital revolution and the “Internet of Things” that link us instantaneously around the world. Too often the digital revolution gets viewed, wrongly, as irrelevant or even hostile to the needs of impoverished communities, as something controlled by and mainly available to global elites. While true on the face of it, this waste stream of information also has the potential, as Morrish recognizes, to provide an “open “know-how” platform of collective trust to help citizens build and maintain a civil society and sustainable city.” It also suggests a future in which we will stop moving bodies so frequently and so rapidly around the world – threatening all of us in the process – and instead will increasingly move digital bytes of data that can empower people in their local communities with the information that they need to have agency over their lives and that we all need if we are to fully leverage the human capital we need to innovate our way out of the demographic and environmental double whammy we face as a species. (Fisher, 2014)

Survival Through Cities

Cities have long served as places of opportunity and the rapid urbanization going on around the world testifies to that. As Spencer, Bolton, Alarcon et al summarize, “since World War II, political and financial capital has concentrated in cities … At the same time, lack of investment in rural areas, the industrialization of agriculture and the commodification of land in the service of corporate interests have eroded rural livelihoods. Faced with few opportunities in rural settings and drawn by the promise of a better life in the city, more than 70 million immigrants relocate to cities each year. More often than not, their hardships continue unabated when they arrive.” That promise of a better life, though, clearly trumps the hardships that continue, since people keep flooding into cities globally.

Living Off the Waste Stream

The lure of the waste stream that Morrish writes about in all of its variety has a lot to do with the sense of so many people that, whatever their challenges, cities still offer a better chance of surviving and eventually thriving. As the journalist Katherine Boo conveys so powerfully in her book about the Annawadi slum near the Mumbai airport (Boo, 2012), scavenging, recycling, repurposing, and disposing of the enormous waste stream of products, materials, and resources in the city represents opportunities that rural people rarely have, and so urbanization feeds on itself. The more people in a city, the more waste, and the more waste, the more people move to the city. As Morrish says, quoting William McDonough, “waste = food,” which remains almost literally true in the case of the residents of many informal settlements. They have a better chance at feeding themselves and their families by living off the waste stream than by trying to grow their food themselves.

In this sense, the human ecosystem operates no differently than any other. As one of the only species that generates waste that ends up not as food for others, but as garbage in landfills, we have a lot to learn from the more advanced species we share the planet with that have long established a balance among predator, prey, and scavenger. We may think of ourselves as predators, but before we become some viruses’ prey, we need to greatly increase our scavenging. The residents of informal settlements understand what a scavenging economy entails and the ingenuity it involves.

The Economy of Cities

A scavenging economy may also help us address the paradox of value that Adam Smith put at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations and that capitalism has yet to resolve. Smith asked why we value diamonds that have no use and don’t value water without which we cannot live. A moral philosopher by training, Smith thought that the invisible hand of the marketplace would solve that paradox by enabling people to do well financially and do good ethically – and environmentally – at the same time. This has not yet happened. We still over-value diamonds and under-value water to the point where large segments of the human population do not have ready access to clean water, something that, as we have seen, jeopardizes us all because of its pandemic threat.

To resolve the paradox of value, we will need to rethink – or rather finally achieve what Smith had in mind with – capitalism and begin to treasure the things essential to life – clean air, fresh water, diverse species, the human imagination – and price out of reach everything that threatens our survivability – pollution, poverty, and predatory behavior of all kinds. This will, in turn, require an inversion of social mores in which status accrues to those who need and consume the least rather than, as today, the other way around. We will one day – and soon, I hope – admire the residents of informal settlements for this reason, for we ignore them at our own peril.

The Third Industrial Revolution

In many ways, the global economy has begun to move in this direction, in what the economist Jeremy Rifkin has called “the third industrial revolution.” (Rifkin, 2011) This revolution represents a shift away from the mass production and consumption that characterized the second industrial revolution, ushered in by the assembly line process, and toward an economy based on mass customization and micro-production, enabled by mobile digital devices and “big data.”

As Rifkin describes this third industrial revolution, it sounds remarkably similar to the vision of the future laid out in this book. He sees the world’s economy moving from the “top-down organization of society … to distributed and collaborative relationships,” from “fossil-fueled” industry to a “green industrial era,” and from “hierarchical power” to “lateral power.” At the same time, this third revolution undermines the old hierarchical, capital intensive, and resource demanding production methods of the second one by empowering ordinary people with extremely low cost production methods, as Gundula Proksch mentions in her chapter.

The Informal Economy

This also alters our perception of informal economies, which as a couple authors note in their chapters, have become a major percentage of the economic activity in many countries, as much as 40% of the annual output in developing countries. Economists have tended to see this as a transitional phase as these countries become more developed and presumably move toward a larger formal economy. (Elgin, 2012) But Rifkin’s assessment of where the global economy is heading suggests that informal economic activity might grow not just in developing countries, but in the developed world as well, as design and production go virtual and increasingly happen anywhere and anytime by almost anyone.

            Here, too, the study of informal settlements and human ecosystems has much to offer. On one hand, everyone with a cell phone now has access to a vast, global market, making it possible for people to overcome the limits on their activities that impoverished places have placed upon them. On the other hand, the virtual, fluid nature of living, working, and making things in the third industrial revolution makes place, paradoxically, an ever more important concept. Innovation will increasingly depend upon our maximizing the interactions among diverse people and human activities, making dense, mixed-use, and mixed-income neighborhoods of the sort discussed in this book vital to economic development.

Place-based Thinking

This paradox of place becoming increasingly important in a placeless economy suggests another transition key to our thriving in the future. With the waning of hierarchical, mechanistic ways of thinking and of the capital- and resource-intensive methods of the second industrial revolution will come a change in how we understand and sort our knowledge about the world. We continue to convey information in linear ways, in the form of books and e-books; to teach it according to disciplines; and to store it in libraries – real and virtual – by sequential number and lettering systems on shelves.

Whatever advantages this has had in order for us to command and control the world around us, this way of storing and accessing knowledge has also enabled us to damage the world and ultimately to harm ourselves because we don’t organize our understanding of the world as it is organized: by place. We see the world topically and sequentially, while it occurs spatially and temporally. This suggests that a tool essential to landscape architecture and urban design - geographical information systems – will eventually become a major way – perhaps the dominant way – in which we will access information in the future. Because GIS layers information spatially, linking data to a given place, it allows us not only to “map” the world, but also to see the world as it actually exists, as Morrish, Proksch, and other authors in this book suggest.

Spatializing Knowledge

This mapping of our knowledge about the world also reinforces the social and economic changes mentioned above. Data-rich maps provide a visual way of conveying information across the barriers of language and to the growing percentage of the human population that remains illiterate. The book divides the literate and illiterate and, as such, has helped reinforce the power of the former over the latter. The digital divide threatens that as well, with the wealthier parts of the world having much more access to information than the poorer parts.

The web and cloud computing may help end that division by making most of what we need to know available at low cost, with “dumb” devices able to access information anywhere in the world. But there remains the problem of literacy as well translation, and so closing the digital divide through such devices will only partly close the gap that exists between those who have access to knowledge and those who don’t.

Geo-designing the Future

Which leads to a final point. The temporalizing of knowledge has, through the agency of history, helped us understand the past and possibly comprehend how the present came to be, but rarely do we venture very far into the future. We call that science fiction or fantasy in order to set such future-oriented thinking apart from what we can reliably know about the world as it is or as it once was. And we tend to see such work as somehow of lesser quality or validity than what the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

But spatial understanding has a different relationship to the future, as well as the past and present. Spatial knowledge recognizes place, rather than time, as the ultimate continuity in our lives. And while none of us can see the future as a temporal idea, we continually imagine the future of places, projecting possible spatial arrangements based on what we see around us. The design disciplines do this all the time, using spatial means to imagine what could be, envisioning the future of a place, product, or environment, and depicting that visually for others to see.  

And in that regard, “geodesign,” which uses of GIS as the basis of making decisions, may well become a key feature of how we empower communities and build our cities in more sustainable, equitable – and indeed, survivable – ways in the future. Rather than see future-oriented thinking as somehow fiction or fantasy, geodesign allows us to connect what we know about the world with what we want the world to be – not just “now urbanism” but the urbanism that comes next.

Notes

Bettencourt, Luis. (2013) “The Origins of Scaling in Cities.” Science. Washington D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Vol 340.

Boo, Katherine. (2012) Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House

Elgin, Ceyhun and Oztunali, Oguz. (2012) “Shadow Economies All Around the World: Model-based Estimates,” Vox, Centre for Economic Policy Research. May 10.

Fisher, Thomas. (2013) Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design.  New York: Routledge.

Fisher, Thomas. (2014) “Architecture in the Third Industrial Revolution” Architect. Washington D.C.: Hanley Wood.

Gunderson, Lance and Holling, C. Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Leakey, Richard and Lewin, Roger. (1996) The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. New York: Anchor Books.

Osterholm, Michael. (2005) “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. July/August.

Rifkin, Jeremy. (2011) The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

West, Geoffrey. (1999) “The Origin of Universal Scaling Laws in Biology,” Physica A, vol. 263, p. 104-113.

Lehrer, Jonah. (2010) “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times Magazine, December 17.^.

Woodson, Grattan. (2005) “Preparing for the Coming Influenza Pandemic,” The Druid Oaks Health Center, Decatur, Georgia: www.DruidOHC.com.

(Afterword in the book Now Urbanism, The Future City is Here, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Benjamin Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocom, and published by Routledge in 2015)