iq2 If Conference

Securing Our Real Future by Investing in Evolving Cities

2011-11-29T04:24:17-05:00

In response to FT.com special report on the Future of Cities

http://www.ft.com/cities

And the Guardian extended coverage on Future Cities (sponsored by Arup)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/futureofcities"

This is the century of the city. For the first time in human history we are witnessing the advent of megacities - seemingly endless urban expanses that house more than ten million densely packed inhabitants.

Yet, megacities are not the product of ingenious design. They spread like weeds across the urban landscape straining the already stressed modern infrastructures to breaking point and causing potentially life-threatening problems such as, crime, homelessness, waste and resource management issues, disease, traffic congestion and pollution.

By the middle of this century there will be another third again of people taking up residence in cities and many stakeholders are now exploring new ways to address this migration. Iconic projects such as, Korea's New Songdo, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, or the PlanIT Valley in Portugal embody the latest approach to addressing the performance of cities using 'smart' information infrastructures to nudge their inhabitants towards better citizenship and ultimately better quality of life. But cities are not a stand-alone puzzle to be solved - they are a shifting target which are evolved, not made. The peculiarities and messiness of their inhabitants are exactly what gives rise to our greatest cities and most of them will inhabit the unruly urban sprawls.

Investing wisely in our rapidly emerging cities is challenging since our current economic and political system only deals with short term-ism based on products, financial returns and executive periods in office. Yet, new inventions are only part of the urban innovation process, the real challenge is putting them into practice to make a difference to our cities. This requires the application of strategic approaches that are based on research, not presumptions, which can change with experience and time.

These kinds of approaches are possible. Architectural research groups such as, AVATAR (Advanced Virtual And Technological Architectural Research) are forging new design methods by applying cutting edge technologies with life-like properties to architectural challenges. This approach embraces the radical creativity possessed in urban environments and is harnessed to bring about change that has not been over-prescribed by top-down imperatives, systems of control or scientific/engineering abstractions that strip cities of their character and history.

Potentially we could be looking at an amazing century for the city, where inhabitants co-create living spaces and make choices that are based on environmentally responsive design and development choices. But if we don't properly invest in creating and supporting evolvable, systems-based practices, then we will be faced with stark extinction scenarios in the middle of this century and experience the dark, blunt end of crisis management. Time is not on our side, but with the right kind of investment - in people, systems and international collaboration - the choice is still ours to make.

Rachel Armstrong spoke on 26 November at the inaugural If Conference. A video of her talk, Lewis Dartnell

Russian space scientists are currently locked in a race against time. The Fobos-Grunt space probe was launched successfully on Tuesday, but then failed to fire its own rocket engine to leave Earth orbit. The unmanned spacecraft is currently stranded just above our heads, and the rocket scientists have only a fortnight to successfully contact the stricken probe and fire its propulsion system before the batteries fail and it reenters the Earth's atmosphere as an expensive shooting star.

The Fobos-Grunt mission is of great personal interest to me as it was heading for the larger moon of Mars. Not only was this mission promising to bring back scoops of Phobos' surface material ('grunt' is Russian for soil) - an important precursor to returning samples of the martian surface itself, potentially holding signs of martian microbial life - but it is also carrying a remarkable biology experiment. The LIFE capsule has passengers onboard: small samples of carefully-selected bacteria and other microorganisms, including some that I work on. The idea is to see whether microbes can survive the unprotected journey to Mars and back, testing the feasibility of the hypothesis that life on Earth may itself have been seeded from Mars, hitchhiking within a meteorite.

The Russian space agency has suffered a string of such set-backs in its Mars exploration programme - 16 consecutive failures since the 1960s. This underlines just how difficult space travel is. Any number of thousands of components or lines of software code can be faulty, and space is an exceedingly unforgiving place.

Yet it's something that we keep trying. There is something deep within the human psyche that compels us to strive towards the horizon, exploring the unknown. And as JFK so eloquently put it, whilst announcing the Apollo programme, "we chose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard'.

More recently, there's been a shift in the driving force behind human space exploration: not so much the assertion of national prestige, but private corporations chasing a profit. Space has become a bankable commodity. First, it will serve as an adventure activity and holiday destination - short suborbital flights and stays in space hotels - but before too long I'm confident we'll begin exploiting extraterrestrial natural resources. These might include particles of the solar wind soaked into the lunar surface, which would provide fuel for fusion reactors (once we crack that technology), or the huge lumps of metal offered by many asteroids; we'll begin mining the skies.

For me, though, there is a clear fundamental reason for humanity to ensure a long-term future in space. Because it will ensure a long-term future for humanity. Any number of potential global catastrophes, including comet or asteroid impacts, threaten our species' existence on the planet. We can't afford to risk all our eggs in one planetary basket. Independent, off-world colonies would serve as an insurance policy against the unthinkable happening and allow recolonisation of our homeworld after the apocalypse.

Humanity inevitably has a future in space; we just need to keep our eyes on the horizon and stride forwards.

Dr. Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology research scientist at the Centre for Planetary Sciences, University College London. He is talking at the iq2 If conference on Saturday 26th November on 'Humanity's Future in Space', and how we'll get from here to there.

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Virtual Worlds and 'Intimate Computing': the Future of Digital Play

2011-11-08T12:17:18-05:00
By:Tom Chatfield

The recent story of human-digital interactions is one of steadily increasing closeness: we are moving from merely 'personal' computing to something that you might call 'intimate' computing. Modern smartphones and tablets, with their touchscreens and their constant presence in our lives, are extensions of our selves in a way that no digital device was even a decade ago. They are the channels through which we interact with even the most important people in our lives. They are where we work and play; where we hang out with friends. They are the first thing many of us touch when we wake in the morning and the last when we go to bed at night.

Our relationship with technology is, it seems to me, one that's increasingly governed by the dynamics of leisure and play. We have an incredibly satisfying sense of control when we are plugged into the best digital tools - and, increasingly, a gnawing sense of anxiety when we are unplugged. There is the pleasure of the most serious kind of play: the agency that comes from transforming the world into a kind of game, full of achievements, progress and certainties.

When you consider the power the devices in our pockets are going to have in even a decade's time, it's also clear that this integration of digital tools into the texture of daily living has barely begun. The layers of digital information and interaction that we bring with us, wherever we are, are only going to increase in both complexity and ease. We're looking at a future not of immersive virtual worlds, but of a virtualised version of this one: everything around us augmented by the power of personalised devices and services.

Some of the trends this points to are wonderful, some troubling. Everything in our lives, from clothing, to food, to our own health, is already starting to have its digital shadow. Who safeguards and owns this data, and what they do with it, is a big question. A bigger question still, however, is how the coming decades will affect what it feels like to be us. As we distribute more and more of our selves across technological services and devices, what feels most "real" in many lives is migrating from where we are to something intangible: what we bring with us, everywhere and anywhere; and what we wish others to bring in return.

Tom Chatfield will be giving a talk at the iq2 If Conference November 25-26 at the Royal Geographical Society, London.

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We Need to Re-Invent Ourselves as a Workshop, not a Casino

2011-10-31T07:37:49-04:00
"Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work." John Ruskin

Prime minister, do you know what a rivet is? You should. If you could explain how a rivet works, you would be in possession of valuable knowledge of mechanics, the history of structures, material technology, stress, load paths and the aesthetic limitations of working in metal. But you cannot explain it because you are a modern, post-industrial Briton who has lost touch with the beautiful and important culture of things.

We built an empire. But now can't build anything. This is a calamity. We need to re-invent ourselves as a workshop, not a casino. Our economy was once based on (what's been called by Jozef Schumpeter) "creative destruction": a continuous industrial revolution. Lately it has been "destructive creation": the invention of abstract financial products with no cultural value. And, as it has turned out, no economic value either!

Before the calamity becomes a catastrophe, there is an essential political, economic, cultural, educational and social relevance to rediscovering the value of making things. We do not make (and are losing the knowledge to design) the goods we consume.

As an experiment, I emptied my bag on the kitchen table. The contents are as follows:

Fountain pen by Mont Blanc (Germany)

Rollerball by Mitsubishi (Japan)

Camera by Leica-Panasonic (Germany-Japan)

Spectacles by Alain Mikli (France)

Sunglasses by Ray-Ban (Italy-US)

Notebook by Moleskine (Italy)

Multitool by Leatherman (US)

Car keys by Mercedes-Benz (Germany)

Laptop by Apple (US)

Phone by BlackBerry (Canada)

Unless there is radical change our children will not have the status and opportunities of nineteenth century Chinese coolies. They will not even be able to afford to buy the foreign trinkets that fill my bag.

This is not a sentimental call to return to dirty old industry, but a demand that people begin better to appreciate the benefits of making things. People who make things do not just have superior mechanical skills, they have superior cognitive skills as well. A riveter understands from first-hand-and-eye experience the relationship between function and form, it comes naturally.

The trade benefits of manufacturing don't require much emphasis in a country where we are all dragging around more than five times our own weight in mood-altering deficit, but there are even more important occult advantages. If you make things you need to understand ideas, materials, markets, skills. If you make money, you just need the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master. And when you make things, you restore that essential practical and moral connection between effort and reward which have been lost in the flim-flam of post-industrial sophistry.

This was all beautifully explained in a regrettably obscure 1944 pamphlet by W. Julian King, a Californian engineer. King's Unwritten Laws of Engineering are not about physics, but behaviour. Manufacturing demands that individuals be both be decisive and share information. This positively stimulates personal human development: you start with an idea, it becomes a more elaborate specification that is in turn mass-produced, distributed, consumed, recycled. At each stage, additional skills are required and generated. So too is real value.

Then there is the question of national identity. Do we want to live in a ghost culture or a real culture? Do we want to be an off-shore mall populated by 60m owners of a Mulberry handbag or would we prefer to be surrounded by well-considered, well-made and meaningful products and buildings? Shall we just have national traditions as quaint antique memories, or should we be busy making traditions of the future? You don't get riots and looting in workshops.

Susan Hockfield President of MIT said, "Our economy will thrive only when we make what we invent". She's right.

Stephen Bayley will be giving a talk at the iq2 If Conference November 25-26 at the Royal Geographical Society, London.