Cities get a new lease of life - Future of Business

Next month (June), “Monocle” magazine, the glossy chronicler of culture and design, will publish its latest annual “liveability index”. Ranking the world’s cities in this way has become a rather popular activity in recent years. Similar lists are produced by the management consultancy Mercer, the Economist Intelligence Unit and others. Largely, though, they cater for corporations looking to decide what they should pay in living and other allowances to personnel located around the world. As such, they tend to favour smaller cities that suit families. For example, the latest EIU list is topped by the same 10 cities as took the top spots the previous year (albeit with a couple of place swaps) and seven of the 10 are in Canada and Australia, countries where – as the report points out – population densities are well below those in much of the United States and Europe.

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Reconceptualising the City - Joining the dots. Linkages between Sustainable cities, Action Research, Complexity and an emerging role for Technical Professionals - Martin Butcher

A recent letter writer to the Guardian Weekly (March 2010) expressed a vision for the future that many
of it’s readers (educated, technically proficient, inquisitive) would probably be happy enough to adopt.
“There’s general agreement on the destination: a planet where all sentient beings can grow, work,
play, create, eat, shit and sleep in perpetuity and safety”. The writer then stated that the big problem
is that we don’t know how to get there. As we live in an age where if you don’t have a plan - you plan
to fail, this is not a good situation. A significant problem is that the vision lies externally to any specific
product or service, and our dominant level of consciousness can only conceptualise planning to
achieve sophisticated products and services. To achieve the desired vision requires a different level of
problem solving to that which we are used to. To both explain this and illustrate what this might mean
in reality, I will use the contemporary city that we live in (as imagined as that great jumble of products
from shacks to railways to high rise offices) as a focus. This focus will be as both illustration of the
kind of change required, and a platform to explore how built form itself can more effectively be used to
achieve the desired vision.

I will first outline what I see as some of the inhibiting factors to achieving the vision. I will then look at
the issue of complexity and how that links with Spiral Dynamics and Action Research. Finally I will
provide some strategies to achieve the desired outcomes with some practical examples I have used
or am aware of.

Click here to read Martin Butcher's suggestions.