I stumbled upon an interesting TED talk this morning by Columbia University professor and city theorist Saskia Sassen. And while she herself admits in the talk that she doesn’t have all the answers to the questions and ideas she’s proposing, she does raise a few intriguing concepts that I would like to share with you all.

The first is the idea that cities talk back.

I like this idea because I’ve long thought of cities as a kind of living breathing organism. The example she uses is that of a car - specifically an Audi. She talks about all the great engineering that goes into a car like this, but then how it all gets muted once it enters a busy city centre. The city is “talking back” and telling the car how it’s now going to behave.

In her view, this idea of listening to what a city has to say is the first step towards what she’s calling “open source urbanism.” This is the idea that city dwellers can not only respond to and engage with cities, but also help make/shape them - just like how open source software works. This is a profoundly interesting concept that flips top-down city planning on its head. 

Again, how exactly this might work is still to be determined, but I can already think of a few early examples; one of which is a DC-based startup called Popularise. Essentially it works by allowing local residents to weigh in on what they’d like to see built/developed in their community. It’s a way of decentralizing development input.

And that’s really how I see the internet in general - as this massive decentralizing force. So the idea of an open source urbanism may not actually be that far off.

At this point, it’s well established that more and more people are favouring downtown urban centres over suburbs. Eric Jaffe from Atlantic Cities, put it this way:

"Population growth is on the rise in city centers (though total population still favors suburbs), Millennials seem less keen to drive than their parents were, urban home values are increasing faster than suburban ones. The list can and does go on."

As one Toronto columnist put it, generation Y is now keen to live in apartments the size of their childhood suburban bedrooms so that they can be closer to amenities.

So what does this mean for the suburbs?

Some believe that this means the suburbs are dead, or dying. But Leigh Gallagher, in her new book "The End of the Suburbs", argues that it’s not the end of the suburbs. It’s simply the end of the suburbs, as we know them.

That is, the suburbs, which functioned arguably quite while for a period of time, have now become a victim of their own success. They’ve become too big, to the point where they now isolate people away from their social networks and places of employment.

Every time I bring my car in for service, I’m reminded of how expensive it is to maintain one. Between car payments, insurance, gas, parking in the city and service, owning a car eats into a lot of disposable income.

So for cities where the residents don’t need a car to get around, there’s potentially a lot of additional income that can get placed in other sectors of the economy.

Richard Florida, and others, have argued that we’ve historically been overspending on housing and transportation, and that it restricts capital from flowing into other, more productive, areas of the economy.

I’d be curious to see a study that compares transportation spending versus other local economic measures. How would a driving city compare to a public transit or biking city?

I stumbled upon an interesting TED talk this morning by Columbia University professor and city theorist Saskia Sassen. And while she herself admits in the talk that she doesn’t have all the answers to the questions and ideas she’s proposing, she does raise a few intriguing concepts that I would like to share with you all.

The first is the idea that cities talk back.

I like this idea because I’ve long thought of cities as a kind of living breathing organism. The example she uses is that of a car - specifically an Audi. She talks about all the great engineering that goes into a car like this, but then how it all gets muted once it enters a busy city centre. The city is “talking back” and telling the car how it’s now going to behave.

In her view, this idea of listening to what a city has to say is the first step towards what she’s calling “open source urbanism.” This is the idea that city dwellers can not only respond to and engage with cities, but also help make/shape them - just like how open source software works. This is a profoundly interesting concept that flips top-down city planning on its head. 

Again, how exactly this might work is still to be determined, but I can already think of a few early examples; one of which is a DC-based startup called Popularise. Essentially it works by allowing local residents to weigh in on what they’d like to see built/developed in their community. It’s a way of decentralizing development input.

And that’s really how I see the internet in general - as this massive decentralizing force. So the idea of an open source urbanism may not actually be that far off.

At this point, it’s well established that more and more people are favouring downtown urban centres over suburbs. Eric Jaffe from Atlantic Cities, put it this way:

"Population growth is on the rise in city centers (though total population still favors suburbs), Millennials seem less keen to drive than their parents were, urban home values are increasing faster than suburban ones. The list can and does go on."

As one Toronto columnist put it, generation Y is now keen to live in apartments the size of their childhood suburban bedrooms so that they can be closer to amenities.

So what does this mean for the suburbs?

Some believe that this means the suburbs are dead, or dying. But Leigh Gallagher, in her new book "The End of the Suburbs", argues that it’s not the end of the suburbs. It’s simply the end of the suburbs, as we know them.

That is, the suburbs, which functioned arguably quite while for a period of time, have now become a victim of their own success. They’ve become too big, to the point where they now isolate people away from their social networks and places of employment.

Every time I bring my car in for service, I’m reminded of how expensive it is to maintain one. Between car payments, insurance, gas, parking in the city and service, owning a car eats into a lot of disposable income.

So for cities where the residents don’t need a car to get around, there’s potentially a lot of additional income that can get placed in other sectors of the economy.

Richard Florida, and others, have argued that we’ve historically been overspending on housing and transportation, and that it restricts capital from flowing into other, more productive, areas of the economy.

I’d be curious to see a study that compares transportation spending versus other local economic measures. How would a driving city compare to a public transit or biking city?