Tag: urban metabolism

• Urban metabolism

  I spent this morning in the suburbs bouncing around to a few different meetings. I then came back downtown so that I could get some actual work done in the office. And then after that, I was around downtown getting a bunch of different things done.

  I am mentioning this to you all because today I was reminded of how different the metabolic rate can feel in the city compared to the suburbs. There are even studies suggesting that people walk faster in larger cities.

  Some businesses, of course, require a lot of space and the economics simply do not work in the core of the city. We all get that. But if you’re competitive advantage is human capital, then this is something to think about.

  I feel like I spent most of my morning driving around, which I’m not complaining about, except that I could have probably had 3x as many meetings in the city during that same period of time. If you multiply that out over time, then we’re talking about a material spread in overall productivity.

  And we haven’t even touched on those fortuitous urban encounters, which do happen and do provide all sorts of benefits. As much as we’re all connected like never before – through things like, well, this blog – there’s nothing like shaking somebody’s hand and looking them in the eyes.

  2018.07.28

• Do cities talk back?

  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.

  2013.08.30