Can We Get There From Here? | Nov 7th at 3:27pm
There has been no shortage of big ideas at the conference, so far. At our lunch session Peter Head, an expert on eco-city design, presented slides showing magnificent vistas of green cities—literally green—with buildings sheathed entirely in food crops and energy producing algae systems, tree canopies covering streets without cars, and suburbs emptied of asphalt. Much of it, said Head, was or would soon be commercially viable. And indeed, very little of the actual technology presented was unknown to us. The problem, or at least the missing link, is execution.
Head highlighted China’s commitment to eco-city construction. Building wisely is entirely in China’s interest, given the resource demands of its growing economy. China also has plenty of opportunities to try out new ideas. In a country where millions of migrants from the countryside flock to mega-cities every year, experimenting with an 80,000 person town or two, dedicated entirely to renewable technologies, is no big deal. In America, by contrast, the challenges are different. Our cities are older, and mostly built-out. Any significant change in such cities will require an overhaul in places where navigation of building codes to erect a conventional building is difficult enough. Whether in New York City, where tower battles occasionally turn epic, or in a typical suburb, where homeowners are likely to fight tooth and nail over the design of a mail-box or the shade of paint employed by a neighbor, the probable resistance to a wholesale rethink of our building techniques is daunting.
The same problem reared its head in the afternoon plenary, where TED founder Richard Saul Wurman entertained us with a series of amusing stories. Wurman is an idea man, an individual with a knack for seeing solutions where others didn’t realize there were problems. During his talk, he let them rip. “Why do cities build schools?” He asked. “They should just require any new building to add two floors for classrooms at the top. Then the city never has to pay for class space, and students have the whole city as a schoolyard.” (This is paraphrasing; my note-taking skills aren’t that impressive.) “I mean, come on,” he said, “it doesn’t take a committee.”
But it does take a committee! Our institutions are sometimes of very high quality and sometimes not, but none of them are built for rapid, revolutionary change.
And this is a significant problem. Throughout the talks today, the ability of our planners and our innovators has become clear. The ideas are there and often brilliant; the technologies are there and often far more advanced than we imagine. If only our political leaders would place these people in charge, we would see monumental changes in no time at all.
But our political leaders are not going to do this. As such, we need to make sure that we focus on political innovations as much as technological innovations. We need to wow political groups with the do-ability of our ideas, as much or more so than their cleverness.
Ryan Avent is an economics writer living in Washington, DC. He authors The Economist's economics blog, Free Exchange, and covers environmental and urban policy issues for Grist.
