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“Now what about the social?” | Nov 7th at 5:17pm

Posted by Andrew Blum | 1

It’s clear by mid-afternoon that the trajectory of the day will bring us from crisis to urban understanding—if not all the way to solution.
At lunch, Peter Head presented Arup’s invigorating vision of happy eco cities circa 2050—all the way through to suburban garages turned to vegetable stalls and big city buildings bragging about their energy conservation on electronic billboards. (The one downer was the news that Dongtan, Arup’s prized Shanghai eco-city project, is on temporary hold. “I think these projects will move forward, but I suspect they’ll not move forward as fast as we expected,” as Head put it.)
The post-lunch plenary was about understanding more than action. (Or, as Richard Saul Wurman put it, “What you heard before was action. Mine is non-action.”) For Wurman, that takes the form of 19-20-21—19 cities of more than 20 million people in the 21st century—his multi-platform project asking “the same questions of cities, so we can display the answers similarly.” “How can we fix what we don’t fully understand?” For James Higgins, a GIS specialist from ESRI, it’s the mapping tools that are the key piece of the process. “We build software that allows you to abstract the world to make decisions,” he explained. But this challenge is a powerful acknowledgment of the complex, polyvalent nature of the city—and the need to understand it before we can change it. For example, Higgins was recently in Doha, Qatar—a new city that, despite its newness, has no single, same-scale map of its wastewater, roads and electricity infrastructures, Higgins said. So forget (for the next 42 years) Arup’s eco-city; this is about a basic understanding of what’s there at all, before the infrastructural change can come.
So here’s where it ends up for me: the presentations have more in common than not. We agree more than we disagree; there is a remarkable overlap of interests, attitudes, technologies. Presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker, the same diagrams are clicking by on the big screens, the same calls for integrated flows, for common solutions for China and London, of hope for an Obama energy policy. And so at the afternoon breakout session on “Local Urban Design,” Martin Haas, a partner at Behnisch Architects, took the stage, thought for a moment about the previous presentations (flows, common solutions in China, London and San Francisco…) and said, with precision: “Ok. All the technical elements of sustainability are in place. We can implement them. Now what about the social?”

Andrew Blum writes about architecture, urbanism and technology from Brooklyn, NY. A contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines, his work can also be read at andrewblum.net.