Scanning for City Futures - Metafuture

Scanning for City Futures

Prepared by Sohail Inayatullah www.metafuture.org

April 2002


Contents

Executive Summary 5

Theme One: Urban Reform 23

Theme Two: Transportation Planning 32

Theme Three: Smart city 39

Theme Four: Green City 46

Theme Five: Community and Healthy City 57

Theme Six: Globalization 72

Theme Seven: Trends and Emerging Issues 82

Theme Eight: Scenarios of City Futures 95

Theme Nine: Visions of the Future 104

Theme Ten: Planning Tools and Methods 110


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PURPOSE

This report has multiple purposes: (1) to be used to develop the Conference Design, particularly, conference themes, of the 2003 AsiaPacific Cities Summit; (2) to provide Brisbane City Council with a knowledge base of current trends and emerging issues from which it can develop longterm strategic directions; and (3) to provide a knowledge base for planning the future for other Queensland and Australian local councils. In effect, this report serves as a ‘State of the Future of the City’ Report.

The scans help determine what strategies should be pursued to further the goals of Brisbane. This is done by understanding the changing needs of the public and other stakeholders.

Scanning as a prerequisite for planning the future has history of at least 20 years. Leaders in this approach have been the Hawaii Judiciary and the US Council of State Policy and Planning Agencies in the 1980s, and the Virginia Courts in the 1990s. The National Center for State Courts, also in the USA, is currently engaged in scanning the future. The Singapore Subordinate Courts have institutionalized scanning.

In Australia, The Department of Justice, Victoria, has conducted a scan of the Judicial System. Currently the Office of Corrections Services Commissioner, Department of Justice, Victoria is engaged in scanning the futures of corrections.

Internationally, UNESCO through its Futuresco project engaged in crosscultural scanning along a variety of topics, including education, ecology, communication and human rights.

Executive branches of government have generally been less prone to engage in futures planning as pressures generally come through the political electoral process and short term budgetary cycles. Longerterm interests are often lost sight of.

However, most recently local government throughout the world has begun to engage in futures activities. This is due largely to the following factors: rapid advances in technology allowing for increased access and speed of delivery; globalization limiting the effectiveness of the nationstate; dramatically changing citizen demands that go far beyond rates, roads and rubbish; and the swift growth of social movements and third sector organizations reframing politics by reincluding the ethical. One example of a city futures project is that of the UK local government association (www.lga.gov.uk). It uses scanning and scenario development to inform action by local government to secure a healthy future for the communities it serves. Mayors recognize that while their term in office may be limited, many of the problems these seek to address have solutions that require long term partnerships.

Scans are of utility as they provide the knowledge base for planning the future. They alert decision and policymakers to the latest trends, to swings in citizen concerns.


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PLANNING CONTEXT

Scans must be seen in the context for planning for the future. There are four main approaches.

1. Problemoriented planning. In this approach, the problems facing the system are assembled and prioritized by the stakeholders. The utility of this approach is that the functional efficiency of the system increases; however, structural problems are often not noticed (metaproblems) and gains are often for the shortterm.

2. Missionoriented planning. In this approach, the system's fundamental core missions are determined. For example, the justice system as a bureaucracy with a responsibility to be accountable and transparent, or the justice system as a public institution with the responsibility to anticipate and respond to the changing judicial needs of the public. The utility of this approach is that there is clarity of core competence and mission – individuals know why they are doing what they do. The weakness in this approach is that it is static, not accounting for technological or economic changes or for the changing needs of citizens.

3. Visionoriented planning. In this approach, strategic directions of the system are developed by discerning what stakeholders would prefer the system to move toward. While this approach moves the organization forward, it is often difficult to get buyin from daytoday managers who prefer the problemoriented approach.

4. The Futureoriented approach. Strategic directions are determined by anticipating the short and longterm future. Environmental scanning aids in creating a map of the probable future. This map gives the tools to analyze how specific trends might impact core missions, which missions need to emphasized, which directions need to become a focus of human and budgetary resources. The weakness of this approach is that it can be overwhelming, as well it is difficult to ascertain what is relevant versus what is merely interesting.

TYPE OF PLANNING PROBLEM UTILITY

Problem Reactive

Politicized

Banal focus

Solves immediate concerns

Recognized by managers

Puts “runs on the board”

Mission Static Clarity of core competence

Vision Can be too lofty

Hard sell to some managers, often leaving them behind

Moves organization in desired direction

Active

Future Overwhelming

Relevance versus just interesting

Proactive

Clarity of operating environment

System wide big picture


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SCANNING

Scanning seeks to identify issues and trends as evidenced in published material. These may be, for example, speeches by experts, items in newspapers, scholarly journal articles, magazine editorial pieces, as well as interviews with leading thinkers. Scanning is both volume driven — seeking to focus on issues where frequency is high (the smart city) — as well as leading indicator driven — searching for new issues of which there is only marginal support in the literature (the Bio Living City, for example). Scanning also seeks to understand which issues are located in the current paradigm and which issues challenge the current paradigm, and which issues are outside current understandings of issues facing cities (outside the doxa). Scanning requires an understanding of the micro dimensions of a particular field as well as the macro ‘big picture’.

Scanning needs to be conducted on a regular basis, so as to able to track issues from being “beyond the horizon” to “on the horizon” to “today’s problems”. Regular tracking can also help identify anomalous issues. Scanning is similar to the more academic literature review; however, the issues presented are more focused and news item driven. While breadth and depth are important to this particular scan, it is relevance in terms of the design of the AsiaPacific Cities Summit that is far more crucial and strategic directions for Brisbane City Council.

However — and this is crucial — scanning is, as far as possible, an objective assessment of the social, political, economic and technological environment. Scanning is generally less concerned with the search for specific information bits and more with gaining a thorough understanding of the future justice terrain. While individual scans are important, far more noteworthy are the trends and patterns — the themes — that emerge from environmental scanning.

These themes define future action.


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SCANS

THEMES

The following themes have emerged from the scans.

1. Urban Reform

2. Transportation Planning

3. Smart City

4. Green City

5. Community and Healthy City

6. Globalization

7. Trends and Emerging Issues

8. Scenarios of City Futures

9. Visions of City Futures

10. Planning tools and methods

For each theme, some of the key ideas/issues are noted. Details are provided in the full scan.

Theme One – Urban Reform

1. Smart Growth. The industrial conditions (concentration of labour around place) that created sprawl are no longer there. Sprawl has reached its environmental and political limits. Smart Growth, focused on reducing greenhouse gases, facilitating the new economy, saving landscapes and the desire to rebuild community is smart economics and smart futures.

2. European Recommendations: (1) Tax reform, shifting the burden to consumption (pollutionproducing fuels and highway congestion); (2) High tech road pricing programs; (3) Longterm maintenance of urban public safety requires abandoning public housing complexes and incentives to strengthen families; (4) Using vouchers to better schools; (5) Mixed land uses can make urban land use more interesting (a richer fabric of neighborhood enterprises); (6) Revenue sharing among local, state and federal; (7) Raise excise tax on motor fuel; and (8) Liberal migration to cities.

3. Population growth is leading to increased sprawl, creating edge cities, and dramatic losses in productivity. Smart growth, transportation management, and new land use laws (acquiring farm and parkland) are likely to increase.

4. Urban Husbandry is revitalizing inner cities. This is different from high capital project management. Urban husbandry includes farmer markets, trolley


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systems, artist enclaves, public building and community space. Cities cannot project plan; they must steward and create spaces for revitalization.

5. Urban growth boundaries to discourage sprawl are likely to increase, as is smart growth, defined as: pedestrian friendly communities, a mix of housing types, a ‘main street’ type town centre, and less dependence on the car.

6. Livable and Sustainable Communities are foundational to the success of Australia. Specifically, this means: (1) Federal/state/local working together to create livable communities; (2) Investment will lead to globally competitive, livable and healthy cities, serviced by the highest quality infrastructure; (3) Closing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged, thus enabling social participation; (4) Environment Sustainability through smart growth; (5) Regional approach to community development; (6) Best practice design for quality living environment, not just the cheapest alternatives; (7) Harmonize development and regulatory systems, coordinated and flexible as in the AlburyWodonga program; and (8) Foster greater debate among business and communities in the debate about livable community, perhaps through a national roundtable.

7. Triangle of developers, local councils and administrative bureaucracies is thwarting change, creating the appearance of small towns and communities but generally these are gated or too small, without any necessary conveniences.

Theme Two – Transportation Planning

1 Reduce problems associated with traffic ($500 billion a year on deaths and injuries plus congestion, sprawl, noise, loss of forests and farms, and increasing carbon emissions) by banning cars from central areas, introducing cleaner fuels, fuel taxes, car sharing, coordinated transportation and land use policies, or funnel new investments toward rail, bus, and bicycle infrastructure so that people have a variety of attractive, noncar choices, with less damage to the environment.

2 Create carfree cities as they offer a more sustainable, healthier, and happier future than any plan to `improve' the car or ameliorate its impacts.

3 Ending gridlock through GPS, tolls, active traffic management (sensors), shared taxes, integrated bus system, and shared taxis.

4 Dualmodel transportation systems. Since people will not give up their cars, a "dualmode transportation system" will result in transport that is safer, faster, cheaper, less stressful, and less polluting. Under such a system, vehicles will be used in two distinct modes: driven in the normal manner on the streets, and/or traveling automatically on highspeed dedicated guideways for trips of more than several miles

5 From a Car for all to Mobility for All. Mobility for all could reduce environmental demand, increase accessibility, improve the quality of life of


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older and disabled people and offer new commercial opportunities to the very companies threatened by a reduction in traffic volume.

6 The car paradigm is at the heart of our environmental and social problems. European cities and Singapore show that an alternative light rail and other transportation modes are possible.

7 Transport planning needs to be integrated to include land use planning, community development and educational development. Curtiba, Brazil stands out as an example of innovative planning – a third world city that works.

Theme Three – Smart City

1. Etopia — Lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder by pursuing five basic design principles: dematerialization, demobilization, mass customization, intelligent operation, and soft transformation that is subtle, incremental, and nondestructive.

2. Telecities — Televillages virtually connected through individual computer systems or community kiosks. Community is created through connectedness.

3. Smart Cars — Making cars smarter through GPS, sniffers and other technologies that can ensure that the car shuts down if there is alcohol intake.

4. Working from home — The 5% of people who work from home will grow to 20% by 2002 and perhaps 40% by 2020.

5. Award for Intelligent City — Clarity of Purpose, Internet for all and vision for the future, so as to adapt to changing conditions (what happened to those cities based on railroads – where are they now?)

6. Smartness plus sustainability — In the cybernated city, machine intelligence will be linked to all the social and environmental information needed to analyse issues and generate ideal options for decision making. Like an electronic, autonomous nervous system, the Cybernated City will extend its sensors out into the social complex, then coordinate production and distribution on the basis of human needs in full accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth.

7. Smart home — The home can be rewired, creating an intelligent house. The key is user friendliness.

Theme Four – Green City

1. Australian government system of rating housing on star system in the following nine categories: (1) biodiversity; (2) embodied energy; (3) energy consumption; (4) water consumption; (5) indoor air quality; (6) resource efficiency; (7) location and transport; (8) waste management; and (9) food production.


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2. Disastrous environmental impacts if population forecasts for Brisbane are correct.

3. Green Architecture. Going beyond the tired recycling metaphor and designing objects so that they have a productive afterlife. This means, for example, designing for car companies a woolandcellulose upholstery textile that can, when composted, serve as garden mulch. Full life cycles must be designed into every product.

4. Reduce demands for cars and create healthier cities. 700,000 deaths in developing countries annually could be prevented if three pollutants — carbon monoxide, suspended particulate matter, and lead — were brought down to safe levels. Simple changes can create brighter futures, for example, 70% of water in developing nations is lost via faulty pipes.

5. Sustainable planning. This means city planning focused on environmental concerns in the context of health, economic development, public education and social justice.

6. Is Sustainability possible or will it always be a side issue (under construction)

7. Shift from Gray (drab) City consciousness to Green City consciousness focused on: the city as a living system; the city as an experience of nature and the city as a particular place.

8. Organically integrating nature and city through the direct transfer of know how from nature to architecture.

Theme Five Community and Healthy City

1. Foundational parameters for a healthy city are: environment, social justice, participation, basic needs, connection, urban design, access to health, and high health status.

2. Enhanced health is partly determined by level of social connection in city. Social inclusion leads to better health.

3. Place has become more important for individuals and community health as globalization makes place less important for business.

4. New Strategies for Communities. Communities must move away from dead end strategies such as: competing for multinationals (leads to erosion of labour and environmental standards); export strategies (leads to vulnerability); lobbying for federal funds (vulnerability as funds are reduced or eliminated). Instead what is required is: A Community Bill of Rights; A State of the City Report; CommunityFriendly Business Schools; Community Reinvestment; Local Purchasing; and, Real Devolution leading to selfreliance.

5. Placelessness — Postmodern Globalization has led to the search for nostalgia for place. However, this is often reactionary, that is, exclusionary, and even fascist. Postmodern urbanscapes may however lead to neighborhood community development.


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6. From space to place. Space is empty, place is filled, has meaning. NGOs can help as long as they move from protest to project.

7. New leaders are likely to arise from the community development movement.

8. Expanded notions of community development that are inclusive of physical, intellectual, financial, and political. E.g. security, partnerships, local jobs.

9. Violence and civic engagement. Local civic engagement does not only lead to social capital but it can prevent violence during times of upheaval and crisis.

10. Slow cities. Slow cities stress environmental policies that create public green spaces and promote new ways to dispose of garbage. They also agree to restore old parts of the city before expanding to new areas. This movement is focused on ending the mad rush of rush hour, drive through cuisine and multinational branding.

11. Gift Economies. Gift economies can revitalize local neighborhoods, can succeed when Federal and State project management fail. They empower local communities. The Gift economy expands as opposed to social capital, which is consumed as it is used. The gift economy enables and ennobles a people.

12. Community involvement leads to community power. Neighborhood initiatives have led to green teams, declaration of community rights, partnerships of neighborhood and city, holistic development and community inventory.

13. Symbiotic Cities. Cities must heal, become more selfsufficient, green, learn from each other, and above all learn from nature. The alternatives are global megalopolis and sick world: sick city.

14. New technologies could create urban villages, individuals working and living where they choose.

15. Healthy megacities. Given the reality of megacities, how can they become healthier? A healthy megacity is one which reduces its resource inputs and waste outputs, whilst simultaneously improving the quality of life for its inhabitants. Healthy megacities are possible if appropriate policy actions are taken.

Theme Six Globalization

1. Cities as Agents of Global Change. Instead of merely being impacted upon by global change, cities can create change, or for example, political change through their values, e.g. on policy towards Burma.

2. Multiculturalism. Multicultural cities are likely to be leading indicators of future; for example, the French city of Toulouse is where Europe is likely to be in 20 years.

3. New Challenges coming from: deregulation of state and local authority and revenues; loss of revenue through competition; governance challenges of applying new technology to improve delivery of public services; and the loss


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of loss of skilled computer professionals to the private sector, and potential revenue losses from electronic commerce);

4. Edge or A la Carte cities are likely to spread.

5. 100 emerging supercities are developing. They have the vital elements: water, transport to hinterland, domed stadium, adequate wiring for telecommunications, green infrastructure, excellence in a field of technology, new political structures that are cross jurisdiction and project focused.

6. Golden Age City is one that has "a unique buzz, a unique fizz, a special kind of energy, will prove more magnetic than ever for the production of products and, above all, the performance of services."

7. SecondTier cities are developing because of globalization, leading to clear winners and losers (with second tier as the losers).

8. Hong Kong currently has a yang policy in respect to globalization – hyperconnectivity, brand name image, global city, but it is missing a yin image – sustainability, liveability, wellbeing. Can a mix be possible? Yin Yang?

9. Communities that create the most livable environment will win the globalization sweepstakes; that is, increased and qualitatively enhanced investment and economic growth. Sustainability is thus a goal in itself, as well as being capable of leading to economic development.

10. Australian government talk on sustainability is not matching practice.

11. Urban problems ahead. Globalization and migratory diasporas are a source of survival as well as creativity; new forms of cultural politics that revolves around complex questions of difference, representation, identity, citizenship, and local democracy; transnational identity formation; "third worlding" of major First World cityregions; and the ecologies of fear these phenomena produce.

Theme Seven — Trends and Emerging Issues

1. Hot Towns. Unlike earlier waves of migrants, Hot towns are being created by wave migrants that are skilled, welleducated, relatively affluent, and often retired.

2. Humanizing the city, linking cultural pluralism, sustainability with deep democracy, new forms of governance. Without a revival of civic spaces, ungovernability will result.

3. Paradox of highly differentiated globalized societies (from mass industrial modes to customized individualized creative fluid modes) and vision of sustainability.

4. New urbanities are transforming the Inner city, generally revitalizing it. Immigrants from other countries and a growing cadre of nativeborn migrants,


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largely young, single, educated, and childless are central to this transformation.

5. Disasters – earthquakes, tsunamis – are likely to inflict heavy damage to cities. This is especially as cities become more complex.

6. Mental health problems of cities of today and, even more, of tomorrow are many and severe. They complement and aggravate other health problems that endanger existence and quality of life.

7. Third world cities in crisis. Common characteristics of these cities are the massive social dislocation, polarizing inequality, uneven distribution of resources and congestion, pollution and environmental degradation. They must become democratic, productive, inclusive, sustainable, cultural and educational.

8. The emergence of the polycentric city, enhancing the peripheral districts and subcentres in terms of better management, cultural diversity, and improved transport.

9. Gender and the city. What would the city look like if designed from feminist principles?

10. Postmodernity and hyperreality challenge the notion of the traditional physical city. Simcity becomes the real with reality the simulacra.

11. Zoos and civilization. Zoos will continue to draw people, but developments in genetics will make the zoos of the future truly unusual. Every museum is a repository of animals waiting to be resurrected through genetic technology.

12. Egovernance is set to take off. In India, it appears it can be used as a way to bypass corrupt officials. Bio gas and other energy sources can run the Net cheaply, allowing enhanced access. In Europe, numerous cities are experimenting with egovernance. These include Tampere (Finland), Manchester (UK), Venice (Italy) and Eindhoven (The Netherlands). In a later stage we will involve the South African cities of Capetown and Johannesburg as well, and perhaps some Asian and American cities. Preliminary findings are that: Egovernance is a very complex matter. It entails new relationships between government and city users (which can be citizens, companies, commuters or visitors). It also requires new types of relationships between the public and the private sector, and among public sector actors.

Theme Eight – Scenarios of City Futures

1. Inayatullah's Scenarios:

A. Globalized and Smart. The A.I. city sensing us;

B. Sustainable and Connected. Rural and other communities in authentic conversation and interaction. Stable in regards to population; and


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C. Multicultural city – alternative ways of knowing, spiritual, indigeneous, modern, postmodern. Feng shui as central.

2. Inayatullah’s Transportation Scenarios:

A. Great Divide. Smartness and globalization for the rich and nothing for the poor.

B. Smart for All. Smart cars, houses and transportation systems.

C. From a car for all to Mobility for all.

3. Saul's scenarios:

A. Smart cars and Smart houses. More safety and interactivity.

B. Carless Global Village. Community prospers.

C. Café's society. Resurgent inner city communities. 4. Tegart and Jewell:

A. Econologic City – Rich. HiTech, Internet connected, Community & Government responsive.

B. Monopolis – Sustainable, Hitech tropical, megacity. Stringent regulations and cars banned from city. Slums are abolished. It has been redesigned with more efficient resource allocation, mixed use land planning, innovative transport modes, and a target of four square meters of open space for every resident.

C. Fat City – vibrant intercultural and intellectual interaction – a concentrated network of selfgoverning communities. Corrupt and convoluted Bureaucracy has been superseded significant local democracy and participation. With low unemployment, concern for the elderly and disadvantaged and substantial decision making at the community level, Fat City is a megacity on a human scale.

5. Marvin Manchester Scenarios:

A. Demythologized City.

B. Integrated and Sustainable City – environment and community are key

C. Better Led City – Leadership is the key variable

D. Longer term future – Future is the key variable, end of short termism

E. Cyber fantasy city.

6. Daffara's Scenarios for the Sunshine Coast:

A. “Amorpohous Suburbs in SEQ SuperCity”

• Weak regional government and planning policy lead to urban sprawl.

• Social isolation increases as those who are unable to drive.

• Inequitable.


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B. “Diverse Sunshine Coast Towns”

C. Triple Bottom line by half of organizations

• Sustainable development

• Social interaction promoted

• Social capital grows

• Diverse local economy

D. “Sunshine Coast Archologies”

• Urban form is transformed from sprawl to architectural ecology.

• Triple bottom line as dominant form of accounting

• Voluntarism is high, social capital is vibrant.

• Communities live in walkable mixed use towns

E. “The Sunshine Coast BioCity”

• Regional governance and planning policy is transformed by the sustainability/glocal movement. It is replaced by community self action and governance, enabled by technology. The city becomes a living entity cohabiting in a symbiotic relationship with its citizens.

• Biocity is walkable, carfree and connected to other Biocities by rapid maglev trains, airships and other forms of transports.

7. Malik's Third World Scenarios:

A. The inherited city – dilapidated; unkempt and disowned but still a repository of knowledge

B. The modern city – is built for the government, the decisionmakers and the well off to project an image of progress and affluence but without the technology and economy or resources to sustain it. – A meaningless construct of costly images irrelevant to the life and need of many.

C. The vast slum city – urban poor and rural migrants, without help skills or resources.

Theme Nine – Visions of the Future

1. End of Sprawl vision of unlimited lowdensity sprawl. Instead of a new vision, governments are focused on urban management.

2. Garden City Vision:


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• Within an overall parklike setting, there will be community gardens, hydroponic farms, orchards, vineyards, and solardomed conservatories. City centers will be "hanging gardens," the main trafficways will be lineal parks, and local streets will be sheathed with canopies of foliage. As our cities are made to leaf and bloom again, gardening will be a favorite avocation and nature appreciation and outdoor recreation will become ever more a part of city living.

3. Brisbane Vision

• A city of inclusive communities; A smart city; A prosperous city; A creative city; A clean and green city; An accessible city; A regional and world city.

7. Belfast Vision

• A United City A City Of Liveable Communities A City Of Culture And Sport A Healthy City A Learning City A Prosperous City

Key values behind this vision are: equity fairness of treatment of both people and places across the city; education knowledge and learning as the means to make the most of ourselves and our city; economy a competitive economy that allows the city to earn its living and provide all with the opportunity for a decent livelihood; efficiency the best use of resources, opportunities and strengths; empowerment new forms of decisionmaking that enable all voices to be included, and partnerships that allow for effective networking across agencies and sectors; environment an awareness of, and respect for, the surrounding natural environment and a keenness for aesthetic design and cleanliness in the built environment; and excellence development across the city in all fields to be underpinned by quality and

8. Ananda Nagar – the EcoSpiritual City. The Vision:

• Spirituality, global/local community, economic democracy, and multiculturalism. Central to this rethinking of the city, this new vision, is the resituation of land from individual and state ownership to cooperative means.

Theme Ten – Planning Tools and Methods

1. Traditional Planning a Mistake. The traditional planning practice of assuming that the future will continue like the present is a mistake. Responding to change after the fact increases the costs to the city. External circumstances and public attitudes are changing so rapidly that the practices of the past are quickly becoming obsolete.

2. Creative actors are central instead of strategic planning A creative city region hosts creative actors. These include not only the obvious actors such as artists, but also those who are capable of negotiating borders and of abandoning secure lines and inherited truths. Creative actors are able to cooperate with

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/inclusive_communities/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/smart_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/prosperous_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/creative_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/clean_green_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/accessible_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/regional_world_city/index.shtml

http://www.belfastvision.com/vision7.htm






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others, are open to the experiences of different cultures, and understand the `enemy' at the far end of the table. Creative action involves being open, communicative, informed and willing to develop a vision … a creative city region is an environment where everybody is invited to develop creative potentials in an experimental situation.

3. Models of planning must include the image of the city: visual but also touching upon the other senses.

4. Long term foresight is needed. Current trends are leading to futureshock and creating inadvertent consequences. For example, in the USA federal funds encourage home ownership but this has generally only been for whites, thus leading to racial tensions.

5. Complexity leads to new roles for the planner. Planner must be an administrative, regulator; an advocate and bargainer; an inventor or innovator; and a problem finder or social learner.

6. Asian situations are unique and thus Asian city planners need to develop their own models and modes of planning

7. Visual preference surveys is an excellent way to help citizens imagine their preferred future.

8. Functionalist paradigms of city planning, design and construction in the guise of ubiquitous infrastructures such as transportation limit the livability of cities. Participatory scenario development is a far more effective way to design the future.


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A MAP OF THE FUTURE

The Themes provide the knowledge base for what is likely to occur in the future. However, they must be contextualized by two methodological tools. First is emerging issues analysis. Emerging issues analysis uses the Scurve shape to locate issues along a continuum. Current issues are near the top of the curve. They are wellresearched problems. Lower down is the trend line. There is considerable quantitative data to support the trend, however, the final trajectory of it is not yet clear. Will it continue to go upward, for example, population migration to Brisbane and Southeast Queensland, or are there factors which will lead the trend line to peak (job possibilities) or are there events that may cause the trend line to swerve directions (global warming, urban sprawl, for example)? At the bottom of the Scurve are emerging issues. These issues may or may not eventuate, and generally they are between 1020 years forward. Anticipating them is crucial for providing decisionmakers ample leadtime. However, since some emerging issues may not eventuate allocating funding to research possible problems is difficult. Yet, through adequate leadtime, considerable opportunities can emerge. For example, instead of focusing on Biotech after other cities have entered the race, why not forecast emerging technologies and invest in them, or most importantly, why not create cultural, economic and knowledge capacity for learning and inventing.

Generally, the Themes provided in this scan are of the problem variety (Urban reform) and the trend variety (globalization, smart city). However, in the section on Trends and Emerging Issues, some are further out – the carless city, bio city, for example. Discerning the issues along an Scurve can thus provide valuable information to Brisbane City Council in terms of the changing expectations and needs of the community.

The SCurve of Emerging Issues Analysis


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The second methodological tool is the futures triangle. The top of the triangle is the Pull of the Future. The pull is the image of the future that which defines what citizens and communities desire. It is the preferred future. However, there are often competing visions. In this scan, we can see that there is competition between Smart Growth, the Green Healthy City and the Cyber Global City. And over the longer period there are new images emerging such as the EcoSpiritual City. There are also negative images, pulls to be avoided – the economically and socially divided city, for example, and certainly urban sprawl.

At the bottom of the triangle is the push. These are the drivers. These drivers include: globalization (privatization, a global market, the porousness of the nation state, breakdown of the Western worldview); Demographic shifts (Aging, international and regional migration, the global teenager); technological (GPS systems, the Internet, smart houses), and new worldviews (Genomics and customization; Sustainability and future generations). These drivers push the direction that the city is likely to take. Which direction it actually does take, however, is partly dependent on a third variable. This is the weight. The weight is difficult to change. In the context of the City, this is usually the partnership between developers and local councils. However, with globalization, the weight as well comes from the dictates of global corporations. Cities define their policies based on attracting such corporations. Other weights include patriarchy, class, and in the case of the city, endless and continued economic growth – the paradigm of growth. Competing visions challenge this final weight however. The discourses of Genomics, the Net and Multiculturalism all imagine the city with far more choice, individual and civilizational choice. The competing vision of sustainability, however, focuses more on community choice. Place becoming far more important once globalization and the Net create the conditions for placelessness. More expanded notions of Sustainability imagine a city focused on environmental principles along with issues of social justice, multicultural inclusive and intergenerational solidarity.

Pull

Push Weight

The Futures Triangle


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What the future, thus, will ultimately look like is essentially a political question. Political, however, is defined in a complex way. It is partly about definitional politics: what is real, what is important. It is partly about economic politics – who has what. It is partly about electoral politics – who wins elections. And it is partly about popular community concerns – the values expressed by civil society. In this sense, while the probabilities of the future can be known, the future itself cannot, since it is always in the process of being created. Humans have agency. The scans suggest that cities do as well, or at least may.

TRENDS AND ISSUES

While there numerous trends (directional, frequency) and issues (overarching concerns) that emerge from the themes and scans, the following stand out.

1. The sense of place paradoxically increases with globalization and the Internet. Community development and relations becomes even more important. The vision is that of a local neighborhood in a global world.

2. There is a direct correlation between social inclusion – connectedness – and individual and community health. A City thus must be about creating connectivity (net) and connectedness (belonging). Not doing so creates more health costs in the longer run.

3. There are real alternatives to urban sprawl – integrated planning, a carless future, taxation of consumption, energy efficiency. Urban sprawl does not have to be the future. Individuals and cities have agency.

4. These alternatives, while possibly more expensive up front, in the long run will save money as environmental and health costs will decrease and productivity will increase. A good environment and good health (particularly access) is a building block of good business.

5. Transportation planning must be integrated to land use planning, educational planning and community development. Planning, however, must be openended, experimental, and not rigid or "master" plan based.

6. The previous vision of unending sprawl has ended (as a vision if not a practice) as well as the functional planning approach that underlies it. New Visions and approaches are being developed.

7. A new paradigm of the city is emerging – it is (1) Community based; (2) Green; (3) Healthy; and (4) Inclusive.

8. An alternative vision is the global, hightech, smart city. An emerging issue is: Can this be reconciled with the local vision? Can there be a GloCal city?

9. Alternative Economies particularly the notion of a gift economy push conventional understandings of social capital and the commons. Gift economics is a clear emerging issue.

10. Smart technologies are being pushed by suppliers and are not necessary foundational to citizens – community is!


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11. Egovernance is and can be used to enhance transparency and democracy. Pilot projects are necessary and increasing.

12. New types of city planning, using foresight, scenarios and complexity are on the rise.

13. There is clarity among writers on which directions the city should not go in, that is, current sprawl, antigreen policies must be transformed. Doing so requires new levels of coordination and cooperation between federalstate and city as well as between social groups, locally and globally.


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THEME ONE: URBAN REFORM

SMART GROWTH – SOLVING URBAN PROBLEMS

Smart growth” – Why Now? Peter Newman. Yes. Summer 1999. http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/newman2.htm

"Signs of central and inner area revitalization are now emerging in many large US cities, including New York, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco. Why is “smart growth” happening now?

First, “if you build it they will come,” appears to hold true with transportation infrastructure: cities that build freeways will sprawl; cities that emphasize transit will not. European cities have mostly abandoned large road building and have used rail transit to focus development and encourage revitalization. The US ISTEA legislation is shifting priorities away from freeways to transit as it favors more local planning solutions.

Second, one of the underlying dynamics for sprawl, the need for large expanses of land to create jobs in manufacturing, is no longer present. Jobs, especially the high paying jobs, are mostly being created in informationrelated services. Rather than favoring scattered development, the informationbased city needs intensive areas where people can meet to share their expertise, to plan and develop their projects. Electronic communication supplements facetoface contact; it does not replace it.

Third, over several hundred years, cities worldwide have tended to develop based on a halfhour average journey to work. Motor vehicles and freeways have taken sprawl about as far as it can go in most large autobased cities. Sprawl seems to have reached its political as well as its environmental limits.

Fourth, cities that prioritize freeways and sprawl spend a much higher proportion of their wealth on transportation –12 to 16 percent of gross regional product, compared to 4 to 8 percent spent by cities that prioritize transit and more compact development. “Smart growth” is smart economics.

Cities justify “smart growth” for many reasons – reducing greenhouse gases, facilitating the new economy, saving landscapes – but common to all is the desire to rebuild community. Those cities we have studied where “smart growth” is being implemented have responded to the visions of their civil society for more community. “Smart growth” is a grassroots movement.

IMPACT

Is smart growth possible in Brisbane? Queensland? Australia?

http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/newman2.htm


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URBAN REFORM – POLICIES

Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America, Pietro S. Nivola (Senior Fellow in Governmental Studies, Brookings). Washington: Brookings Institution Press, March 1999/126p/$14.95pb. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, July 1999, 21:7, 320.

Liberal access to space beyond the boundaries of central cities has helped the US to thrive. But equally clear is the fact that America's urban exodus has gathered pace more rapidly than warranted by market forces alone. A distinctive collection of government policies have spun the urban centrifuge, and this added stimulus has led to metro areas so decentralized as to be inefficient. The goal of stemming sprawl and reclaiming the cities has remained out of reach of the familiar correctives. Shopworn solutions invoked for decades in one incarnation or another have involved physical and economic development programs to revitalize city centers, federal and state funds to bolster urban mass transit, metro growth management schemes, and reorganizations to right interjurisdictional fiscal imbalances.

Eight suggestions are offered from European experience:

1. Tax Reform: shifting the tax burden to consumption and to things that society should discourage (pollutionproducing fuels and highway congestion);

2. Transportation Policy: rather than throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at traffic problems, a more costeffective priority is suitable pricerationing of the existing infrastructure (hightech road pricing programs);

3. Urban Crime: longterm maintenance of urban public safety requires abandoning public housing complexes and incentives to strengthen families;

4. Bettering the Schools: vouchers may open a few local options; 5. Small Business Development: city living is unlikely to be alluring without a

richer fabric of neighborhood enterprises; zoning principles need to be rethought so that mixed land uses can make urban land use more interesting;

6. Fiscal Relief: state and federal treasuries should share more revenues with municipalities, as in Germany and Canada, and unfunded directives from above should be abolished;

7. Energy Policy: the US is the only advanced nation that seeks to save oil by commandandcontrol regulations on auto companies, rather than raise the excise tax on motor fuel;

8. Immigration: liberal immigration looks increasingly like a lifeline for the nation's cities, larger zones of which would otherwise be deserted today.


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URBAN ISSUES – ENDING SPRAWL

Reining in Urban Sprawl. Thomas B. Stoel Jr. (Washington; cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council). Environment, 41:4, May 1999, 611ff. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, July 1999, 21:7, 320.

Officially designated metro areas now account for 19% of US land area, up from 9% in 1960. Four out of five US citizens live in a metro area, and more than half live in an area with more than one million people. Many Americans believe that metro conditions are deteriorating in important respects, including increased traffic causing congestion and air pollution, loss of green spaces, added runoff of pollutants into waterways, and a less pleasing landscape.

In the Washington area, at least 23 fullblown or emerging "edge cities" were counted in the early 1990s, and a 1998 federallysponsored study found that "traffic delays caused the average resident of the Washington area to waste two full work weeks per year while stuck in traffic."

The average estimated cost was $1,055 for each resident of the Washington metro area. Yet the population of the Washington area is expected to grow from 3.1 million in 1980 and 4.5 million in 1995 to at least 5.6 million by 2020. Some 80% of the 19952020 increase will be in the outer suburbs, and traffic in the DC metro area is projected to increase by 70%, while highway capacity expands by only 20%.

"The question, on a longterm national scale, is whether the growth required to accommodate the 50% increase in the US population that is expected by the mid21 st century will consist largely of urban sprawl or will take some other form." Among efforts to control sprawl, Oregon's landuse laws, requiring every city to designate an urban growth boundary, are seen by many as a model. Notable efforts to manage sprawl include Portland's 50year growth management plan (pursuant to the Oregon landuse law), Maryland's smart growth initiative adopted in 1997, and even the state of Maine. In the November 1998 election, more than 100 antisprawl measures were approved, generally to authorize funding to acquire parks, farmland, and other types of open space. "More antisprawl initiatives seem inevitable."

URBAN TRANSFORMATION: Inner City Renewal

Cities Back From the Edge: New Life for Downtown. Roberta Brandes Gratz (NYC) with Norman Mintz (NYC), NY: John Wiley, Fall 1998/361p/$32.95. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, July 1999, 21:7, 315.

A journalist/urban critic and a consultant on urban revitalization argue that most accepted rules of thumb about why downtowns have died and how to bring them back are wrong. Positive change and sustainable growth are occurring in many American downtowns, neighborhood commercial streets, Main Streets, and big city business districts. Some downtowns have grown more exciting; others have just been rebuilt. Those rebuilt by


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Project Planning are done so according to expensive plans of bankers, planners, and politicians, resulting in a collection of big activity places connected by a massive auto based network. Places that have become more exciting often do so despite conventional plans, with modest public investment and catalytic efforts of public citizens.

Such Urban Husbandry breaks or ignores the rules of excessive visions and overblown plans, so that new life and the outofthe ordinary occur. Chapters describe Mansfield, Ohio as an example of the new style of rebirth, the dysfunctional mess of our urban forms, the rebuilding of NYC's 42 nd Street as metaphor for the contrasts between Project Planning and Urban Husbandry, NYC's SoHo district as the epitome of positive progress (and an influence on many other downtowns), the death and rebirth of the public realm, rebuilding place and valuing transit in new configurations (e.g., a wide assortment of vintage trolley systems are being revived), undoing sprawl (WalMart is the most ubiquitous symbol of sprawl), how superstores and national chains are doing the right thing by locating in downtowns ("most big box retailers don't know how to be urban"), farmers markets (perhaps the most successful tool for regenerating downtowns of any size; from 1994 to 1996, their number increased 38%, from 1775 to 2400), and public buildings as downtown essentials. "Urban Husbandry requires modest nurturing, not major underwriting. It is costeffective and generous, liberating and empowering, liberal and conservative

IMPACT

How might an urban husbandry program begin in Australia?

URBAN SPRAWL CONTINUES

Urban Sprawl. John G. Mitchell. National Geographic, July 2001, 23 pp.

John Mitchell is senior editor of National Geographic Magazine.

This article explores the reality of living in Urban Sprawl in America and why the practice is expanding. This behaviour is partly explained by the American perception that “it (urban sprawl) is tolerable to so many because it has become so familiar.”

The American dream has long promised life, liberty and the pursuit of a spacious singly family home in the suburbs, but as new generations of home seekers look for breathing room in the suburbs and the lands beyond, the dream has been displaced by all too familiar worlds – Places plagued by traffic jams, high taxes and pollution. The irony of Urban Sprawl.

By 2025 the US will be home to nearly 63 million more people that are here today, if current trends prevail, they’re going to need more that 30 million new homes, most of which, will be singlefamily, detached dwellings built on the edge of today’s newest suburbs. And most of the families will be in and out of their cars at least 10 times a day. Currently traffic delays cost the U.S. more that 72 Billion dollars in wasted fuel and productivity.


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The article presents a chronological overview of the Political/Policy factors that facilitated Suburban development in the US and also identifies contemporary policy shifts to create alternatives.

During the late 19 th and early 20 th Centuries, cities were crowded, and often unhealthy places, especially when compared with early suburbs like New Jersey’s Llewellyn Park (1853) and New York’s Forest Hills Gardens (1909), which were modeled on Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the Garden City. By the 1950’s the stream toward the suburbs had become a surge, thanks in part to changes in laws, finance, technology and culture.

“The urge to move on lies entrenched in most Americans” – the Author states. “It is a kind of cultural impulse, as one historian has defined it “to withdraw from the great world and begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape.” Here is the tired city, out there the fresh country, the pastoral Jeffersonian ideal, the sort of place where that fellow Thoreau build a hut and grew beans, far from the townies living lives of quiet desperation. So begins the succession from county to suburb to sprawl.”

The article also presents the ‘State of Oregon’s’ contrasting policy approach to urban sprawl compared to the rest of the Nation, which began in 1973, when Oregon enacted legislation that required its 240 cities to establish urbangrowth boundaries to control suburban sprawl. Outside the boundaries, zoning protected farmland and forest, the minimum lot size set at 80 acres. The emergence of an alternative to mindless sprawl is described, who some call ‘smart growth’ or ‘New Urbanism and TransitOriented Development (TODS).

In 2000, Nationwide, US voters approved 400 of 553 growth related ballot measures. Most promote ‘smart growth’ which encourages pedestrian friendly communities, a mix of housing types, a ‘main street’ type town centre, and less dependence on the car.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS OF PEAK AUSTRALIAN BODIES

COMMUNIQUE: 2001 NATIONAL SUMMIT ON CITIES AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT, June 21st 2001; Secretariat C/ Royal Australian Planning Institute, Abstracted from WWW: rapi.com.au/~rapi

Produced and endorsed by:

• Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF)

• Australian Council of Building Design Professions (BDP)

[Includes Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA); Association of Consulting Architects Australia, (ACA); Association of Consulting Engineers Australia (ACEA); Australian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (AIQS): Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA); and engineers and planners as below]

• Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS)

• Australian Geography Teachers Association (AGTA)

• Master Builders Australia (MBA)


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• National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA)

• Royal Australian Planning Institute (RAPI)

• Reconciliation Australia

• Property Council of Australia (PCA)

• Institution of Engineers Australia (IEAust) In Consultation with:

• Australian Local Government Association (ALGA)

• Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA)

Peak Associations Urge ‘Livable Communities’ for Australia By world comparison, Australian cities and regional areas since Federation have been first class in design and management. Governments and communities have worked hard to ensure this as a matter of priority. However, we the undersigned are strongly concerned that environmental, social and economic outcomes are not being sufficiently realised in Australian settlements today, nor planned for the future. There is a lack of strategic direction, policy integration and understanding of the spatial impacts of national policy directions on our cities and regions.

Creating ‘livable communities’ is fundamental to the success of urban and regional Australia. It is fundamental also to national social well being and to long term environmental sustainability.

This unique alliance of a wide cross section of national associations calls for a new approach to city and regional development in Australia. Major expenditure decisions in environment, infrastructure, housing, and communications should be considered in the context of a broad set of principles about how we develop this nation.

Overall, major decisions affecting city and regional development in Australia should be based on the concept of sustainability. Sustainability is a dynamic process that enables people to realise their creative potential, improve their quality of life in ways that simultaneously protect and enhance the earth’s ecology and that also can facilitate national prosperity. A 'new approach' is required that includes the following principles:

1. Australia needs a new cooperative agreement for ‘livable communities’ – Federal, State/Territory and Local Government working together co operatively under the auspices of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to focus on strategies to achieve ‘Livable Communities for Australia’. Action – Planning Ministers in consultation with Federal and Local Government requested to form a Task Force on priorities for achieving ‘Livable Communities’ and for the Task Force to report back within twelve months.


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2. Strategic infrastructure investment will lead to city and regional prosperity – globally competitive, livable and healthy cities, serviced by the highest quality infrastructure thereby maximising the potential for Australia to reap the benefits of the new economy.

Action – That the Commonwealth take a leadership role in funding for strategic development infrastructure, based on cooperation between federal, state and local governments – to facilitate comprehensive crossportfolio strategic plans for Australia’s cities, communities and regions.

3. Close the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged – enable social participation by the rich and the poor, the advantaged and the disadvantaged in the life of Australian communities.

Action – The CommonwealthState Housing Agreement should be reinforced and updated to incorporate new development and financing options for affordable housing on a national basis.

4. Encompass environmental sustainability – promote ‘smart growth’ development areas and create, conserve and protect all significant environmental areas contain urban sprawl – reduce Greenhouse impacts. Action – Legislate to incorporate ‘sustainability’ and integrated transport and land use into plans, policies, programs and strategic planning processes/stages, and ensure that potential Greenhouse impacts are properly assessed.

5. Promote a regional approach to community development – recognise that many issues transcend traditional boundaries – e.g. the Murray Darling Basin and salinity issues, the AlburyWodonga area and crossborder issues – including regions of urban and regional advantage and disadvantage.

Action – The development of incentives for Regional Organisations of Local Governments to tackle regional issues such as land management, housing, transport, and communications.

Complimenting this would be the adoption of a ‘pooled funding’ approach for the co ordination of State and Commonwealth service delivery in regions with special problems or opportunities. Pooled funding would see a proportion of existing Government spending in the regions set aside for use in planning and service provision strategies whereby Government agencies work together, rather than in separate ‘silos’

6. Improve the quality of urban design in our communities – we need ‘best practice’ design to produce quality living environments and not just the cheapest alternatives.

Action – Governments to lead in urban design quality – for example, through application of ‘Triple Bottom Line’ economic, social and environmental consideration of the requirements of communities in projects and infrastructure – recognising that urban design is a comprehensive approach that embodies the custodianship and the prevention of wasteful use of resources and energy.


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7. Harmonise development and conservation regulatory systems – regulatory systems for development that are based on areabased strategic planning and that are simple, nationally coordinated and consistent, yet flexible enough to respond to the unique characteristics of Australian communities.

Action – Use AlburyWodonga as a pilot program to develop ‘harmonised’ best practice frameworks for development assessment complementing the current initiative of the NSW and Victorian Governments.

8. Foster greater engagement of business and communities in the debate about ‘livable communities’ Action The Commonwealth to establish formal consultations, perhaps in the form of a ‘National Roundtable’, with interest groups including the signatories to this communiqué, as an aid to Planning Ministers active involvement.

We call on the community and importantly, private enterprise to reprioritise city and regional development as a key issue for the future of Australia. We call on political parties to include these principles and actions in their policies for the up coming federal election. We propose to develop a ’scorecard’ system to monitor the outcomes.

IMPACT

Peak Australian Associations urge the Australian Federal Government to develop and action Policy across all levels to create sustainable and livable communities.

THWARTING CHANGE – Who are the culprits?

Changing Urban Development: Housing and Community in the 21 st Century, Joseph F. Coates (President, Coates & Jarratt, Washington), Vital Speeches of the Day, 65:22, 1 Sept 1999, 690694. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey. 22:2, 059.

A March 1999 address to the Urban Land Institute and the Center for Housing Policy on successful housing and other buildings for the future (shops and stores open at least 18 hours a day in residential areas are necessary), the concept of community as a "misshapen American myth" (the worst communities today in America are the gated communities, which are antidemocratic), building for singles and home workers (the 5% who now work at home will grow to 20% by 2005 and perhaps 40% by 2020), energy saving for anticipated global warming (we already know how to build comfortable houses using only 1030% as much energy as now used, and "a boom in retrofit [is expected] to cut energy consumption by 40 to 70% in houses that now exist"), and the advantages of manufactured housing (quality control you can get at a factory that you can't get at a job site). But barriers to serious change in the housing sector come from an "iron triangle" thwarting change: developers, state and local governments, and the administrative bureaucracy responsible for enforcing laws and regulations. Microthinking developers are intrinsically shortterm focused, driven by profits and laws. They are largely involved with creating "miserable fake small towns without the amenities of traditional small


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communities." Local governments are also parochial in outlook, subject to corruption and local pressure groups. Local government is too often the fly in the planning ointment.


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THEME TWO: TRANSPORTATION PLANNING

TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES

Choosing the Future of Transportation, Molly O'Meara Sheehan (Research Associate, Worldwatch Institute), The Futurist, 35:4, JulyAug 2001, 5056. [Adapted from a chapter in State of the World 2001 (Norton, Jan 2001; Future Survey, 23:2/063).] Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, www.wfs.org, 23:9, 404 September 2001.

Policy makers in every country are facing major transportation decisions that will affect millions of people. The investments society makes today will determine which of two very different transportation futures will unfold: building more highways and going farther toward car reliance and urban sprawl, or funneling new investments toward rail, bus, and bicycle infrastructure so that people have a variety of attractive, noncar choices, with less damage to the environment. Advances in transportation have brought benefits, but growing use of vehicles and escalating fuel use have created accidents (the World Bank estimates trafficrelated deaths and injuries costing the world roughly $500 billion/year), smog, congestion, sprawl, noise, loss of forests and farms, and carbon emissions. Many of these costs are not covered by taxes or fees. Options to reduce these problems are briefly discussed: cleaner fuels and engines, use of fuel cells instead of engines, banning private cars from central areas (as in some European cities), an increase in the "variable cost" of operating a vehicle to deter excessive use, e.g.: by fuel taxes (increasing the "fixed cost" may promote use), promoting private carsharing networks, coordinated transportation and land use policies, boosting cycling and publictransit options, computeraided paratransit services (vans, taxis, shuttles buses, and jitneys with flexible pickup and delivery stops) with a central switchboard matching drivers and riders, identifying bottlenecks that thwart progress (e.g.: fear of robberies on buses), integrated networks for bicycles, bus, rail, and new types of transit

CARFREE CITIES

Carfree Cities. J. H. Crawford (Amsterdam; www.carfree.com). Foreword by James Howard Kunstler. Utrecht: International Books, July 2000/323p/$29.95 (Order in US from Paul & Co, Concord MA; 978/3693049). Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 22:11, 518.

For far too long, we have permitted narrow commercial interests to determine when and how new technology will be applied. Society must now take control of technology and bend it to human ends. The automobile is the most extreme example of a useful technology inappropriately applied. "Cars and trucks make truly wretched neighbors. Among the world's cities, only carfree Venice has escaped the damage cars have done to the quality of urban life." The car has actually reduced mobility in cities, while creating dilemmas we had never anticipated. The only real solution lies in car and truckfree

file:///cgi-bin/show_fs.cgi%3Ffs=23_2_063

file:///cgi-bin/show_fs.cgi%3Ffs=23_9_404&words=sheehan



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cities. "Carfree cities offer a more sustainable, healthier, and happier future than any plan to `improve' the car or ameliorate its impacts."

Chapters discuss yardsticks for cities (quality of life measures), how various transport modes affect urban form, the ravages of cars (deaths and injuries, destruction of social systems, noise and pollution, congestion, space devoted to parking, service stations, dealerships, etc.), why most people avoid public transport (the most common complaint is that it is slow in comparison with driving, but the reverse is true in some large cities), sustainable carfree cities, design goals and standards for carfree cities (a high quality of life, beautiful urban areas, quick and inexpensive public transport, reduced energy and resource consumption, etc.), alternative topologies for large and small cities, city districts and blocks, building design, passenger transport (a fundamental principle is that pedestrians take precedence over all other street users, including bicyclists, delivery vehicles, and carts), freight delivery in the car free city (slow, small, batterypowered electric delivery vans are desirable), developing policy support for carfree cities, successful carfree areas (most German and Swiss towns of any size have at least one area in the commercial center), unsuccessful areas (about half of the 200 carfree malls instituted in the US between 1970 and 1998 were subsequently reopened to regular traffic; most failures were associated with poor public transport), planning carfree cities, and some modest carfree proposals (a new city to house the EU, sunbelt retirement cities in the US, land grant cities in the US to provide decent lowcost housing, the bicycle city, and the making of "magical places" characterized by human scale, rich detail, beautiful setting, harmonious sounds, evocative scents, and an appreciative public. "Few of the places we have built in the 20 th century are ever magical, and many are downright repulsive. If we bring this magic back into our lives, we will be a happier people”.

ALTERNATIVES TO GRIDLOCK

Gridlocked? Global Ideas to Get You Going. The Washington Post, Outlook Section, Sunday, 12 Aug 2001, B3. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 23:9, 402.

Responding to threemile backups on the Washingtonarea Beltway, the Post's staff writer’s report from six cities on innovative ideas to relieve traffic congestion:

1) Tokyo: more than half of new cars in Japan are equipped with navigation systems ranging from digital maps to realtime traffic reports and precise location of one's vehicle via the Global Positioning System; a small panel on the dash tells how much time a trip will take, where the traffic jams are, and alternative routes around heavy traffic;

2) Singapore: the ultramodern citystate charges tolls at peak travel times; more than 98% of vehicles have a small transponder on the dash; drivers purchase prepaid cards inserted into the units and fees are deducted from the card when a car drives under a toll gantry; Singapore also has an efficient subway system, punctual buses, and auctions for certificates of entitlement to own a car;


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3) London: the speed limit on the 117mile M25 beltway is varied by a computerized system of sensors so as to reduce erratic stopstart driving; by slowing traffic down through "active traffic management," everyone gets to their destination faster;

4) Curitiba: this city of 2.3 million in the south of Brazil has weaned residents from using cars as primary transport by developing an integrated bus system that handles 64% of all commuters (89% of users are happy with the service); one 50cent ticket permits passengers to travel anywhere with an unlimited number of connections (thus richer people who travel shorter distances subsidize poor workers who travel long distances);

5) Istanbul: in June the city inaugurated an electronic ticketing system that allows passengers to buy passes for use on all modes of public transport (ferries, buses, trains, and the subway); to relieve traffic on the two busy bridges that cross the Bosporus, 75 ferries make 1,200 trips a day from 46 ferry ports; and

6) Bombay: to encourage at least four passengers in every taxi, a rate system was established to encourage shared taxis, enabling the average number of passengers per vehicle to rise from 1.6 to 4 per trip.

HIGHTECH TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES: Dual Mode

The Transportation System of the Future. Francis D. Reynolds (Innovation Assessment Center, Washington State U). The Futurist. 35:5, SeptOct 2001, 4450. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 23:9, 405.

The guideways will carry almost all categories of vehicles now Since people will not give up their cars, an engineerinventor proposes a "dualmode transportation system" that will result in transport that is safer, faster, cheaper, less stressful, and less polluting. Under such a system, vehicles will be used in two distinct modes: driven in the normal manner on the streets or traveling automatically on highspeed dedicated guideways for trips of more than several miles used on streets and highways: most of the traffic will consist of private cars, but much of it will be crosscountry buses and longdistance freight vehicles operating with no drivers. The guideways will operate at full speed day and night, allowing a constant speed of 60mph in and around cities, and 200 mph between cities. Vehicles will be synchronized and may travel only one foot apart (thus a single guideway lane could carry the traffic of 12 highway lanes at 60 mph, and the need to build more lanes will become a thing of the past). To enter the guideway, motorists will drive to an entry stop, shut off the motor, and punch the number of a desired guideway exit into a keypad on the dash; the vehicle will then be automatically accelerated and merged with the guideway traffic.

Various transportation inventors have proposed different approaches to dualmode, many of them using maglev guideways so that vehicles float with their street motors off. A huge dualmode system for the US would cost hundreds of billions, but the guideway system will be paid for by charging every vehicle that uses it. The many benefits include less use of internal combustion engines, greatly reduced domestic air traffic, less highway congestion, automatic parking of cars directly from guideways, perfect safety under all


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weather conditions, and much faster travel. Unlike dualmode, automated highway systems would not solve energy problems, do little to relieve congestion, and probably be less safe than ordinary highways. Concludes with a brief description of six dualmode project (Autoshuttle, Carbus, Flexitrain, MegaRail, Monomobile, and Transglide 2000 for bicycles only) and a website for the latest thinking on dualmode:

http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/dualmode.htm.

FROM THE CAR TO MOBILITY FOR ALL

A Car for All – or Mobility for All? Roger Coleman. Lecture. http:/designage.rca.ac.uk/resources/publications/CarforAll.

Population again and environmental concern are two important factors that will effect the design of vehicles in the future. The authors argue for a shift from individuals to transport services, from A Car for All to Mobility for All.

Mobility for all could reduce environmental demand, increase accessibility, improve the quality of life of older and disabled people and offer new commercial opportunities to the very companies threatened by a reduction in traffic volume.

BEYOND THE CAR PARADIGM

Dreams: the making of cities. Peter Newman. Yes. Summer 1999. http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/newman.htm [email protected]; Web: wwwistp.murdoch.edu.au

(Peter Newman is coauthor of Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence (Island Press) and director of the Institute for Science and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6150 Australia.)

This article is critical of the worldview of international traffic consultants, arguing that cities do not need to be created from the perspective of the car and road.

"Los Angeles is the city of dreams – it has created fantasies, romances, and visions of tomorrow that have seeped into every corner of the world. Disneyland, films, and television permeate every part of the city and its dream industry. The freedom over space and time promised by the car was a perfect fit for the Los Angeles dream. Yet L.A.’s traffic, sprawl, and smog reveal a waking nightmare, a city of individuals where streets and other public places are sacrificed to traffic – a city that developed with no vision other than that of the highway engineer.

While some other cities are following in the path of L.A., there is an alternative movement developing around the world based on a different dream: to slow down the traffic, to provide alternative modes of transportation, to build urban villages where people don’t need a car.

http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/dualmode.htm

http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/newman.htm

http://wwwistp.murdoch.edu.au/


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These alternative visions for cities are not difficult to find. Many European cities like Zurich, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Freiburg have shown it is possible to reduce traffic. All have stories to tell of how their dreams of less car dominance were achieved over those of the traffic engineers.

Boulder, Colorado, has 20 years of pursuing a different development model than that of L.A. The city has a vibrant, walkable, mixeduse center instead of a bigbox shopping center. Students and seniors get free service on the city’s highly successful local bus service, and Boulder’s growth management strategy has stopped sprawl cold. Boulder has been so successful at buying up land on its fringe and turning it into open space that the city recently bought about half the adjoining county to stop some major freewaybased sprawl.

Like L.A., Bangkok, Thailand, is also known as the city of angels, and during its recent history it has been pursuing the car about as keenly. Traffic levels regularly exceed road capacity so that total gridlock seems a whisker away.

However, there are different models in Asia as well. Singapore decided it would not follow the American dream and has for 20 years created a wealthy citystate based around its electric rail system and welldesigned centers. The city has one sixth of the car use of L.A. and eight times as much use of public transport. But more importantly Singapore has 40 percent less car use than Bangkok, 20 percent more transit use and is nearly 4 times as wealthy.

Singapore went against World Bank advice when it built its electric rail system. The American transportation establishment that has dominated Bank policy for 50 years still regards electric rail as an inferior choice to upgrading bus services. Singapore has proven them to be wrong and our data show why.

Only cities with good electric rail systems show average speeds of transit faster than traffic, thus offering a competitive advantage to transit. In Singapore the traffic speed averages 33 kilometers per hour and the MRT train averages 40 kph. In Bangkok, the traffic crawls along at 13 kph but the bus system averages a mere 9 kph.

That these gridlocked cities are all a victim of their dreams rather than some inevitable process of the market is seen when the economics of these alternative approaches is examined. Bangkok spends 17.3 percent of its city wealth on its cardominated transport system while Singapore spends a mere 7.2 percent on its transitdominated transport system.

L.A. with its freeways spends 12 percent of its wealth on transport, while most European cities, with extensive transit systems, spend only 8 percent. Overall, among the 37 cities we studied, those cities with good transit systems have much lower total transport costs than those cities that have freeways and poor busbased transit. This is the opposite of the current investment ideology, which suggests that freeways are good for a city’s economy and transit is a drain on city wealth.

In L.A., despite the last freeway costing $200 million per kilometer to build, and despite only 18 percent of the population actually believing that freeways help ease congestion, the city is planning another freeway through 1,000 homes in Pasadena. Lois Arkin who


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founded L.A.’s EcoVillage, has a different vision for her city; with the residents of Pasadena and other transit advocates she is hopeful that a different dream for her city can win the day.

IMPACT

What would need to be done to move Brisbane and SouthEast Queensland away from the Car paradigm? Is it possible? What might be the benefits?

INTEGRATED TRANSPORTATION

Curitiba: Sustainability by Design, Tony LloydJones.

The city of Curitiba in Southern Brazil has been widely lauded as a model of sustainable urban planning, as a 'Third World city that works' largely because of its highly innovative busbased public transport system.

The most important aspect of the new approach was the use of transport as an instrument of development policy and a strategy integrating land use and transport planning. From 1974 onwards, the urban design structure emphasising linear growth along a series of structural axes began to be implemented. Each axis is made up of a 'trinary' road system, comprising three parallel routes, a block apart. The central carriageway of the central road is reserved for a dedicated highcapacity express busway. Its physical separation from the other carriageways allows, should future demand require it, for a more sophisticated, light railwaybased mass transport system. The carriageways either side of the busway are for local access and parking. The two lateral roads (one way or dual carriageway) provide for through traffic and access to adjacent development.

The structural axes form the first level in a hierarchy of an integrated road system. Priority links connect traffic to the structural roads, whilst collector streets accommodate various types of local traffic and are lined with local commercial activities.

Connector roads link the structural roads to the Industrial City.

These integrated policies form part of a much wider approach to environmental and social issues adopted by the city. Curitiba has launched a rescue programme for street children and organised open air markets to cater for the informal economy of street hawkers, The park and green space construction programme has expanded the amount of open space from 0.5 to 52 square metres per capita, one of the highest rates for any city anywhere, and this has been supplemented by the planting of 1.5 million trees. The parks and networks of green spaces are protected and maintained by both city employees and volunteers and incorporate both bike routes and ecological information centres.

One of the better known of Curitiba's policies is the 'Garbage That is Not Garbage' recycling programme which has reached 95% of the city. 750 tonnes of recyclable material is sold to local industry each month, providing income for social programmes, while recycling plants provide employment opportunities for the homeless and those recovering from alcoholism. The 'Green Exchange' programme is aimed primarily at the


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inhabitants of favelas, where access for garbage collection is often difficult and local rubbish tips scar the neighbourhood. This involves 22,000 low income families from 52 communities who swap rubber, glass and paper for bus tokens, vegetables and dairy products.

The newest policies in Curitiba include the creation of nine secondary centres for high density commercial development. These are multifunctional centres, associated with public transport terminals and incorporating local, decentralised town halls, sports and cultural facilities, as well as commercial services. The administration is also in the process of constructing fifty 'lighthouse' towers across the city, incorporating new libraries (including public internet facilities). These are associated with existing neighbourhood schools and also provide lookout facilities for local security guards. The intention is to reinforce civic identity through the provision of beacons of knowledge and security, in the manner of the ancient lighthouse at Alexandria. Lerner, meanwhile, has moved on to become Governor of the State of Parana and is focusing on rural development policies which will help stem the flood of migrants to Curitiba and, more recently, to smaller cities in the state.


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THEME THREE: SMART CITY

SMART CITY CHARACTERISTICS

etopia: Urban Life, JimBut Not As We Know It. William J. Mitchell (Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT). Cambridge MA: MIT Press, Oct 1999/184p/$22.50. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 22:2, 060.

The buildings, neighborhoods, towns, and cities that emerge from the unfolding digital revolution will retain much of what is familiar to us today. The power of place will still prevail. But superimposed on the residues of the past will be a global construction of highspeed telecom links, smart places, and increasingly indispensable software. This new layer will shift the functions and values of existing urban elements, and radically remake their relationships. The ten chapters describe: 1) March of the Meganets: the broad outlines of our electronically mediated future are

becoming clear, and nothing will effectively stand in the way: we must understand our emerging options, design the future we want, and build well (in contrast, "don't look here for more technotriumphalist, machomillennial prophecies of a glittering, goahead cyberfuture");

2) Telematics Takes Command: in a world of proliferating screenspace and speakers, smart surfaces, immersive displays, and augmented reality, digital info is ubiquitously overlaid on tangible physical reality;

3) Software: New Genius of the Place: on embedded intelligence, instant networking, rhizomic software;

4) Computers for Living In: wear ware (implanted, wearable, and pocket devices for bodily health and comfort, identification, and remote communication), body nets, intelligent appliances, buildings with nervous systems, intelligent resource consumption, reconceiving construction, smart cities (produced from a proliferation of nested smart places);

5) Homes and Neighborhoods: new arrangements enable reconfigured homes and new planning and zoning should enable the interweaving of living and working; "for good or ill, the home will play a stronger role in our lives than ever" and primary social relationships are generally likely to remain facetoface and domestically based; digital technology could revitalize local life or lead to the specter of the dual city of spatially and socially polarized groups;

6) Getting Together: many meeting places of the 21 st century will be virtual, but the virtual can complement the physical; we will still need places of assembly and interaction, and they will operate at an extraordinary range of scales;

7) Reworking the Workplace: familiar types of workplaces are fragmenting and recombining into new patterns;


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8) The Teleserviced City: we will increasingly face tradeoffs between maintaining our privacy and getting better service by giving some of it up; remote delivery of service can make a big difference; the price of inforelated services will be driven down, while manually performed services (plumbers, gardeners, nannies, cooks) will do increasingly well; most important, teleservice demands a new way of thinking about the organization of space;

9) The Economy of Presence: we will plot our actions and allocate our resources within the new framework of choice between facetoface and telecoms and between synchronous and asynchronous modes such as email; "the diverse architectural and urban forms of the future will surely reflect the balances and combinations of interaction modes that turn out to work best for particular people, at particular times and places";

10)Lean and Green: we can create etopias (lean, green cities that work smarter, not harder) by pursuing five basic design principles: dematerialization, demobilization, mass customization, intelligent operation, and soft transformation that is subtle, incremental, and nondestructive.

TELECITIES

Telecities: The Life and Times of Generation X. Margaret Klayton. Futures Research Quarterly. Summer 1998, 5965.

Telecities and their smaller counter part, televillages, are virtual communities of people connected through electronic communication. Common linkages are from a resident's home, community kiosk or telecenter to community amenities such as libraries, government agencies, hospitals or schools.

Smart Cars and Smart Insurance. Sohail Inayatullah. Foresight. Vol. 4, No. 1, 2002.

In this article, the future of the home and car are explored. The most visible discussion is focused on making cars smarter thus leading to fewer accidents and fewer insurance claims. This is essentially about making the driving experience safer, making the driving experience less tiresome and making the experience smarter. Technology is likely to lead the way here, for example, with the advent of the car sniffer and other devices can determine alcohol levels of a driver and then turn the car off.

Trends impacting upon car and home futures include:

• Globalization. This creates two classes in Australia, a rich internationally linked, and poor, local. The poor tends to be single, alone and female. Social isolation is the primary problem in this process of globalization.

• Rise of cultural creatives. A new demographic category focused on spirituality, sustainability, global ethics, future generations, relationships and helping others.

• Customization. The expectation of products that are customized for the individual.


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• Infotailoring. This is essentially guardian angel software which tracks one's entire purchasing history, allowing one to receive products suited for oneself. Products that ensue are interactive – they learn from your needs.

• Demographic shifts. Instead of a focus on youth and car insurance, the focus will be on mobility, seamless products throughout the entire life cycle.

Plausible scenarios include:

1. Great Divide. Smart cars for the rich and nothing for the future.

2. Smart cities. Smart cars, drivers and transportation systems.

3. From the car for all to Mobility for all. A dramatic rethinking of transportation.

IMPLICATIONS

What is the likely impact of infotailoring, customization and cultural creatives on the city? Will citizens expect a more seamless, personalized city council? Will cultural creatives dramatically change the nature of the city?

What would a totally mobile city look like?

WORKING FROM HOME

Changing Urban Development: Housing and Community in the 21 st Century. Joseph F. Coates (President, Coates & Jarratt, Washington). Vital Speeches of the Day, 65:22, 1 Sept 1999, 690694. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 22:2, 059.

A March 1999 address to the Urban Land Institute and the Center for Housing Policy on successful housing and other buildings for the future (shops and stores open at least 18 hours a day in residential areas are necessary), the concept of community as a "misshapen American myth" (the worst communities today in America are the gated communities, which are antidemocratic), building for singles and home workers (the 5% who now work at home will grow to 20% by 2005 and perhaps 40% by 2020), energy saving for anticipated global warming (we already know how to build comfortable houses using only 1030% as much energy as now used, and "a boom in retrofit [is expected] to cut energy consumption by 40 to 70% in houses that now exist"), and the advantages of manufactured housing (quality control you can get at a factory that you can't get at a job site). But barriers to serious change in the housing sector come from an "iron triangle" thwarting change: developers, state and local governments, and the administrative bureaucracy responsible for enforcing laws and regulations. Microthinking developers are intrinsically shortterm focused, driven by profits and laws. They are largely involved with creating "miserable fake small towns without the amenities of traditional small


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communities." Local governments are also parochial in outlook, subject to corruption and local pressure groups. Local government is too often the fly in the planning ointment.

SMART CITY AND CITY AS AGENT OF CHANGE

A City with a Broadband Future. Michelle Delio, http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,38346,00.html

The World Teleport Association (WTA) has named LaGrange, Georgia (pop. 27,000), the "Intelligent City of the Year."

"This is the premier international award for any community that understands technology and its role in the global economy," said Joe Maltese, director of community and economic development for the City of LaGrange.

LaGrange, located 60 miles southwest of Atlanta, competed against thousands of cities around the world for the award, beating major business capitals such as New York, Chicago, London, and Toronto.

Louis A. Zacharilla, director of global marketing for the World Teleport Association, said the award doesn't mean that LaGrange is more technologically advanced than other cities.

"One cannot compare the technological resources of the world's more robust broadband communities to one with fewer than 30,000 people. But LaGrange's aggressiveness and clarity of purpose, and the way they embraced new ideas including the ability to deliver Internet access to every citizen gave them an edge. Some places have a lot of technology, but haven't harnessed it to effect real changes," explained Zacharilla.

David Aden, an economist studying the effects of Internet infrastructure on cites, said that LaGrange definitely deserves to be honored.

"The city could have died when its textile industry faded. But instead they built fiber optic networks, and offer(ed) lowcost broadband services to local businesses and the town's citizens. They should be commended. Too many small towns simply build an industrial park and offer relocation assistance to lure companies in. LaGrange offers all of that, and sophisticated Internet infrastructure. They understood that big bandwidth wins business for small cities."

LaGrange also offers all of its residents free, fast Internet access via cable modem connections. The city provides all the needed hardware, software, and access fees. The town's 60mile fiber network and 150mile broadband hybrid fibercoax network also provides businesses with twoway, highspeed connectivity and advanced voice, data and video transmission capabilities.

Zacharilla said that the WTA defines cities or regions as "intelligent" when they use information and broadband communications technology to attract businesses, stimulate

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.lagrange-ga.org/

http://www.worldteleport.org/


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job creation, generate economic growth, and improve the delivery of government services.

"We are dealing with a transformation that is not unlike the advent of sewers and bridges. The world's infrastructure is being rebuilt.

"This is the real 'paradigm shift' or revolution. It is happening wherever you turn. As our chairman, Stephen G. Tom, says, it is impossible for a city, town, or region to remain competitive without taking significant steps to buildout its infrastructure to accommodate broadband communications," Zacharilla said.

Tom adds that this process "is neither cheap, easy ... or optional any longer."

The WTA first presented the "Intelligent" awards in 1999. Along with the Intelligent City award there is also an award for the Intelligent Building of the Year and an Intelligent City Visionary.

The Intelligent Building 2000 award will be shared between Hongkong Land Ltd. of China and Caracas Teleport in Venezuela. The Intelligent City Visionary Award was awarded, posthumously, to Tadayoshi Yamada from Japan, for his work with the World Trade Centers Association and the World Teleport Association, which he helped found.

Singapore was voted the Intelligent City of the Year for 1999, in honor of its "IT2000," initiative, a plan created by Singapore's National Computer Board to transform Singapore so that the Internet and other forms of information technology are present and central in every aspect of life.

Zacharilla says that Singapore received global acknowledgement as a result of winning the award, is "ranked one of the top places in the world to do business and continues to show economic growth despite the punishing recession throughout Asia."

But LaGrange's award has a special significance for Zacharilla.

"I grew up in a railroad town in upstate New York. When the railroad went away, I watched our town suffer, unprepared for the next generation. That will happen to any city without vision.

"In contrast, LaGrange is a role model for the rest of the world on how to prepare a community for economic change. They have recognized and reacted to the shift from manufacturing and machines to telecommunications and technology," said Zacharilla.

"The big cities that are just dragging along may be in for a rude awakening: It's the progressive small towns like LaGrange that are paving the way for the future."

IMPACT

What would Brisbane need to do to be voted Intelligent City of the Year?


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SMARTNESS AND SUSTAINABILITY

Engineering a New Vision of Tomorrow. Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows. The Futurist. Volume 36, No1 (www.thevenusproject.com). The World Future Society.

‘The Venus Project is a global social design that incorporates a proposed city built on the principles of sophisticated use of technology and sustainable use of resources. Fresco has built new models of the technologies to show how they will be used in creating and managing the cybernated city he envisioned. His conclusion – “We can get there where from here”.’

“As artificial Intelligence rapidly develops, machines will be assigned the tasks of complex decision making in industrial, military and governmental affairs.” Fresco believes this is not a takeover but the next phase of social evolution.

In Fresco’s vision of the cybernated city, machine intelligence will be linked to all the social and environmental information needed to analyse issues and generate ideal options for decision making. Like an electronic, autonomous nervous system, the Cybernated City will extend its sensors out into the social complex, then coordinate production and distribution on the basis of human needs in full accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Technologies Fresco and Meadows envision are:

• Megamachines;

• Automated construction systems – robots via satellite;

• Automated tunnel assembling machines;

• Self erecting skyscrapers;

• Mariculture and sea farming;

• Floating megastructure;

• Artificial Islands; and

• Ocean Mining Mega Structures – Sea Cities.

IMPACT

The Transformation of the Global Economy towards sustainability is reliant on transfer of critical decision making to Artificial Intelligence. Humans cannot be ‘trusted’ to solve our problems. Cyber city gives humans even greater power to collect the earth’s vast resources and distribute them to all, this is a global resource based economy where all of the Earth’s resources are declared the common heritage of all the world’s people.


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REWIRING THE HOME

Cable Manners. Rod Easdown. Sydney Morning Herald, 410 April, 2002, 6.

The only thing certain about future proofing the home is the need for cables. The technology is revolutionary, allowing your washing machine to directly call a service agent. Says David Beauchamp, "We've done a fully voice activated house for a quadriplegic. ... A home cinema, airconditioning, lifts, security door, lighting – all controlled by the spoken command”.

The most important part of any system is user friendliness. The smart house will make our life much easier. However, architects need to design appropriately for these new technologies, not as an afterthought.

IMPACT

What will be the cost savings for the city?


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THEME FOUR: GREEN CITY

MEASURING CITIES – GREEN CITIES

NABERhood watch. Anne Susskind. The Bulletin, November 20, 2001, 43.

Writes Susskind, "With buildings creating more greenhouse gases than vehicles, a new government plan that rates houses for environmental impact is not such a bad idea."

A new plan being launched by the Federal government will rate houses on a star system from one to five in nine broad categories. These are:

1. Biodiversity;

2. embodied energy;

3. energy consumption;

4. water consumption;

5. indoor air quality;

6. resource efficiency;

7. location and transport;

8. waste management; and

9. food production.

This is important as buildings consume 30% of Australia's raw materials. They create oneandahalf times the green house gases produced by vehicles. With the business as usual scenario, emissions from buildings are estimated to increase by 48% during that time.

Writes the author, "if your house is far from public transport, or is carpeted, or if you smoke, this would count against you. If you grow native plants in your backyard or herbs on the balcony, and have shops in walking distance, this could generate extra stars.

IMPLICATIONS

This system could revolutionize consumer behavior as well as help Australia limit greenhouse gases. Should there be a star system for cities?


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ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS FOR BRISBANE AHEAD

On the slide ..still. Ian Lowe. New Scientist. 6 April 2002, 49.

Writes Lowe: "More alarmingly, greater Brisbane is growing at a rage of 3.4% a year. If that were to continue, its population would double in 21 years and quadruple in 42. Those growth rates point to an environmental disaster in the making.

"The forces driving environmental degradation are activities like land clearing ..increased use of water for irrigation and continued population growth…. Unless those pressures are reduced, continuing environmental decline is inevitable.

IMPLICATION

What should Brisbane do given the likelihood of population growth in the near and medium term future? How can the environmental impact of increased population be reduced?

GREEN ARCHITECTURE

Prophet of Bloom. Florence Williams. Wired. February, 2002. 6063.

In late 2000, Ford Motor Company hired William McDonough – designer plus environmentalist – to blue print a $2billion design. The center piece will be a vast but energy efficient truck assembly plant, nor from a lowemission paint plant. The goal is to transform Ford's aging River Rouge factory into nothing less than "the model of 21 st Century sustainable manufacturing."

McDonough's approached Ford because he understood that with $80 billion dollars worth of purchase orders, the world could be changed. His ideas for green architecture are developed in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things.

In this book, he envisions a technically advanced world of zero waste, where nothing ever hits the trash bin and all materials, under a kind of karmic destiny, can be recovered to lead productive lives over and over again.

We need to go beyond the tired recycling metaphor and design objects so that they have a productive afterlife. Concretely, this mean designing for Ford, a woolandcellulose upholstery textile that can, when composted, serve as garden mulch.

Critics, however, point out the limits with this approach. Says David Korten, "It's like when advertisements say, ‘you can contribute to the environment by buying an energy efficient air conditioner,’ when the proper response would be to just open the window”.


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IMPLICATIONS

A new wave of energy efficiency moving far beyond recycling appears to be almost here. Can Brisbane and the AsiaPacific meeting be on the cutting edge by pushing this approach?

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH

The Futurist, Megacities of the Future. NovemberDecember, 2001, 8. Review of Cities at the Forefront. John Hopkins Population Report. www.jhuccp.org.

“By 2030, 60% of the world's population will live in cites”. By 2015, "megacities" – those with over 20 million people – will include Tokyo, Bombay, Lagos, Dhaka and Sao Paulo. Approaching mega city status will be Karachi, Mexico City and Shanghai.

How cities develop will dramatically how the world develops. "Over 600 million people in cities in developing countries cannot meet their basic needs for shelter, water, food, health and education."

"Cities also produce nearly 80% of all carbon dioxide and account for 75% of industrial wood waste, and use 60% of freshwater withdrawn for direct and indirect human use."

The report concludes that one of the best investments can make is a good mass transportation system. It can create jobs and provide an affordable way for residents to reach places of employment.

" It also can greatly reduce pollution by reducing the demand for private vehicles. WHO estimates 700,000 deaths annually could be prevented in urban areas of developing countries if the three major pollutants – carbon monoxide, suspended particulate matter, and lead – were brought down to safe levels by WHO."

Simple things can lead to dramatic improvements, argue the writers. For example, 70% of the water pumped into cities is lost before it can reach consumers, leaking out of faulty water mains, pipes, and faucets."

IMPACT

What products can Brisbane/Queensland offer to increase the efficiency of water pipes? As well, what role can Brisbane/Queensland play in designing more effective transport system?

SUSTAINABLE PLANNING

Sustainable Planning in San Francisco. Sustainable City http://www.sustainable city.org/welcome/index.htm#Our

Sustainable City's advocacy for a sustainable future – one that provides for the needs of


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the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations and the natural world to provide for their own needs is embodied in the Sustainability Plan for the City of San Francisco, featured on this website. Over 350 San Franciscans community activists and people representing many city government agencies, over 100 businesses, and academia gathered in working groups in 1996 to draft the "rough gameplan that is necessary for a concerted effort to achieve a sustainable society." In July, 1997, the goals and objectives of the sustainability plan became policy of the City and County of San Francisco

The plan sets out:

1. Broad, longterm social goals, meant to be very general, that speak to the basic human and ecosystem needs that are to be addressed.

2. Longterm objectives to achieve a sustainable society, describing the state of the City when it reaches sustainability.

3. Objectives for the year 2002, describing the proposed state of the City within five years. These objectives are quantified and meant to be feasible within a fiveyear timeframe. They include objectives for businesses and individual residents as well as for city programs.

4. Specific actions to be taken to achieve the objectives. They also include actions for all sectors: government, business, the nonprofit community and individuals. Some are suggested for specific entities; most are not. These proposed actions are just that proposals. The City of San Francisco has endorsed the goals and objectives of the plan, and will consider the specific actions in the future as more fleshedout proposals on which the public have had further opportunity to comment are brought before the Board or the various City Commissions.

A separate section lists indicators for all topic areas. The indicators were designed to be numerical measurements that:

• Are obvious in what is being measured;

• Can be found at low cost given the current informationgathering machinery;

• Clearly indicate a trend toward or away from sustainability; and

• Are understandable to everyone and easily presented in the media.

Topics Addressed in the Plan:

• Section I Specific Environmental Topics

o Air Quality

o Biodiversity

o Energy, Climate Change, and Ozone Depletion


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o Food and Agriculture

o Hazardous Materials

o Human Health

o Parks, Open Spaces and Streetscapes

o Solid Waste

o Transportation

o Water and Wastewater

• Section II Topics that Span Many Issues

o Economy and Economic Development

o Environmental Justice

o Municipal Expenditures

o Public Information and Education

o Risk Management (Activities of High Environmental Risk)


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IS SUSTAINABILITY POSSIBLE? Here's how R. Crumb saw it...

From ZAP COMIX # 0 : ©RCrumb1968

From ZAP COMIX # 0 : ©RCrumb1968

::::: The road to SolarDome is always under construction:::::

IMPACT

How can Brisbane move quicker toward energy efficiency? What can other Asiapacific cities do? Can there be a joint plan?


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ENERGY NEEDS OF VILLAGE AND CITY COMPARED

School of Ekistic Science

http://www.solardome.com/SolarDome69.html

IMPLICATIONS

How can Brisbane switch over to solar energy, quickly and immediately?


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WHICH FUTURE? GRAY OR GREEN?

Gray City, Green City. Mark Dekay & Michael O’Brien. Forum for Applied Research & Public Policy. Vol 16 No. 2, 8pp (1927).

(Mark Dekay is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Michael O’Brien is a landscape consultant and principal of Newland Geographic in Boulder Colorado.)

The American City, if one can still call such a sprawling, Gray metropolis a city, is an ecological disaster. The way cities use land and resources profoundly alters the quality of the local and global environment. Uncontrolled growth devours land, water, and energy from the surrounding landscape. Contemporary settlement patterns create auto dependence, high energy demands for building, water pollution from excessive toxic runoff, air pollution, and such other adverse environmental effects as increased health risks caused by coal mining, nuclear waste, and fuel burning.

For their exorbitant ecological price, these urban patterns do not even buy a high quality of life. Early 21 st century Americans are separated from the aesthetic and ecological experience of nature while spending hours every day commuting and several more hours working to pay for their cars. Neighbours are not friends, community is not tied to place, and millions, too poor to own cars, are disenfranchised. The city is noisy, congested, frustrating, and unhealthy. Our society has created this habitat for ourselves.

The Authors argue that Human habitat must be restructured so that we live within the limits imposed by our lifesustaining ecosystems and follow the organising principles by which all life flourishes. The Authors argue for a Green City Consciousness – a shift in our perceptions to correct the ecological damages caused by today’s Gray City.

A sustainable city can be built on three interrelated mental models, each depending on a different set of values for what counts as success:

• The city as a living system. This way of thinking asks: What form would the city take if we understood it as a manifestation of natural process? The central insight of the living city concept is that cities and landscapes are living systems. A city is a human ecosystem set in a landscape.

• The city as an experience of nature. This way of thinking asks: What form would the city take if we understood nature as a crucible for human development? Ecosystem services do not just provide our basic needs. The biosphere nurtures our mind and soul, as well as our stomachs and lungs. The city is natural, but it is a nature degraded. This mental model is supported by the ‘Biophilia hypothesis’ (Ulrich, “Biophiloia, Biophobia”)

• The city as a particular place. This way of thinking asks: What form would the city take if we understood it as part of larger whole? Placemaking is generated through ecological (Bioregional) and cultural contextual thinking.


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Shape of the Green City

The integration of these three mental models – living systems, landscape experience, and native context – generate a set of five patterns necessary for the emerging green city:

1. Hydrologic City collect, store, and process water as much as possible with its own watershed.

2. Productive City Urban Agriculture – permaculture to grow a significant portion of city’s food close to where people live.

3. Bioclimatic City – the use of the natural climatic forces to provide human comfort in and around buildings – Energy Conservation.

4. Transit City – Network of ‘Urban Villages” linked by cycle, bus or rail.

5. Habitat City – Ecosystem Health achieved by bounding the built environment by: wildlife and water shed preserves, bio regional habitat network of linking greenways.

The key to managing the green city’s development will lie in distinguishing what nature can do on its own, given the right conditions, from what humans must orchestrate. Our success will depend on our ability to:

• raise individual and social awareness of our participation in life processes;

• receive timely feedback about system behaviours that affect human activities; and

• increase our understanding of the nonlinear and counterintuitive aspects of the behaviour and development of complex systems.

The Authors conclude that, if the future really matters to us as a society, we will build the restorative, regenerative green city, one in which the life and options of all future generations are better than ours.

RENATURED CITY

Applied Nature – Ken Yeang’s Utopia of the renatured City. Andreas Ruby. Daidalos – Architecture, Art, Culture. Issue 73 October 1999, Gordon & Breach Publishing Group, London.

While most architects today have renounced any kind of Utopia, Yeang permits himself the luxury of a vision: that of once again reconciling nature and the city.

According to his thesis, the growth of population has resulted in the continuing expansion of cities, both toward the outside (consumption of area) and toward the inside (architectural density). In the process, nature has been the big loser. Urban Sprawl has increasingly swallowed up landscapes that once extended between the cities. Yeang’s answer: architecture – whose very existence suppresses nature – must restore the landscape to nature.


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Ruby states that this concern is not new, rather, it extrapolates a central theme in urbanism: the attempt to interrupt the omnipresence of architecture with botanical oases.

He briefly outlines previous historical attempts in urbanism to resolve this theme:

• Inclusion of Parks during the growth of the 19 th Century metropolis to counterbalance the building activity of rapid industrialisation. For example, Hyde Park in London, Central Park in New York, or the Tiergarten in Berlin.

• Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the Garden City, by picturesquely embedding the city within a natural context. This romantic concept was completely overrun by the dynamics of modern urban development.

Other attempts similarly overrun were:

• The Organic City of the late 1920s; or

• Le Corbusier’s Radiant City model which influenced the green, more spaciously structured city of the 1950s. e.g. Brazilia.

Ruby argues that these models hardly attribute more than metaphorical value to nature. Its essential function is to provide botanical decoration for the urban body.

Ken Yeang on the other hand, uses nature in his buildings in an entirely pragmatic way: to produce additional oxygen, as a microclimate generator or organic air conditioner. Yeang is concerned with the direct transfer of knowhow from nature to architecture, with using the intelligence of the natural to correct the artificial. Ruby states however that Yeang’s new “nature” is scarcely less artificial than the architecture it is supposed to renature.

The experimental field where Yeang will test his thesis is the site of Expo 2005, Aichi, Japan. The result will be the organisation of the exhibition vertically. The 60 metre high Expo tower’s space allocation is comparable to the land use apportionment of Expo 1998 in Lisbon. Visitation is estimated at 12million. Within 6 months, that means 64,500 visitors a day. In addition there will be 12,900 Expo employees. (NB: = approx. pop. of Mooloolaba with twice the domestic overnight visitation rate recorded for the whole Sunshine Coast region pa.)

The quaternary circulation system comprises:

• Expo Promenade – a pedestrian ramp connecting the different parts of the tower.

• Light Rail Transit (LRT) system links all the major zones of the Expo around the façade of the tower.

• High speed district lifts and escalators.

• Local lifts, travelators, ramps and staircases.

The Vegetation strategy has 3 functions:

1. Sunshading and microclimatic control on the façade.

2. Decorative landscaping along the main exposition promenade.


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3. Vegetation pockets located in public areas as natural air fresheners.

IMPACT

The Vertical Renatured City being developed for Expo 2005 is a possible model for the city future, to reduce and or retract urban sprawl.


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THEME FIVE: COMMUNITY AND HEALTHY CITY

ELEMENTS FOR A HEALTHY CITY

The Common Good: Futures of Community (Special Issue). Edited by Leonard Duhl (Prof of Public Health, U of CaliforniaBerkeley). Futures. Vol 31, No. 5, 405525. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey, July 1999.

Trevor Hancock and Leonard Duhl have proposed the following elements as key parameters for healthy cities, communities, and towns:

• a clean and safe environment;

• a stable and sustainable ecosystem;

• a strong and nonexploitative community;

• a high degree of public participation in decisions affecting one's life and wellbeing;

• meeting of basic needs for all, access to a wide variety of experiences and resources;

• a diverse and vital economy;

• encouragement of connections with cultural and biological heritage and with other

groups and individuals;

• urban design that enhances the preceding parameters and behaviors;

• an optimum level of appropriate public health;

• sickcare services accessible to all; and,

• high health status.

As our lives become more complex, so have our communities and our social problems. "Two things become paramount: we need to evolve new social mechanisms, and we need to build coalitions across the board." Communities everywhere are increasingly putting their selfinterests aside, and working with diversity to live together, and shape a better future, for the common good. "A move toward the common good and respecting our differences is the only means we have for surviving the future."

HEALTHY CITY – Scientific Evidence

Communities as Early Warning. Eliot Hurwitz, Futures Research Quarterly (Summer 1999), 7593.

Hurwitz points out two critical studies. 1. A 1992 study published in the American Journal of Public Health contrasted the two of Roseta, PA with two neighbouring towns served by the same community hospital. Study investigated Roseto's significantly lower


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incidence of heart attacks despite nearly identical risk factors, including smoking, high fat diet and diabetes. The one difference was that Roseto was composed of a very tightly knit Italian immigrant community with many threegeneration households in active extended social networks.

Other studies as well confirm that socially isolated people had up to five times the risk of premature death from all causes when compared to those who had a strong sense of connection and community.

Dean Ornish as well in his book, Love and Survival – The Scientific Bases for the Healing Power of Intimacy (Harper Collins, 1997), cites dozens of studies, including a Swedish study of 131 women which found that availability of deep emotional relationships was associated with less coronary artery blockage independent of age, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, cholesterol, educational level and menopausal status.

IMPACT

Creating a healthy city then, along with health services, is about healthy communities.

FROM DIGITAL TO PLACE: Place and Community

The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape. Joel Kotkin (Senior Fellow, Institute for Public Policy, Pepperdine U). NY: Random House, Nov 2000/230p/$22.95. abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey. 22:11, 515.

Distance has shrunk in the digital economy, and we seem to be living in a placeless society. But the digital economy may well have precisely the opposite effect on place: in truth, geography and place are more important than ever before. What has changed profoundly are the rules governing geography, and the making of successful and unsuccessful places. "Perhaps the key rule grows from the realization that where informationprocessing companies, related services, and skilled professionals choose to locate will increasingly shape the geographic importance of future cities and communities." These engineers, scientists, investors, and creative workers are increasingly very sophisticated consumers of place. "The more technology frees us from the tyranny of place and past affiliation, the greater the need for individual places to make themselves more attractive." Surveys of hightech firms making location decisions find that "quality of life" was far more important than factors such as taxes, regulation, or land costs. In the digital age, some cities thrive and others continue to die or become marginalized. At the same time, the largest metro regions are increasingly bifurcated between rich and poor.

Kotkin discusses the postindustrial city, the new urbanites who live in the creative centers, rural Valhallas (areas with significant urbanlike amenities and appealing scenery, where knowledge workers remain plugged into the information economy), the rise of "midopolis" (older suburbs that generally face less rosy prospects), "nerdistans" (attempts to recreate the suburban dream, but in a less egalitarian way), winners and losers in rural



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America, the future of city centers, cities without children (in places like New York, being single, childless, or gay is becoming the norm), the artful city (the trend to smaller artisanal firms in urban areas such as upscale bakeries), Main Street 2020 (the efforts of small cities to bring life back to their historic cores and restore a villagelike atmosphere), the impact of etailing (filling newly abandoned retail space may soon be the biggest challenge facing cities and towns). "There is a growing tendency for even businesspeople to fight against chain development, often favoring less profitable development, if it means maintaining an area's character." The concluding chapter touches on "places in the heart," sacred places, and the "looming prospect of a society severely divided between rich and poor." Ultimately, in the digital age, the oldest fundamentals of placesense of community, identity, history, and faithwill increasingly be the critical determinants of success and failure.

LOCALISM AND COMMUNITY SELF RELIANCE

Going Local: Creating SelfReliant Communities in a Global Age. Michael H. Shuman (CoDirector, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington), Annals of Earth (10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth MA 02540), 17:1, 1999, 810. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey. www.wfs.org. 22:2, 064.

Shuman argues against three common strategies for economic development, each demonstrably a dead end:

• Get big companies to locate in your backyard (which usually forces an erosion of labor and environmental standards);

• Export your goods as widely as possible (which increases vulnerability to forces beyond community control); and

• Lobby for more than your fair share of federal pork (which can also make a community vulnerable if programs are reduced or eliminated).

Three alternative principles for community development:

1. Ownership: local ownership can come in many forms, such as familyowned business, workerowned business, cooperatives (47,000 are alive and well in the US), nonprofits, and municipallyowned enterprises (an outstanding model of local ownership is the Green Bay Packers, a nonprofit with thousands of stock shares mostly held by local fans, who will never face the prospect of their football team being sold to another city).

2. SelfReliance: move from exportled development to importreplacing development.

3. Power: secure power instead of pork, and beware of ‘feds’ bearing gifts (most communities waste economic development money on the wrong things such as stadiums, new highways, shopping malls, and convention centers); if more money is needed for the community agenda, tax land and not improvements (as Henry George argued long ago).

http://www.wfs.org/


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Six basic steps toward sustainable development are suggested:

1. A Community Bill of Rights: a communitywide conversation on the What, How, and Where of sustainable business, defining standards as a guide to decisions;

2. A State of the City Report: compiling a good database for the city each year;

3. CommunityFriendly Business Schools: creating new kinds of business education in community colleges, churches, and civic centers;

4. Community Reinvestment: investing locally and banking locally, preferably in credit unions;

5. Local Purchasing: purchasing as much as possible from communityfriendly businesses (e.g., the state of Oregon has set up a brokering service that links local sellers with local buyers); and

6. Real Devolution: "a sustainable city will seek to dismantle the enormous number of federal rules and laws that deny communities the basic powers they need to become more selfreliant."

PLACELESSNESS AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY: Postmodernism and the Return of Community

Postmodern Urbanism (Revised Edition). Nan Ellin (Asst Prof of Architecture, Arizona State U). NY: Princeton Architectural Press, Feb 1999/392p/$21.95pb. Abstracted by Michael Marien. Future Survey, 21:7, 310.

"Over the last several decades, Western landscapes have undergone a sea change along with the ways we experience them and our visions for improving them." The importance of place has diminished, as global flows of people, ideas, capital, mass media, and other products have accelerated. The walking city has evolved into a less legible landscape where the erstwhile distinctions between city, suburb, and countryside no longer abide.

A byproduct of this shift to placelessness is a deep nostalgia for "the world we have lost." To quell this sense of loss, a search has been underway for a usable past, a sense of community and neighborhood, meaning, roots, and leadership. These goals have been sought by preservation or rehabilitation of old central cities, the building of new cities which resemble old ones, the cooperative movement, and reassertion of traditional social values. As the global village grows smaller, local efforts have grown to assert, rediscover, or invent traditions.

However, one reflex of this has been: a retreat from political engagement, turning inward, greater vulnerability to fashions and fascisms, fluid identities, increased sense of fragmentation.

The Postmodern city, at its worst, the extreme relativism and disengagement may eliminate any possibility for communication, ethics, and democratic practice.


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COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IDEALS

Urban Problems and Community Development. Edited by Ronald F. Ferguson (Wiener Center for Social Policy, Harvard U) and William T. Dickens (Brookings Economic Studies). Washington: Brookings Institution, Jan 1999/628p/$56.95. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, July 1999, 21:7, 311.

Urban problems are addressed from a broad vision for community development entailing eight qualityoflife ideals:

• residents should feel secure;

• neighbors should have the capacity to collaborate;

• the neighborhood should garner its fair share of public goods and services;

• residents should have the resources and support to get good jobs within commuting distance;

• local businesses should be competitive;

• wellmaintained housing should be affordable;

• local schools should educate children; and

• local religious institutions should help maintain the community's moral foundation.

Authors conclude, "alliances in community development are critically important" to build five types of capacity both inside and outside a target neighborhood: social, physical, intellectual, financial, and political.

COMMUNITIES AND PEACE

The Local Roots of India's Riots. Ashutosh Varshney, Far Eastern Economic Review, 26.

While this article ostensibly if focused on the religious riots in India, the crucial part for other parts of the world is the following research. He writes: What explains religious violence. Peaceful cities exist because of the following: (1) preexisting local networks of civic engagement between the two communities – business associations, political parties, trade unions, professional associations, clubs – stand out as the single most important cause. Where such integrated networks of engagement exist; tensions and conflicts get regulated and managed; where they are missing, segregated lives lead to ghastly violence.

IMPACT

What communities and areas can be identified where the potential for conflict exists, where there are few possibilities for civic engagement?


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LOCALISM AND SPEED

Slow Cities, Italy. Wired, February 2002, 87.

In 1986, Italian journalist Carlos Petrini founded the Slow food movement, protesting the arrival of the first McDonald's in Rome, and what he presciently identified as the surge of a global fast food culture.

In 1999 this movement led to the Slow Cities movement. Currently there are 30 slow cities, and 40 more towns have requested membership.

This movement is focused on ending the mad rush of rush hour, drive through cuisine and multinational branding. Slow cities stress environmental policies that create public green spaces and promote new ways to dispose of garbage. They also agree to restore old parts of the city before expanding to new areas.

Slow cities focus on the local economy, and thus give residents reasons to not move to major cities.

IMPLICATIONS

Slow cities is a clear niche, which, is likely to have quite dramatic tourist, not to mention health benefits. As Brisbane globalizes, might it be worthwhile to keep and go slow?

LOCAL ECONOMIES: Alternatives

The cornucopia of the commons. David Bollier. Yes, Summer, 2001 http://www.futurenet.org/18Commons/bollier.htm.

"A few years ago, the newspapers of New York City were ablaze with a controversy about dozens of plots of derelict land that had been slowly turned into urban oases. Should these beautiful community gardens that neighborhoods had created on trashfilled lots be allowed to stay in the public domain? Or should the mayor and city government, heeding the call of developers, try to generate new tax revenues on the reclaimed sites by selling them to private investors?

The community gardens emerged in a realm that the market had written off as worthless. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New York City real estate market had abandoned hundreds of buildings and city lots as unprofitable. Investors stopped paying taxes on the sites, and the City became the legal owner of some 11,000 nontaxable vacant lots. Many became rubblestrewn magnets for trash, junked cars, drug dealing, and prostitution, with predictable effects on neighborhoods.

Distressed at this deterioration, a group of selfstyled “green guerillas” began to assert control over the sites. “We cut fences open with wire cutters and took sledgehammers to sidewalks to plant trees,” said Tom Fox, an early activist. Soon, the City of New York


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began formally to allow residents to use the sites as community gardens, with the understanding that the property might eventually be sold.

In the Lower East Side and Harlem, Coney Island and Brooklyn, neighborhoods came together to clean up the discarded tires and trash, and plant dogwood trees and vegetable gardens. Over time, hundreds of cool, green oases in the asphalt cityscape emerged — places that helped local communities see themselves as communities. Families would gather in some gardens for baptisms, birthday parties, and weddings. Other gardens were sites of poetry readings and performances, mentoring programs and organic gardening classes.

Over 800 community gardens sprang up throughout the five boroughs, and with them, an economic and social revival of the neighborhoods.

“Ten years ago, this community had gone to ashes,” said community advocate, Astin Jacobo. “But now there is a return to green. We’re emerging. We’re seeing things return to the way it should be!”

Perhaps most importantly, the gardens gave neighborhood residents a chance to govern a segment of their lives. A city bureaucracy was not needed to “administer” the sites; self selected neighborhood groups shouldered the burden, and the sites became organic expressions and possessions of their communities.

By the 1990s, greenery and social vitality were boosting the rents of storefronts and apartments, which, ironically, alerted the city to the growing economic value of the sites. In 1997, Mayor Giuliani proposed auctioning 115 of the gardens to raise $3.5 to $10 million. For the mayor, the sites were vacant lots: underutilized sources of tax revenue that should be sold to private investors.

“These properties should go for some useful purpose, rather than lying fallow,” said a city official, in support of the mayor.

The mayor’s plan ignited an uproar, as hundreds of citizens demonstrated — some through civil disobedience — in numerous attempts to save the gardens. Determined to eke maximum revenue from the sites, the city rejected an offer by the Trust for Public Land to buy 112 garden lots for $2 million. Then, one day before a planned auction of the sites in May 1999, actress Bette Midler donated $1 million to help the TPL and other organizations consummate a purchase of the lots for $3 million.

The gift economy The power of a gift economy is difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. We are accustomed to assigning value to things we can measure — corporate bottom lines, Nielsen ratings, costbenefit analyses. We have trouble valuing intangibles that are not traded in the market and which therefore have no price. How is something of value created by giving away one’s time, commitment, and property? Traditional economic theory and property law cannot explain how a social matrix as intangible and seemingly ephemeral as gift economies can be so powerful.

Yet the effects are hard to deny. Gift economies are potent systems for eliciting and developing behaviors that the market cannot — sharing, collaboration, honor, trust, sociability, loyalty. In this capacity, gift economies are an important force in creating


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wealth, both the material kind prized by the market and the social and spiritual kind needed by any happy, integrated human being.

The vitality of gift exchange, writes Lewis Hyde, one of the most eloquent students of the subject, comes from the passage of a gift through one person to another and yet another. As a circle of gift exchange increases in size, an increase in value materializes.

As Hyde puts it: “Scarcity and abundance have as much to do with the form of exchange as with how much material wealth is at hand. Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow. ... Wealth ceases to move freely when all things are counted and priced. It may accumulate in great heaps, but fewer and fewer people can afford to enjoy it. ... Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy, and wealth can become scarce even as it increases.”

When anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski studied the Trobriand Islanders in the western Pacific, he was stunned to discover that ritual gifts such as shell necklaces made a steady progression around an archipelago of islands over the course of 10 years. People “owned” the cherished gift object for a year or two, but were socially obliged to pass it on. This is the same sentiment that apprentices feel after leaving their masters — an obligation to honor the gift that was freely given to them by passing it along to deserving successors. Several fairy tales — as well as a biblical parable — warn that a gift that is hoarded loses its generative powers, withers, and dies.

What’s remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places — in rundown neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, in blood donation systems, in drug and alcohol rehab groups.

The gift economy of blood and science One of the most vivid case studies comparing the performance of market and gift economies is Richard Titmuss’s examination of British and American blood banks in the 1960s. Drawing upon extensive empirical data, Titmuss concluded that commercial blood systems generally produce blood supplies of less safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems; are more hazardous to the health of donors; and over the long run produce greater shortages of blood.

What can possibly account for these counter intuitive deviations from market theory, which holds that the price system produces the most efficient outcomes and highest quality product? It turns out that the introduction of money into the blood transaction encourages doctors to skirt prescribed safety rules and tends to attract more drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners, and derelicts than altruistic appeals do.

According to Titmuss, Britain’s National Blood Transfusion Service “has allowed and encouraged sentiments of altruism, reciprocity, and societal duty to express themselves; to be made explicit and identifiable in measurable patterns of behavior by all social groups and classes.” In this context, the gift economy regime is not simply “nice.” It is actually more efficient, cheaper, and safer.

It is not widely appreciated that much of the power and creativity of scientific inquiry stems from a gift economy. While researchers are of course dependent upon grants and other sources of money, historically their work has not been shaped by market pressures.


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The organizing principle of scientific research has been giftgiving relationships with other members of the scholarly community. A scientist’s achievements are measured by recognition in academic societies and journals, and the naming of discoveries. Papers submitted to scientific journals are considered “contributions.” There is a presumption that work will be openly shared and scrutinized, and that everyone will be free to build on a communal body of scientific work.

The gift economy is now under siege as never before. As Jennifer Washburn and Exal Press have shown in their Atlantic Monthly article on the “kept university,” corporate money is introducing new proprietary controls over the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Why should anyone want to protect the gift economy of academic research when the market promises to be more efficient and rational?

The answer, says Warren O. Hagstrom, a sociologist of science, is that a gift economy is a superior system for maintaining a group’s commitment to certain (extramarket) values. In science, it is considered indispensable that researchers be objective and openminded in assessing evidence. They must be willing to publish their results and subject them to open scrutiny. They must respect the collective body of research upon which everyone depends — by crediting noteworthy predecessors, for example, and not “polluting” the common knowledge with phony or skewed research. The longterm integrity and creative power of scientific inquiry depends upon these shared values.

Market forces are illsuited to sustaining these values, however, because monetary punishment and reward are a problematic tool for nurturing moral commitment. By contrast, a gift economy is particularly effective in cultivating deep and unswerving values.

The cornucopia of the commons Gift exchange is a powerful force in creating and sustaining the commons. It offers a surprisingly effective means of preserving certain values from the imperialism of the market and the coercions of the state. It may be tempting to patronize the gift economy as archaic or “soft,” but the evidence is too strong to ignore: gift exchange is a powerful force for social reconstruction and a more civilized, competitive market.

It is a mistake, also, to regard the gift economy simply as a highminded preserve for altruism. It is, rather, a different way of pursuing selfinterest. In a gift economy, one’s “selfinterest” has a much broader, more humanistic feel than the utilitarian rationalism of economic theory. Furthermore, the positive externalities of gift exchanges can feed on each other and expand.

This points to the folly of talking about “social capital,” as so many sociologists and political scientists do. Capital is something that is depleted as it is used. But a gift economy has an inherently expansionary dynamic, growing the more that it is used. While it needs material goods to function, the gift economy’s real wealthgenerating capacity derives from a social commerce of the human spirit.


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IMPACT

How can a thriving gift economy be created in Brisbane? What hurdles need to be removed?

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT – Grassroots Neighborhood Initiatives

Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood. Peter Medoff (former DSNI Executive Director) and Holly Sklar. Boston: South End Press, April 1994/337p/$40.00;16.00pb. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, October 1994. 94, 454.

The Dudley Street neighborhood, less than two miles from downtown Boston, had been considered the city's most impoverished area. The authors tell the story of community rebirth through the residentled Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. Chapters describe creating the DSNI, organizing the neighborhood, bottomup planning of an urban village, how DSNI curtailed the trashing of the neighborhood, assembling vacant land for development through the eminent domain option, creating a unified vision and plan for neighborhood renewal, tenant organizing, holistic development (human, economic, environmental), the Community Resource Inventory to identify service and funding gaps, community gardens and the "Green Team," the community economic development strategy session, the DSNI Declaration of Community Rights, reclaiming a park as a safe community space, nurturing neighborhood leadership, the fruitful partnership between DSNI and city government, and the ways in which the neighborhood has changed as a result of "Dudley pride."

SYMBIOTIC COMMUNITIES

The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban Living. Herbert Girardet (London UK). Foreword by Lester R. Brown. NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, June 1993/191p/$16.00pb. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey, February 1994.

"If we are to continue to live in cities, indeed if we are to continue to flourish on this planet, we will have to find a viable relationship between cities and the living worlda relationship not parasitic but symbiotic, or mutually supportive." Humanity is becoming a predominantly urban species, and the limits of urban growth are increasingly seen as environmental. This book, on how modern cities might achieve sustainability, is in three parts:

1) The Ecology of Settlements: city throughput, linear vs. circular metabolism, urban heat islands, "globalopolis" as a more accurate term for McLuhan's "global village," development of cities from settlements, urban planning visions, the growth of megacities;


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2) Sick Cities, Sick World: urbanization and overcrowding, the poverty crisis, cities as stressful places, the city as parasite, hidden costs of food, waste and pollution, the pervasive influence of automobiles, threats to cities from future sea level rise;

3) Healing the City: making a city convivial, revival of city centers and neighborhoods, upgrading squatter settlements, healthy cities programs, the green cities movement and urban farming, combined heat and power stations, improving conditions for bicycles, traffic calming, recycling, cities learning from each other, the Megacities Project (run by Janice Perlman of NYU since 1987), safeguarding city hinterlands, China's ecocities that are largely food selfsufficient, renovating waste water.

URBAN VILLAGES

The coming wave of Urban Villages. Alan R, Winger. Foresight – Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy, Vol.01, No.03, Camford, Cambridge, June 1999, No. pages 7 (P243249).

Our rapidly changing digital/information technologies are reckoned by some to be a force that will radically change settlement patterns. One scenario put forth is that of an era in which people work wherever they choose but live in small neighbourly and wellthought out communities – urban villages. The argument made in this article is that this will not happen until we harness more effectively the potential of these technologies. Once this is accomplished, a wave of urban villages could happen. But if it comes, it will be more of a trickle than a wave, at least for a while, largely because of the continued importance of face to face contact in a good deal of business activity.

The article provides a capsized view of the past and present “City”

From Industrial City with concentrations of economic activity in the centre with residences tightly ringed around that activity; to the development of the suburbs with the aid of the automobile and telephone; to the further development of “Edge Cities” spurred by the continuing residential exodus from the centre and the construction of transport hubs. The Spread City now emerges as residential development continues to move into the “exurbs”. It is a city in the sense that there are points of concentration or high density landuse. The City centre has dispersed to a network of centres. What’s different today from 50 years ago is that many of us now live in places within the city where we have little or no contact with what goes on in the centre. We work and play in places well removed from the central business district and are able to do so because of the mobility given to us by the automobile. What the digital/information revolution is said to offer is a world in which there are virtually no limits to that mobility. It offers us a world in which there are few, if any restrictions on where we work or play. The virtual office may liberate the relationship between people and geography.

Obstacles to the networked urban village include:

• Technical infrastructure to network hardware and improve software language.


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• Increasing complexity in the economy will drive the collaboration with collaborators working in close proximity to one another.

• Instinct and the matter of trust – In the business world, the experts report that personal and direct contact to be the best way to develop trust.

• Basic Feelings – working in close proximity with others does apparently have productivity benefits.

• Stock of physical capital – The pull of the value of heritage and refurbishing the old.

• Manufacturing and Services Industries are not possible in the virtual world. i.e. Making a fridge or getting a hair cut.

• Variances in behaviour and preference – some may prefer urban villages whilst others may choose to live in the big city because of the wide range of consumption opportunities that will still be there.

Healthy futures for Asiapacific megacities. Greg Tegart and Tamsin Jewell. Foresight Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy; vol.03 no.06, Dec 2001, No. pages 10 (p.523 – 532).

(Prof Greg Tegart is Executive Advisor, APEC Centre for Technology Foresight, Bangkok and Ms Tamsin Jewell is Policy Researcher, APEC Centre for Technology Foresight)

The AsiaPacific Cooperation (APEC) region, which comprises 21 developed and developing economies, is expected to becomes predominantly urban by 2020 with at least 15 cities exceeding 10 million inhabitants. Whether such megacities will be “healthy” in the sense of physical, mental and social wellbeing is critical to the future of the region. A modified scenario creation technique has been used in this study of APEC megacities to 2020. Fifteen key issues have been identified and these can be grouped using the concept of cities as living organisms. A healthy megacity is one which reduces its resource inputs and waste outputs, whilst simultaneously improving the quality of life for its inhabitants. The study concludes that healthy megacities are possible if appropriate policy actions are taken.

The term “health cities” has been used as a general term to cover sustainability issues. According to the WHO Healthy Cities Program, healthy city is “one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support one another in performing all the functions of life and in developing their maximum potential.”

Three Scenarios were created by APEC CTF for megacities of 2020, being:

1) Econologic City – Top 5 cities of world in terms of wealth & standard of living. Hi Tech, Internet connected, Community & Government responsive.

2) Monopolis – Sustainable, Hitech tropical, megacity. Stringent regulations and cars banned from city.


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3) Fat City – vibrant intercultural and intellectual interaction – a concentrated network of selfgoverning communities. Bureaucracy superseded significant local democracy and participation.

Key issues were grouped using the metabolism model of human settlements developed by Newman and Kensworthy. (Sustainability & Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, Island Press, Washington, DC, 1999)

LIVING ORGANISM

MEGACITY

DRIVERS

Population dynamics

Resources

KEY PLANNING ISSUES

Governance

Infrastructure

Mobility

Planning

City Structure

Waste Management

KEY VALUE ISSUES

Social Connectedness

Participation

Livelihood Opportunities

Heritage

Safety

Living Environment (housing)

HealthCare Delivery

11 key Policy areas were identified in the study as being critical to healthy futures for Megacities.

POSTMODERNISM AND THE NEED FOR COMMUNITY

The Seduction of Place: The City in the 21 st Century. Joseph Rykwert. NY: Pantheon Books, 2000.

(Excerpt from www.upenn.edu/gazette/o701/0701books.html, Ever Changing, Always Themselves What makes cities endure? By Robert Wojtowicz (associate professor of art history and chair of the art department at Old Dominion University).)

INPUTS DYNAMICS OF

QUALITY OF LIFE

FOOD DIGESTI HEALT

http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/o701/0701books.html


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How cities maintain their identity in the face of breakneck change is the subject of Joseph Rykwert’s thoughtprovoking book, The Seduction of Place.

Place versus space: The term place, Rykwert argues, is much more useful than the oft used space. A place has an identity and a meaning to the people who are drawn to it. A space is empty, void of meaning, forgettable or even interchangeable. Impalpable forces, he maintains, guide the development of cities just as surely as the real estate market or a shift in political leadership: “[T]he city did not grow, as the economists taught, by quasi natural laws, but was a willed artifact, a human construct in which many conscious and unconscious factors played their part. It appeared to have some of the interplay of the conscious or unconscious that we find in dreams.” A witness and critic of the worst excesses of postwar modernism—isolated skyscrapers, highway interchanges, suburban sprawl—Rykwert is nonetheless dissatisfied more recently by postmodernism and its purported remedies. To him, the grafting of ornament on to an office building does not make it an inherently better structure. For all of their stylistic charms and higher densities, New Urbanism towns, since they are founded on the same speculative model as ordinary residential subdivisions, are not inherently better communities.

Community Participation as Key: And what of the new millennium? Rykwert sees great promise in the activities of nongovernment organizations (NGOs), such as the international agency to ban land mines, so long as they are able to make the effective transition from “protest to project.” And, despite his disdain for New Urbanism, Rykwert finds great merit in the charette process whereby community input is sought at the beginning design stages promoted by many of its practitioners. Architects, too, must regain some control over the design process.

According to a critique by Timothy Murphy (in Amazon.com), the final chapter pays the requisite nod to the postmodernist implications of, for example, Celebration, Florida, (Disney's controversial new spin on the "company town") but is really distinguished by Rykwert's startlingly onthemark reading of how such wildly popular megamuseums as the new international Guggenheim franchise (with Gehry’s Bilbao "branch" currently eclipsing Wright's New York "flagship") have come to best personify the encroachment of corporate globalization in the urban civic realm.

IMPLICATIONS

Cities require wise nurturing through thoughtful design and especially by communicatively engaged participation, by ordinary citizens and professional planners and architects, if cities are to be sustainable into the future. The case study of Bilbao is important for city planners in Australia, especially for Geelong currently preparing a bid for the construction of the latest Guggenheim museum.

LOCAL COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP IN A GLOBAL VILLAGE

Pulse of the planet: leadership models in the global village. Robert Burke. Foresight: The Journal of Future Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy. Vol. 3, No. 3, 191203.


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Global government is on the rise, and with it a devolution of power to the grassroots. Subjugating nature is out of fashion and ecological living is the new imperative. The next generation of leaders will emerge not from the political class but from ordinary communities, bringing with them new modes of learning and new definitions of intelligence.


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THEME SIX: GLOBALIZATION

CITIES AS AGENTS OF GLOBAL POLITICAL CHANGE

http://www.futurenet.org/5Millennium/5BurmaLaws.html Yes. Accessed March 23, 2002

Three years ago, the Berkeley City Council passed a landmark resolution barring business transactions with Burma because of the country's repressive human rights record.

Since then, 16 US cities, including New York and San Francisco, have followed suit. The state of Massachusetts, California's Alameda County, and several major American universities have passed similar selective purchasing ordinances. President Clinton has banned new US investment in Burma, although existing relations remain unaffected.

Despite this trend, some cities have yet to sign on. Seattle's City Council, for example, drafted a Burma ordinance that seemed to have widespread support, then rescinded it after feeling pressure from local businesses.

Critics of the military dictatorship, including Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy, have asked foreign companies to divest from Burma. Several US companies have cut ties with Burma, including AnheuserBusch, Levi Strauss, Texaco, and Pepsico. However, other companies including Arco and Unocal continue their operations in Burma.

IMPACT

What should Brisbane's role be in overt political statements? What should the conference position be?

MULTICULTURALISM AND GLOBALIZATION

Toulouse could well be a model of multiculturalism. http://www.time.com/time/europe/specials/ff/trip4/toulouse.html

In the middle of the Charles De Gaulle park in Toulouse, a group of spitandpolish young Mormons from Seattle is singing hymns in French. Their heavy American accents make it hard to understand the words, but one old man on a bench nearby is straining to hear them. "It's good for Americans to come here," he says. "America suffers because it doesn't know Europe well enough."

He is Colonel Georges Bastien, 90, an exmilitary instructor at St. Cyr military academy, former prisoner of war in Germany and a veteran of the Algerian war. "I saw every horror you can imagine in BergenBelsen," he says, tugging at the brim of his white cloth cap to

http://www.futurenet.org/5Millennium/5BurmaLaws.html

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shade his watery eyes from the sun. "But I don't hate the Germans. I want to understand them better. I've always believed in mutual understanding among people. If people don't know each other, they will inevitably fight."

Bastien is a committed European who is impatient to see the E.U. get on with political integration. "I have always fought for a federalist Europe, but I'm a little disappointed today," he says. "It's all well and good to start with the money, but it doesn't go far enough. We need all kinds of exchange — political, military, commercial, university exchange."

It happens that Toulouse itself is one of the most fertile breeding grounds for the kind of exchange Bastien is talking about. As a major hub of Europe's aviation industry, an important university town, the site of numerous French and multinational firms, and a prolific generator of hightech startups, the Toulouse region draws students, researchers, workers and businesspeople from all over the world. As a result, Toulouse today is the fastestgrowing region in France.

The region's singlebiggest employer is Airbus Integrated Company, the European firm that produces a line of widebodied jets ranging from the 107seat A318 to the future superjumbo A3XX, which will haul 550 or more passengers. Apart from the company's commercial success — they outsold Boeing last year for the first time — it is a fascinating microcosm of European society. "From the human point of view," says Airbus press officer Alain Dupiech, "this is where Europe will be in 20 years. Thirty three nationalities live and work here. Our social life is totally international. The experience of our kids is much richer than if they had just been English, French or German. They learn foreign languages, surf the Internet, watch foreign TV. It's a new generation with a passion to move and discover new things."

DIGITALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION

Governance in the Digital Age: The Impact of the Global Economy, Information Technology and Economic Deregulation on State and Local Government. Thomas W. Bonnett (Brooklyn NY; [email protected]). Washington: National League of Cities, May 1999/76p(8x11")/$20.00. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey, July 1999, 21:7, 308.

A report prepared for the seven major US associations representing state governments, city/county management, state legislatures, governors, counties, cities, and mayors, on three major accelerating trends that will impact state and local governments in the 21 st century: the integrated global economy, the digital revolution, and deregulation of core industries (telecoms, banking, pipelines, electric utilities).

These trends will pose many policy challenges for all public sector leaders in the next decade, and each will have profound implications on governance.


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More significantly, each represents opportunities for public sector leaders to strengthen their local economies, improve quality of life in their communities, and redesign government operations to adapt to changing needs.

Five key issues:

1. impact of deregulation on state and local authority and revenues;

2. preserving the state role in economic deregulation of core industries ("state and local governments face substantial revenue losses from this transition toward competitive entry");

3. the global economy (the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, now being negotiated, may impinge on the sovereignty of state and local governments);

4. the digital revolution and governance challenges (applying new technology to improve delivery of public services is clearly the greatest management challenge facing leaders; immediate challenges include loss of skilled computer professionals to the private sector, and potential revenue losses from electronic commerce); and

5. strategies to enhance the value of place (since knowledge workers will be able to choose where they live and work, "the ultimate value of place in the digital future will be determined by the community's quality of life and quality of public services."

Other topics: the value of place, benefits and conflicts from international trade, a "dynamic federalism" for the 21 st century, two brief scenarios (optimistic and pessimistic) of core cities and large metros over the next 20 years, and one brief scenario of "the digital revolution transforms society" as of 2008.

A LA CARTE CITIES

The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur. Ziauddin Sardar. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Sardar traces the history and develops the future of Kuala Lumpur. He writes, on the nature of the city and the policies of Mahathir:

"The industrial city is becoming obsolete. A postindustrial borderless metropolis in which technology plays a central role is taking its place…. The historical trend is away from the center of the city and to a more dispersed pattern of growth, with economic activities spreading out to what are dubbed 'edge cities' or cities a la carte."

ELEMENTS FOR A SUPER CITY

The Super Cities of Century 21. McKinley Conway (Chairman, Conway Data). Norcross GA: Conway Data (800/5545686), Sept 1998/5p booklet/free. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 21:1, 031.



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A brief background paper for participants at the World Development Federation's 1999 Global Super Projects Conference, chaired by Conway, that was held in Madrid, May 2 5, 1999 (www.wdf.com). Subtitled "Development Goals for Urban Areas that Wish to Become WorldClass Cities in the Years Just Ahead," the paper notes that many urban areas offer a high quality of life. Yet some rise above the others, becoming worldclass cities or supercities. There may be as many as 100 emerging supercities worldwide, distinguished by 10 vital elements:

1. a morethanadequate water supply;

2. a fullyequipped international airport offering flights to major global cities, with adjacent space for growth of an "airport city" [FSA94/12548];

3. transport routes that effectively link the city to its hinterland;

4. a domed stadium that attracts major world events, offering comfortable seating in any weather (also convention centers and hotel complexes);

5. a center of excellence in several fields of technology;

6. adequate wiring to accommodate the mushrooming global flow of communications;

7. an efficient public rapid transit system to serve all elements of the population;

8. sophisticated new resource recovery systems ("decoplex" or development/ecology installations), in that landfills are no longer acceptable;

9. a substantial green infrastructurepermanent open space such as parks, golf courses, and forests;

10. new political mechanisms that cross jurisdictional lines, so as to manage these big projects. All of these cities are built projectbyproject, and every project is launched by leaders who are already very busy with current problems.

"Those who are too busy to pause and think are the losers."

GLOBALIZATION, INFOTECH AND THE BUZZ

Cities in Civilization. Sir Peter Hall (Prof of Planning, University College, London). NY: Pantheon, Dec 1998/1,169p/$40.00. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey. 22:2, 053.

Golden urban ages are rare, and special windows of light. Hall ranges over 2,500 years "to enter the essence of each place at the time of its belle epoque: to understand the precise conjuncture of forces that caused it to burst forth as it did. Contents are in four parts: 1) The City as Cultural Crucible: Athens 500400 BC, Florence 14001500, London

15701620, Vienna 17801910, Paris 18701910, Berlin 19181933;


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2) The City as Innovative Milieu: Manchester 17601830, Glasgow 17701890, Berlin 18401930, Detroit 18901915, San Francisco/Palo Alto/Berkeley 19501990, Tokyo Kanagawa 18901990;

3) The Marriage of Art and Technology: Los Angeles 19101945, Memphis 1948 1956; and

4) The Establishment of Urban Order: Rome 50 BCAD 100 as imperial capital, London 18251900 as utilitarian city, Paris 18501870 as the city of perpetual public works, New York 18801940 as the apotheosis of the modern, Los Angeles 1900 1980 as the city of the freeway, Stockholm 19451980 as the social democratic utopia, London 19791993 as the city of capitalism rampant.

A final 46page chapter, The City of the Coming Golden Age, considers the new economy as we enter the 21 st century, and the new kind of city. Faced with the combined impact of globalization and infotech, no place on earth is safe; all kinds of businesses may be relocated. Will this mean the end of the traditional city? "Almost certainly, no: as in the past, technological change will bring about not a general dispersal, but a general reshaping of the map." Those activities capable of being decentralized will continue to disperse. But other activities will remain concentrated in facetoface activity centers, though not always in their present locations. The dissemination of electronic media may paradoxically even increase the need and the incentive for facetoface contact. "The likelihood is that places with a unique buzz, a unique fizz, a special kind of energy, will prove more magnetic than ever for the production of products and, above all, the performance of services. Even William Mitchell, high priest of the new cybercity, finally agrees" If these traditional places are also traditional homes of the aristocratic and haut bourgeois rich, as almost all of them are, they are likely to be centers of conspicuous consumption and of the hightouch production that caters for it. Moreover, new train systems that support further concentration at highorder nodal points in city centers and Edge Cities are likely to play a significant role in maintaining traditional urban cores. Three future problems are discussed: new transport technologies ("it will be devilishly difficult to put the automotive genie back into the bottle"), the growing economic gap between rich and poor, and social polarization.

GLOBALIZATION AND SECOND TIER CITIES

Second Tier Cities: Rapid Growth beyond the Metropolis. Edited by Ann R. Markusen (Prof of Planning, U of Minnesota), YongSook Lee (Rutgers U), and Sean DiGiovanna (Rutgers U). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, Sept 1999/403p/$64.95;$24.95pb. abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 22:2, 055.

In the past 20 years, accelerated transnational investment and trade have increasingly integrated national economies, disrupting traditional patterns of urban and regional growth. In many countries, newer, smaller cities have been growing at the expense of older, larger ones. A major phenomenon accompanying this shakeup has been the rise of "second tier" cities: spatially distinct areas of economic activity where a specialized set of tradeoriented industries takes root and flourishes. Case studies are presented from four


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countries: Brazil (São José dos Campos, Campinas, Manaus), South Korea (Kumi and Ansan as distinctive satellite platforms, Changwon, The Masan Free Export Zone, Taeduk Research Park), Japan (Oita and Kumamoto, Japanese technopolis policy in four cities), the US (Seattle as a classic hubandspoke region, Silicon Valley as an amalgam, Colorado Springs as a stateanchored industrial district). The rise of these second tier cities poses a policy challenge for national and regional policy makers, notably "the specter of a few winner regions emerging amid a much larger number of increasingly impoverished or stagnant cities." The editors stress that national governments and international agencies must continue to intervene to ameliorate wealth differentials, level the economic playing field, prohibit interjurisdictional tax base competition, eliminate corruption, and strengthen local and regional institutions for economic development planning and labor force enhancement.

GLOBAL CITY

Hong Kong – The extreme city. Edited by Ezio Manzini. Domus. Vol 839, Unifor, July/August 2001.

The Author provides a snap shot of Hong Kong's position within the emerging planetary network of global cities. It transformation from “TRADING POST” to “WORLD CITY”

The article outlines the changes faced by Hong Kong and its emergence as a model for the global city of the future – an experiment. Hong Kong may not have the political and cultural influence needed to become a “Global City”. Recent manifestations of the urban experiment that may serve as models for the global city of the future include:

1. Hyperconnectivity (transport and communications service hub)

2. Hyperlegibility Image

3. Hyperdensity (extreme urban populations)

4. Creative Energy and cultural diversity

Hong Kong after the First World War was a colonial outpost built for local trade with China. By the time the British left (1997) it had become a world financial centre. Through the Chinese Government policy of (18 Dec 1978 – Deng Xiaoping) economic reform, Special Economic Zones were created where a number of coastal regions were opened up to experiments in market economy.

HyperConnectivity

Hong Kong began transforming overnight – it became a service hub driving the work of an enormous factory scattered across the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong is an island no more. Hong Kong is now part of an entirely new urban landscape stretching 50km up the Pearl River Delta. It is turning into a single city (urban conurbation) with 4 new international airports, endless industrial area and a population heading for 40 million people, linked by highspeed infrastructure and rail (public transport) The Government’s objective of “One Country – 2 systems” is being physically manifested by this urban conurbation.


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Manzini argues that Hong Kong is experiencing an identity crisis caused by its:

• changing cultural and political meaning as Hong Kong becomes a Chinese City; and

• the pressures of globalisation.

A definition of a global city is offered: “If becoming a global city means setting itself up as the hub of a planetary network in which financial, manufacturing, political, cultural activities are concentrated to give it the capacity to affect the net as a whole."… Hong Kong has found itself too in a singular situation. It is a vital economic and financial force but, with very few exceptions, of only secondary importance on the political and cultural level.

Out of the tensions created by the “One Country – 2 Systems” policy (National/Totalitarian vs. Colonial/Democratic) Manzini presents 3 Scenarios for Hong Kong:

• Global City – become allround global city serving as the regional economic poll towards China;

• East West City – Creative energy and cultural diversity – synergy of world views; or

• Third space (neither east nor west).

Hyperlegibility Image

In his wellknown book The Image of the City Kevin Lynch, worried over the fact that so many cities are so eminently forgettable. Lynch argues for the importance of what he calls ‘legibility’ and ‘imageability’ in city planning. What he did not anticipate was that the city as spectacle would achieve this task all too well and what we are faced with now is the opposite problem of hyperlegibility and instant recognition; as cities design image for themselves to boost their tourist trade, hence the proliferation of ‘brandname’ architects in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

Manzini argues that “Ironically it is the ‘image of the city’ that makes the city invisible, not legible.”

Hyperdensity Life in Hong Kong is living in Hyper Density – 6000 people per hectare. Haussmann’s Paris was just 250, and 500 in Singapore today.

The collision between density and comfort has produced a new residential model for Hong Kong, which is becoming the dominant model being produced by private developers: high rise apartment towers with a podium at the base, which provide a compact platform; offering every kind of service for residents.

This habitat typology first created by public housing architects are – ‘the harmony blocks’ cruciform towers with thoroughly worked out organisation of collective amenities has always served to counter balance the obvious lack of individual space and privacy. The “Harmony Block” typically consists of 8 towers clustered together of between 40 to 52 floors, 8 units to a floor and 4 people to a unit, on a podium which has become the major selling point and experimental field.


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Creativity & Diversity Hong Kong looks like the model of city unique in the world for its wealth, connectivity and physical density. It is seen as a generator of ideas and original forms of life and organisation with the potential to be influential on a global scale.

It can be seen as a laboratory in which to bring out the new. Hong Kong's new industrial role could yet be as a factory of ideas a blue print for the services and skills we will all need to live and work in the dense and multicultural metropolis of the future.

Conclusion

What is missing from Manzini’s dialogue about Hong Kong’s future are the characteristics of: Ecological Sustainability; Livability; and Wellbeing – essentially the “yin” the feminine or intuitive.

Current Chinese policy is focussing on the economic and technological creativity – the “yang”, the masculine or rational. Ultimate success for Hong Kong may require a synergy between both.

Definition for a global city is provided, being a city that sets itself up as a hub of a planetary network in which financial, manufacturing, political and cultural activities are concentrated to give it the capacity to affect the net as a whole.

CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION: Lifestyles

Lifestyles for Future Success. John McInerney. Speech and Media Release for the First Congress of the Royal Australian Planning Institute and the New Zealand Planning Institute. Tuesday 9 April 2002. Abstracted from the RAPI website. http://www.rapi.com.au

Communities which offered desirable lifestyles would win the competition for investment and growth in the 21 st Century, the President of the Royal Australian Planning Institute, John McInerney said today.

Speaking at the first joint Congress of the Royal Australian Planning Institute and the New Zealand Planning Institute, held in Wellington, New Zealand, Mr. McInerney said globalisation had brought us a world in which people, corporations and industries were mobile, and cities, regions and nations competed for them.

Challenges of globalisation included building and maintaining livable urban environments which were financially, environmentally and socially sustainable. "For ultimately it will be those with the most livable urban environments who will win the competition for investment, the people with skills and the ideas so necessary for success in this new century," he said. "If I may loosely paraphrase Bill Clinton, 'It's Lifestyle, stupid!'"

Urging greater communication between Australian and New Zealand planners, he said that perhaps the greatest potential benefits of globalisation came through the free exchange of ideas and the sharing of experience to find optimum solutions. "It's clear that

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there is much Australian planning can learn from New Zealand experience," he said. And, dare I say, it is likely that Australian experience and thinking perhaps in master planning, central city development, or placemaking could sometimes add value in New Zealand."

McInerney said; “Though I say this with some reservation after reading the results of our latest national State of the Environment Report. For this document shows that our achievements have not matched our rhetoric.

Despite all our talk of sustainability, the State of the Environment report reveals that:

• Australia's water consumption at 1,540 kilolitres per person per year is the highest per capita consumption in the world;

• our consumption of materials at 180 tonnes per person per year is the highest among OECD countries;

• while our population has increased by 35 per cent since 1975, our energy consumption has increased by 60 per cent in the same period; and

• we generate more carbon dioxide per person 27 tonnes a year than any other nation.

Do as we say, not as we do.” Australian Government Policy across all levels is not walking the talk of sustainability and livable urban habitats.

DANGERS AND CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES FROM GLOBALIZATION

Urban Tensions: Globalization, Industrial Restructuring, and the Postmetropolitan Transition. Edward W. Soja (UCLA). (Paper prepared for presentation at a conference on Global Tensions, Cornell University, March 910, 2001).

In any assessment of the major "global tensions" affecting life in the 21 st century, a strong argument can thus be made that specifically urban tensions must be ranked among the most socially explosive and politically challenging. That these tensions revolve primarily around deepening poverty and its related conditions of urban deterioration provides a useful starting point for analysis and discussion. But it is also important to begin by recognizing that urban tensions today, all around the world, are significantly different from what they were thirty years ago, and must be addressed in ways that reflect the distinctive properties of the contemporary condition, that is, with an understanding of the new urbanization processes that have been reshaping cities and urban life everywhere in the world over the past three decades.

That urban poverty is a significant and politically explosive problem is certainly not new. For many parts of the world, this statement could have been made at almost any time in the past two centuries. What is new, however, is above all the emphatically shared globality of the problem. Something akin to an urban revolution has been happening to cities everywhere in the inhabited world, so that today most of the world’s major cities have similarly volatile conditions of urban poverty and social polarization. Looked at in a slightly different way, what this suggests is that never before has the general urban


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condition been so similar among the major metropolitan areas of what we have traditionally called the First, Second, and Third worlds. Significant differences remain across cultures and continents, but the distinctive qualities of urbanism as a way of life have become shared to a degree never before achieved, at least since the origins of the industrial capitalist city.

In Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Blackwell, 2000), Soja focuses his attention on the new urbanization processes being generated by globalization and economic restructuring. He also describes their cumulative impact as the postmetropolitan transition, a reconfiguration of the modern metropolis into a significantly different metropolitan form and way of life, reflecting a new phase of urban industrial capitalism. The postmetropolitan transition offers a more comprehensive interpretive framework for examining what the UN called an "urban revolution" and for elaborating upon the major causes and consequences of the contemporary urban condition, especially in the world’s major globalized cityregions. Soja summarizes some of the major new developments that have contributed to the widening gap between the rich and the poor and to the intensifying urban tensions that characterize contemporary urbanism. Key issues include: globalization and migratory diasporas as source of survival as well as creativity; new forms of cultural politics that revolves around complex questions of difference, representation, identity, citizenship, and local democracy; transnational identity formation; "third worlding" of major First World cityregions; and the ecologies of fear these phenomena produce.

Most of the attention given to the problems arising from this restructuring of urban form has centered on the poor populations, mainly minorities and immigrants, that have become concentrated in inner city neighbourhoods increasingly distant from better paying jobs, now clustered primarily in the Outer Cities. Less well studied, however, are other problem areas arising from the restructuring of urban form and what can be called the geographically uneven urbanization of suburbia. To take an extreme case, there are several outer cities surrounding Los Angeles that have grown very rapidly as huge concentrations of relatively cheap housing. Although increased local employment opportunities were promised by the developers, inspired by successful nearby Outer Cities, the jobs did not materialize, forcing many workers to travel up to two and a half hours each way to their old job sites. These offtheedge cities, as I have called them, despite their bright (post)suburban appearances, have become among the most psychologically and socially stressful places in the postmetropolis, with exceedingly high rates of suicide, spouse abuse, child abuse, divorce, delinquency, and other signs of family and community dysfunction. Making theoretical and practical sense of the rising urban tensions of the 21st century requires an effective understanding of the new urbanization processes generated by complex forces associated with globalization and economic restructuring.

IMPLICATIONS

The need to study and understand the dynamics of chaos and conflict that give rise to various species of tension in urban life, a notion, which can be extended to inter generational conflict, and other more science fictional sources of conflict still to emerge.


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THEME SEVEN: TRENDS AND EMERGING ISSUES

HOT TOWNS

Hot Towns: The Future of the Fastest Growing Communities in America. Peter Wolf (Chair, Board of Trustees, Van Alen Institute). New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers U Press, Oct 1999/283p/$27.00. Abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey, 22:2, 056.

The US has witnessed five overlapping mass movements of people: (1) the massive immigration from Europe, creating the first coastal communities (16001785); (2) the westward settlement of the interior by the poorest Americans (17501890); (3) urban concentration resulting from millions of job seekers moving into industrial cities (1820 1920); (4) suburban disbursement when 100 million people in young families drove out of town (19301990); and (5) starting in 1970, a voluntary movement of people of all ages out of older cities and suburbs into highly desirable communities across the US places distinguished by fine climate, great physical beauty, abundant recreation opportunities, clean air and drinking water, and relatively few social problems. This "fifth migration" is and will continue to be as influential as the others, with participants bringing, or helping to create, over $150 billion of assets in these new places each year (in part through new real estate demand). Unlike predecessors, fifthwave migrants are skilled, well educated, relatively affluent, and often retired.

The projected 20 highest metro area annual population growth rates (19952005) range from #1 Naples FL (3.83%) to #7 Orlando FL (3.00%), Las Vegas (2.79%), Raleigh Durham (2.53%), Tucson (2.34%), Santa Fe (2.27%), Tacoma (2.17%), Austin (2.16%), and #20 Houston (2.11%). Through 2020, these top 20 metro areas will expand their population by 2 to 4% per year. Numerous nonmetro communities in exurban and rural America will sustain equivalent or even greater growth surges (in the same period, the average city, suburb, and town in the US will have population change of plus or minus 1% per year). Chapters consider forces driving the fifth migration, the top 25 largemetro entrepreneurial hot spots, the top 25 small metro hot spots, the top 25 rural areas, the top 20 micropolitan areas within the exurbs (where population growth rates easily exceed the rate in the nearest metro area), the rural resurgence (about 75% of America's 2,304 rural counties are growing again; the fastestgrowing rural counties attract people in search of recreation), the quiet movement back to the most dynamic older cities, various rankings of best place to live (by Places Rated Almanac, Money, and Reliastar), causes and consequences of community decay (indifference to natural resources, high taxes, absence of resident involvement, fourthmigration sprawl, the decline of edge cities), the whiff of selfdestruction in some growth areas, and policies for wise growth (revitalizing core areas, protecting cultural and historic resources, preserving public space, containing the automobile, aesthetic stewardship, business improvement districts, land trusts).


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HUMANIZING THE CITY

The World Aheadour future in the making. Federico Mayor and Jerome Binde. Zed Books and UNESCO Publishing, 2001. 496 pages.

This book looks at the major challenges of the future and proposes a new start based on four broad contracts: social, natural, cultural and ethical. Of import is, Chapter 3 Humanising the City

The urban population worldwide is growing two to three times more rapidly than the rural population. In the space of 40years, we shall have to build the equivalent of a thousand cities of three million inhabitants, approximately as many cities as there are today. This urban revolution will mostly affect the developing countries.

Twothirds of the world’s population in Megacities is concentrated in the poorest regions increasing the risk of uncontrolled chaos, poor management of social structure and unsustainable impact on natural resources – particularly water and energy.

As pointed out by Candido Mendes, “Human Habitat” is political as its intrinsic biodiversity is related to human values and lifestyles. This means that strategies have to be adopted that defend cultural pluralism, preservation of ecology and democracy.

To meet the urban challenge, we need from now on, according to Nestor Garcia Cancilini, to “revive the public space” and recover the overall meaning of social life: otherwise we are faced with the risk of ungovernability. The destructive urban trends lead us to greater authoritarianism and repression.

The message that UNESCO brought to the City Summit (Habitat II) in Istanbul could be expressed in three words: Humanising the City

Pointers and recommendations include:

• The City – a living environment interacting with the natural environment.

• Sustainable energy for Cities of the 21 st Century.

• For Reduced Urban Water Consumption.

• Urban Transport: Efficiency and cost integration. The compact city is more efficient than urban sprawl.

• Stem the rise of “Urban Apartheid” – the compact city can also provide an opportunity for fighting against social disparities and exclusion; individualisation of urban life, segregated neighbourhoods of the privileged or “fortified enclaves”. Urban apartheid forces us to “imagine a world where we can be born, be educated, live, work, get married, have children, retire from active life and die in a closed world, “behind glass”, without almost ever bumping into a poor person who is not an employee of the services industry.”

• Building a civic city for the 21 st Century. Urban development must strike a balance between diversity and unity. This balance, it is argued, rests upon citizenship, upon the participation of every citizen in the building, management and governance of the


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City. That is, effective community participation in the governance of the city. Contrasting the tense Duality that exists between the “Legal City” and the “Illegal City” (the shanty town).

• Promote Life Long Education for all about “The City” and civic life. Teach ecological methods for preserving the city as a human habitat, processes that enable civic participation, and respect for its heritage.

• Conceive the city as a foundation stone for building a culture of tolerance and peace in the 21 st Century, particularly through conviviality, solidarity and sharing, but also through a democratic dialogue and the exercise of citizenship by all.

• Give new impetus to urban forecasting and the strategic planning of the city and urban fabric.

• Give priority to implementation of the right to a dwelling for all. Integrated Housing Policy must be combined with a policy for service infrastructure, education and health.

THE CREATIVE SOCIETY AND CITY

Towards the creative society: 21st century social dynamics. Wolfgang Michalski; Riel Miller; Barrie Stevens Foresight: the journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy, Volume 2, Number 1, 2000, page 8594.

Summary The prospects for prosperity and wellbeing in the 21 st century will depend on leveraging social diversity to encourage technological, economic and social dynamism. A striking confluence of forces over the next twenty years could drive a twofold convergence: first, towards more highly differentiated and complex societies, and second, towards the adoption of a common set of general policy goals that are conducive to both diversity and social sustainability. In the opening decades of the 21st century four simultaneous and powerful societal transformations will give rise to more variety and interdependence: from the uniformity and obedience of the massera to the uniqueness and creativity of a knowledge economy and society; from rigid and isolated command planning to flexible, open and rulebased markets; from predominantly agricultural structures to industrial urbanization; and lastly, from a relatively fragmented world of autonomous societies and regions to the dense and indispensable interdependencies of an integrated planet. In different ways and in different parts of the world, greater social complexity will in all likelihood accompany these wrenching shifts. Rather than fear this increase in social diversity we should welcome the opportunities for learning and sharing that could bring prosperity and wellbeing. Nevertheless, there are risks of heightened conflict due to the possible polarization that frequently accompanies the passing of old social orders and the emergence of new ones. Policy choices will be the determining factor in minimizing this friction and encouraging the potential synergies.


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THE NEW URBANITES

The Future of the Center: The Core City in the New Economy. Joel Kotkin. Policy Study No. 264, November 1999. http://www.rppi.org/urban/ps264.html

"After decades of decline, the urban center is showing signs of a surprising resurgence. Once thought to be doomed in an era of increasing sprawl and decentralization, city cores around the nation are attracting new investment, business, and residents at a healthy clip.

Symbolically, the new center city is not so much defined by the highrise corporate headquarters as by the revived warehouse or former manufacturing district, where older buildings have been brought back to full use as offices for information and fashion related businesses. Its economy is not so much dominated by the presence of a few looming giants, as by scores of smaller, often highly networked firms.

The new role of center cities—including both downtown central business districts and adjacent "close in" industrial and warehouse areas—in metropolitan geography stems from both geographic and demographic trends. No longer the lure to the vast majority of middleclass families, the cities have been revived by the emergence of what may be called the new urbanites. These are predominately drawn from two groups: immigrants from other countries and a growing cadre of nativeborn migrants, largely young, single, educated, and childless.

These new urbanites are drawn to the center city for both economic and cultural reasons. As in the past, immigrants cluster in urban areas in order to create zones of familiarity with of their compatriots. They also both work in, and often also own, businesses that require highly concentrated clusters of related firms, in industries from food processing to apparel and furniture.

The other group—the largely childless and educated—is attracted to the city core’s cultural resources, architectural sense of place, and to the concentration of single, nonattached people. They also tend to work in many of the burgeoning "knowledge value" industries, such as new media, graphic arts, advertising, and software development.

Although most often written about in reference to a traditional center city such as Manhattan and Lakeside, Chicago, this urban revival actually extends to other, more dispersed places as well. Downtown development is growing both in smaller, suburban communities and in subregional centers, particularly in the large, dispersed metropolitan regions such as Los Angeles and Houston. In this sense even the definition of "central cities" must be reappraised to include many central points that are not within the historic boundaries of the central business district; they can be also found in smaller, more dispersed urban centers, including some, such as Pasadena in Los Angeles County, that also serve their own well defined hinterland.

The city center is in a period of profound and dramatic change, evolving into something that reflects the broader dynamics of the digital era and shifting demographic trends.

Yet, the future of the center city is far from assured. Any future downturn in the economy could undermine this trend, just as occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unless

http://www.rppi.org/urban/ps264.html


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steps are taken to maintain the viability of these places. First order is for cities to understand their new role in the emerging metropolitan geography and economy.

Economic, political, and social leaders need to recognize the importance of dispersed, smallscale industries and firms; they must allow for the natural marketdriven evolution of neighborhoods and commercial districts resulting from shifts in the technological, demographic, and economic environment. Attempts—through subsidy or federal policy—to bring the urban core back to its midcentury status through government fiat are likely to fail, as they have in the past, since they will be driven by political concerns, as opposed to responding to new economic, technological, and demographic realities. Instead the core’s revival depends on adjusting to the great opportunities that lie before it in the information economy of the 21 st century.

IMPACT

What are the Alternative Futures of Brisbane? Will the new urbanities continue to dominate, or will there be a cyclical return to a dying inner city?

DISASTERS AHEAD

Crucibles of Hazard: MegaCities and Disasters in Transition. Edited by James K. Mitchell (Prof of Geography, Rutgers U). Tokyo and NY: United Nations U Press, Jan 1999/535p/$34.95pb. abstracted by Mike Marien, Future Survey. 22:2, 052.

The Hanshin earthquake in 1995, inflicting heavy damage and disruption in Japan's KobeOsaka urban region, is the most recent in a string of natural disasters that have inflicted unprecedented losses on very large cities. Cherished notions about the security of cities in the face of natural extremes are no longer tenable. "Disasters in large cities are likely to pose troubling new problems for society." These papers from a 1994 UNU conference in Tokyo highlight environmental hazards in ten megacities on five continents: Tokyo (one of the most hazardprone cities, with a highly sophisticated system of hazard management and extensive citizen training), Seoul (increasingly vulnerable to floods), Dhaka (surrounded by areas at grave risk from severe storms and vast floods), Sydney (growing vulnerability to an expanding list of hazards), London (facing increased exposure to risk in coming decades), Lima (facing an increasingly hazardous future), Mexico City (permanently on the verge of catastrophe), San Francisco Bay Area (the high levels of disaster planning and expertise create "an important teaching laboratory for the international community"), Greater Los Angeles (facing deteriorating prospects for successful hazard management due to widening class and ethnic divisions), and Greater Miami (still recovering from unprecedented losses due to Hurricane Andrew in 1992).

Mitchell concludes that megacity hazards are profuse (people in the LA region are at risk from at least 25 hazards – geophysical/climatic, biological, technological, and social), burdensome, symbolically potent, incompletely understood, and imperfectly addressed. Perhaps the most striking finding of these 10 case studies is large changes in exposure


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and vulnerability. Moreover, polarization and spatial segregation of groups that have different degrees of vulnerability to disaster are increasingly becoming the norms for most cities. Most of the casestudy authors report increasing difficulty in developing and sustaining public support for hazardmanagement initiatives.

IMPLICATIONS

What are possible disasters facing Brisbane and other Australian cities? What of cities in the AsiaPacific Region?

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES

Mental Health in our Future Cities. Edited by David Goldberg and Graham Thornicroft (both Institute of Psychiatry, London). Maudsley Monographs #42. East Sussex UK: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis Group), 1998/290p/$59.95. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey. July 1999, 21:7, 308.

"Mental health problems of cities of today and even more of tomorrow are many and severe." They complement and aggravate other health problems that endanger existence and quality of life. Yet "governments of the world, faced with rampant urbanization, have not developed a strategy for provision of health care in cities."

In some 30 years, 80% of world population will be living in urban areasa steady growth for industrialized countries and a revolutionary change for most of the others. "It is easy to predict that this change will bring new health problems, or magnify those currently facing health care in an unprecedented manner."

A wellformulated plan of action might make it easier to deal with these problems. Loneliness, anomia, stressrelated disorders (e.g., hypertension), generalized anxiety, and various forms of antisocial behavior (e.g. violence) are seen as typical of cities.

These essays from a 1997 conference reflect invitations to 10 cities to describe their mental health services so that examples of good practice could be shared. The cities are London (fragments of excellence in the midst of growing inability to meet demand), Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Baltimore and Madison (US), Bangalore (India), Kobe (Japan), Porto Alegre (Brazil), Sydney, Tehran, and Verona (Italy).

Some recurrent themes:

• a 24hour community psychiatric outreach service for the inner city has been shown to decrease hospital admissions;

• the need for housing: poverty and lack of choice prevent people from breaking free of the mental health system;

• the importance of a mental health focus in primary care; and

• increasing participation by users.


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ASIAN CITY FUTURES

After modernity: contemporary nonwestern cities and architecture. Ayyub Malik, Futures, Volume 33, Issue 10, December 2001, pages 873882.

Nonwestern cities have gone through an extraordinary period of growth and expansion during the last halfcentury. The urban population in Asia and Africa increased from 17 to 37% between 1950 to 2000 and is expected to reach 55% by 2030. By then, according to current projections, most of the cities with a population of over twenty million will be located in the nonwestern world. Common characteristics of these cities are the massive social dislocation, polarizing inequality, uneven distribution of resources and congestion, pollution and environmental degradation. The disparities and injustices in the social structure are reflected in the structures of these cities: wasteful modern enclaves and affluent suburbs juxtaposed with crumbling historic centers and the ever increasing slums and shanty towns often constituting more than half of the city's population. The paper attempts to analyze some of the underlying reasons which have shaped these cities and explore how urban development can be related to the development of the society as a whole and what governments, architects, city planners and citizens can do to save their cities from a crisis.

Liberating the contemporary city: Real questions and problems of any society are those which it defines for itself; not those which appear to be so in comparison to other societies. Questions and answers in the city are intricately linked with the choices made by society for its own benefit, and here, the quality of public education and political debate on social and urban issues is vital in deciding how land is divided and how resources are distributed and what is built, where, and for whose benefit.

What kind of city? Just as people must write their own history, they must, for shaping a viable future, themselves decide on the kind of cities they want to live in. The once great cities of history were shaped by kings, nobles and merchants and expressed the arts, crafts and urban culture of their time, and while there is much to learn from them, contemporary cities have to deal with the demands of their own time. As centers of trade and export, major cities are vital to national economies, but as a part of the global network, are shaped less by local need than by external forces often producing concentrated wealth in some areas and destitution in others. Cities are not just to do with housing people and economic activity, or building streets and architecture; they are also the places of struggle for social and spatial justice and equitable distribution of resources as well as places of art, culture and civilisation. In a rapidly urbanizing and homogenizing world, citizens have to define their social and environmental aims and ideals and actively participate in shaping their city so that it relates to their culture, provides for their needs, and is safe and healthy to live in. It is only thus that cities will become culturally relevant, aesthetically satisfying and intellectually rewarding. But whatever else people choose, they must also strive to make their cites:

• Democratic: As human constructs, cities need to be places of rights and freedoms and of conscience and compassion.


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• Productive: As centers of economic activity and of production and exchange, cities are generators of opportunity, wealth and resources vital for the city.

• Educational: Cities need to be places of education and intelligence and of creativity and innovation.

• Cultural: Culture has always been important for the character and vitality of cities. Voluntary and representative civic and cultural institutions are vital in sustaining a sense of place and identity.

• Sustainable: Cities are major consumers and polluters of the environment and considerable economies can be made through ecologically conscious design and urban management.

• Inclusive: Cities without democratic institutions produce poverty and deprivation and increase segregation and social exclusion.

Contemporary cities need to be democratic, productive, innovative and sustainable as well as cultural, creative and tolerant. To have meaning and relevance, they also need social purpose and ideals and the ability to use technology, skills and resources to work towards these ends.

CULTURE AND THE CITY

City and Culture: Cultural Processes and Urban Sustainability. Louise Nyström, editor, in association with Colin Fudge.

Urban form is both about the threedimensional image of the city and about the spatial structure of the city. Over the last half century cities have been transformed into ugly sprawling urban landscapes consisting of monofunctional areas for housing, industry, retail, leisure etc. Cities struggle for identity, trying to maintain local character when they are invaded by the signs and architecture of international chains. But they also struggle for world attention in the battle for business and tourists. Sustainable urban form, it is argued, must build on local culture as well as on a spatial structure that supports a comfortable and resource saving everyday life for residents and business. In entering the 21st century, it is not at all clear what is a sustainable urban form. This section gives some inputs in this discussion.

In “Urban Cultures: City Identity, Public Space and Market Forces”, Peter Butenschøn discusses the conflicts about urban space and urban expression between on the one hand the commercial and branded global message and on the other hand the local, contextual and sitespecific. These conflicts are present along country roads as well as in the streets and squares of towns and cities, when large bill boards, shop fronts and standard buildings of international commercial chains fight for our attention against the local image of landscape and townscape. The conflict is most dramatically expressed in public space, because public space is necessarily local, specific and historic. In Norway successful work has been done to negotiate design guidelines with the oil companies on


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the siting and design of petrol stations. The negotiations have been supported by a strong government policy for urban visual quality.

In “Celebrating Difference: Gender Relations and the Polycentric City” Marion Roberts discusses urban spatial structure from the perspective of women's contemporary everyday lives. She questions the notion of the suburbs as being monofunctional dormitories, finding that technology, in the form of the telephone and the car, has radically altered the lives of women, whose networks now stretch between and beyond traditional neighbourhoods. Many women work at the periphery and have few reasons to go to the city centre. Rather, the challenge for the 21st century should be to promote a polycentric city, enhancing the peripheral districts and sub centres in terms of better management, cultural diversity, and improved transport.

IMPLICATIONS

The importance of introducing nonconventional thinking into city life directed evolution, including feminist thinking, in order to create cities attractive and stimulating enough to curb the brain drain to the world’s most “talent attracting” cities.

GENDER AND THE CITY

City Futures: City visions, gender and future city structures. Marion Roberts, in Desire by Design: body. Territories and new technologies / edited by Cutting Edge, the Women’s Research Group. London: Taurus, 1999.

(Anthology of Cyberfeminist Art Theory, May 29, 2000. Reviewer: Sidney Eve Matrix, University of Minnesota.)

Sixteen essays bring together digital media artists, software and graphic designers, feminist theorists and historians of space, architecture and science, with cyberfeminists (see especially essay by "Technowhores"), to consider multiple issues concerned with "women and design." Contributors critically and creatively celebrate and interrogate cybertechnologies, and consider how these (material, conceptual and virtual) processes and practices challenge (and reify) contemporary ideas of gender, the body, nature, identity, space, diaspora, and difference.

IMPLICATIONS

Histories of cities and by implication their futures, are disproportionately influenced by male hierarchies and ways of thinking, to the detriment of females discourses and the othering of nonmale alternative discourses.

POSTMODERN MULTIPLE REALITIES: What is the City?

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Edward W. Soja. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.


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Postmetropolis completes Edward Soja's trilogy aimed at expanding the scope and critical insight of our spatial imaginations. Applying the theoretical frameworks developed in Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Thirdspace (1996), it is the first comprehensive text in the growing field of critical urban and regional studies to deal with the dramatically restructured megacities that have emerged worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. At its core is a lively discussion of six discourses that have coalesced around explaining what Soja calls the postmetropolitan transition, a major sea change in how we live in cities and experience urbanism as a way of life.

According to Lisette BlancoCerda (www.austen.english.purdue.edu/desynsoja8.html) Soja analyzes the "postmetropolis" by saying that it is centered in a new dialogue of deconstructing and reconstructing what we've previously defined as our "worldviews" and "lived spaces." He focuses on the restructuring of the "urban imaginary" and how this concept affects everyday life. He defines the "urban imaginary" as the way we mentally map out our urban "realities" and how we "think about experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces, and communities in which we live" (p. 324).

He further discusses "hyperreality" by stating that in the urban imaginary and its newly changing state, it's becoming more and more difficult to differentiate between what is "real" and what is "imagined." He brings in Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulacra and his four epistemes of "the successive phases of the image" (p. 328). Soja also discusses Celeste Olalquiaga's concept of "psychasthenia" as being a "growing psychological malaise" that's brought about by the technological (communications) revolution. This, in turn, affects how we relate to our urban realities.

Soja also explores the history of "cyberspace" and discusses M. Christine Boyer's position of ""lagtimes, temporal disjunctions, and colonial "nonplaces" that now fill the "disappearing" centers of the postmetropolis and shape the emerging new urban imaginary" (p. 338). Soja discusses interpretations of the urban imaginary like the computer game "Simcities" which has "simcitizens" who function as "real" citizens (i.e. paying taxes, voting, responding to natural disasters like tornadoes and floods and "unnatural" disasters like giant monsters). Soja states that by merely removing the imagery to reveal the "truer material realities hidden behind them" may no longer be effective. He states that new "alternative and transgressive … imagery" must be created "to resist and subvert the established conditions of postmodernity" because hyperreality "is here to stay" (p. 348).

IMPLICATIONS

Challenges the notions of what is Real and how the city citizen of the future will have to continually negotiate the spectrum of these shifting meanings.

GENETIC ZOOS AND FINDING THE AGENDA OF THE CITY

Wild Ideas in Future Cities. Joseph Coates. The Bridge. Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1999.

http://www.austen.english.purdue.edu/desynsoja8.html


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The potential for science and engineering to enhance, alter, or radically change cities is real, but contingent upon social, political, and economic developments, and dependent upon the region of the world under consideration. This paper presents a series of potential developments in the city, nominally in the next quarter century. All of these developments are scientifically plausible and potentially economically viable, and would bring great benefits to city dwellers, whether individual citizens, businesses, manufacturers, or government. While some of these concepts may seem wild, none should seem bizarre to the reader.

Coates argues that “Throughout all of history, the city has been, and remains, the center of civilization. "Rural civilization" is a contradiction, and "suburban civilization" is an oxymoron. The keynotes of civilization in the city are museums, zoos, libraries, theaters, and other public centers of culture. Technology will radically alter all of them. Museums will go high tech. As one sees an exhibit one will be able to press a button and get a level of detail appropriate for one's age and one's knowledge, in contrast to the museum today that pitches everything to the level of a bright 10yearold. Museums and art galleries will be turned inside out. Going into them will be a basic experience with the option of the infusion of knowledge in limitless amounts from the rest of the world. Libraries, similarly, will continue with their repository function, but become the mechanism for electronic dissemination of information to clients anywhere. An emerging central problem for libraries in the age of information technology, more so than for museums, is funding. It is hard to believe that we will all want to work only from a national center, like the Library of Congress. There will be a place for libraries in the future, not only for traditional books, but audio books, video books, and books done in unprecedented media formats yet to be developed. Zoos will continue to draw people, but developments in genetics will make the zoos of the future truly unusual. Every museum is a repository of animals waiting to be resurrected through genetic technology. Coates concludes by noting that: “Endless numbers of other things lie in the domain of science, technology, and engineering to enhance the quality of life for people living everywhere in cities, but where is the agenda? Without an agenda there can be no advocates, without advocacy, no funding, and without funding, there can be no progress. If you of the Academy do not structure the agenda, who can, or will? I recommend that the NAE undertake a self funded project to define a 25, 50, and 100year agenda of specific engineering projects and developments for the United States and the world at large.”

EGOVERNANCE LEADS TO TRANSPARENCY AND EFFICIENCY

EGovernance the web of 'Nirvana'? Isidore Domnic Mendis.The SouthAsian.Com. October 2001.

"Governments are needed to provide services and egovernance will make it possible to give prompt, honest, and visible service." – Kiran Bedi.

The Internet is diminishing the role of indifferent public servants and corrupt middle men. A new book, Government@net shows exactly how Internet has emerged as a great democratizing tool. The book provides a holistic and effective framework of e governance and is authored by Dr.Kiran Bedi, Joint Commissioner (Training) Delhi


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Police, Parminder Jeet Singh, Superintendent of Police, Pondicherry, and Sandeep Srivastava, CEO of iycworld.com. Says Dr. Bedi, "Governments are needed to provide services and egovernance will make it possible to give prompt, honest, and visible service." Kiran Bedi gives instances. If an aggrieved citizen wants to lodge a first information report [FIR], he need not go to the police station but file it on the Internet. This would take away the power of the police officer to refuse to file a FIR, which is so often the case.

The book contains a number of success stories reported from different parts of the country. Experiments like the Warna Wired Village Project in Maharashtra, the Gyan Doot Project in the Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, Friends Project in Kerala and many more are using Internet not as an elitist medium but as a social phenomenon that has the power to touch the daytoday lives of every Indian.

Will Internet also help weed out corruption? Dr. Bedi feels that corruption will be dealt a body blow as there will be a larger gain by going online with all government services. The book gives vivid example of how corruption is being checked by the Central Vigilance Commission via the Internet. " Computers will change everything," she says.

Srivastava feels that government@net will become a reality in India in five years. Dr. Bedi says it would take five to ten years for the IT revolution to work at the level of the masses. Whatever the timeframe, there is no way anyone can now stop this revolution."

EGOVERNANCE IN EUROPE

Egovernance in European cities. Euricur Newsletter 14 (January 2002).

"In September 2001, Euricur has started a new study on urban strategies in the information age. The study bears the title "Egovernance in European cities". The city of The Hague is our key partner. Other participating cities are Tampere (Finland), Manchester (UK), Venice (Italy) and Eindhoven (The Netherlands). In a later stage we will involve the South African cities of Capetown and Johannesburg as well, and perhaps some Asian and American cities.

Egovernance (electronic governance) is radically changing urban management. The Economist (2000) calls it the next revolution, after ecommerce. It states that "reinventing government…is at last being made possible by the Internet", with all the beneficial impact for the business climate and citizens. Virtually every European city is currently experimenting with the new technologies, in order to improve the service provision to citizens and companies, or to strengthen democratic processes. Egovernance is a very complex matter. It entails new relationships between government and city users (which can be citizens, companies, commuters or visitors). It also requires new types of relationships between the public and the private sector, and among public sector actors. Furthermore, it is closely related to access to the internet by the population.

Generally speaking, egovernance is in an innovative and partly experimental stage, in which learning by doing is key. This research project aims to increase insights on good "business models", and contribute to the exchange of experiences. Experiences in other


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cities can yield very valuable information on opportunities and pitfalls of egovernment projects."


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THEME EIGHT: SCENARIOS OF CITY FUTURES

ALTERNATIVE FUTURES OF THE CITY

World as City: City as Future: Imagining the Multicultural Futures of the City. Sohail Inayatullah. Debats Technologics 14. October 2000. 2231.

The Alternative futures of the city are explored in this article. They are:

• Global and Smart: The first is the globalist scenario – a jet plane for all, unrestricted movement of capital and labour as well as ideas and news not a utopia but certainly a good society where feudalism, hierarchy, nationalist power break down and humans function as autonomous fulfilled beings. The market is primary but a globalized worlds allows endless associations nongovernmental organizations, religious affiliations, and other forms of identity currently unimaginable. With scarcity less of a problem, who we are and how we express this changing identity become far more crucial. The city becomes a site of intention. Freedom is realized. The globalized city is the smart city.

This is the hightech city, or what now call the smartcity. The city that senses and thinks, that can monitor the needs of its citizens – when trees are about to interfere with power lines, when criminals are about to loot a store

• Sustainability and Connection: This future is far less concerned with movement and more focused on stability. But the stability does not come from stasis but from connection – relationship with self, with loved one, with community and with nature. Wealth is no longer the crucial determining factor of who we are rather it is our capacity to love and be loved, to not live to transform the world but to live in harmony in the world. Rurality is not tangential to this image – indeed, while this image does not necessarily mean a return to the farm, it does mean a move away from industrial modes of production (that is, high fat, meat based diets and the accompanying waste disposal paradigm) and postmodern modes of production (genetically modified foods) to an organic, recyclable mode of eating and living.

• The Multicultural city: A multicultural city is about city spaces that are not segregated by race or gender, one should not be able to identify an ethnic area, or at least not see in a negative way. Second, citizens should feel they are part of the city, that they are not discriminated against, especially by those in authority. The actions of public officials and employees are crucial here. The Net of course helps greatly by hiding our gender, accent and colour. But a multicultural city is also about incorporates others ways of knowing, of creating a complex and chaotic model of space such that the city does not necessarily match the values of only one culture – mosques with temples with banks. City design not only done by trained city planners but as well by feng shui experts, searching for the energy lines, decoding which areas are best for banking, what for play, what for education – essentially designing and


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building for beauty that helps achieve particular functions broadly defined. Writes Starhawk:

The vision of the future is centred in the city; it’s a vision where people have lots of different religions, cultures and subcultures but they can all come together and work together. It starts with a woman climbing a hill for a ritual and visiting all the different shrines of these different religions and cultures that are up on the sacred mountain. That is what I’d like to see. Culture is like a sacred mountain that’s big enough for many, many different approaches to spirit.

IMPLICATION

While it is likely that Brisbane will choose to be the Global Smart city, we should not discount the stable or multicultural city. Can it be all three?

CAR, HOUSE AND CITY SCENARIOS

Smart Cars and Smart Insurance. Sohail Inayatullah. Foresight. Vol. 4, No. 1, 2002.

In this article, the future of the home and car are explored. The most visible discussion is focused on making cars smarter thus leading to fewer accidents and fewer insurance claims. This is essentially about: making the driving experience safer; making the driving experience less tiresome; and making the experience smarter. Technology is likely to lead the way here, for example, with the advent of the car sniffer and other devices can determine alcohol levels of a driver and then turn the car off.

Trends impacting upon car and home futures include:

1. Globalization. This creates two classes in Australia, a rich internationally linked, and poor, local. The poor tends to be single, alone and female. Social isolation is the primary problem in this process of globalization.

2. Rise of cultural creatives. A new demographic category focused on spirituality, sustainability, global ethics, future generations, relationships and helping others.

3. Customization. The expectation of products that are customized for the individual.

4. Infotailoring. This is essentially guardian angel software which tracks one's entire purchasing history, allowing one to receive products suited for oneself. Products that ensue are interactive – they learn from your needs.

5. Demographic shifts. Instead of a focus on youth and car insurance, the focus will be on mobility, seamless products throughout the entire life cycle.

Plausible scenarios include:

• Great Divide. Smart cars for the rich and nothing for the Poor.

• Smart cities. Smart cars, drivers and transportation systems.


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• From the car for all to Mobility for all. A dramatic rethinking of transportation.

IMPLICATIONS

What is the likely impact of infotailoring, customization and cultural creatives on the city. Will citizens expect a more seamless, personalized city council? Will cultural creatives dramatically change the nature of the city?

What would a totally mobile city look like?

Using Futures Studies to Design Tomorrow's Projects: A case study. Peter Saul. Foresight. Vol 4, No. 4, 2002.

In this article four scenarios for the future of cars and homes are presented.

1. Smart Cars and Smart Houses. GPS normal in most cars. Cars mostly diagnose their own faults and provide the owner and the service technician with early warning of components that need repair. Some of the incar technology is linked to an automated highway guidance system. Drinkdriving accidents have been dramatically reduced through biometric tests that turn the car off if there is evidence of high levels of alcohol consumption. Houses as well are smart, electronic castles.

2. Carless Global Village. In Australia, people have simplified their lifestyles, chosen to work less, have reduced their consumption of energy, have cut pollution and waste, and have introduced taxation policies that make it uneconomical for companies not to take responsibility for their whole product lifecycle and recycle at least 90% of all materials. People have increased their involvement in their local communities – in their schools, in Neighbourhood Watch organisations, in environmental rehabilitation projects and in new forums for preventing and quickly resolving disputes around building development and the allocation of local government funds.

3. Many large businesses have restructured their operations into “cells” located within the communities in which their strategically important workers choose to live. Government policies foster rapid growth in village development and in the use of public transport. Both the new “horizontal village” developments on the perimeter of major cities and the high rise developments inside city precincts are governed by an expanded form of body corporate that has a role in fostering the harmony and health of its “village” inhabitants.

4. Café Society. Cars are banned in inner cities and other softer, lower energy forms of transport are encouraged. Two types of living emerge: (1) High density apartment living; and (2) Inner city villages with a great deal of community life.

IMPLICATIONS

Should Brisbane focus on one dimension or finds to include all three scenarios?


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SCENARIOS FOR ASIAPACIFIC CITIES

Healthy futures for Asiapacific megacities. Greg Tegart and Tamsin Jewell. Foresight Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy; vol.03 no.06, Dec 2001, 523 – 532).

(Prof Greg Tegart is Executive Advisor, APEC Centre for Technology Foresight, Bangkok and Ms Tamsin Jewell is Policy Researcher, APEC Centre for Technology Foresight)

Three Scenarios were created by APEC CTF for megacities of 2020, being:

1. Econologic City – Top 5 cities of world in terms of wealth & standard of living. Hi Tech, Internet connected, Community & Government responsive. Migration to Econologic city would be strictly limited.

2. Monopolis – Sustainable, Hitech tropical, megacity. Stringent regulations and cars banned from city. Slums are abolished. It places great emphasis on survival and self sufficiency. It has been redesigned with more efficient resource allocation, mixed use land planning, innovative transport modes, and a target of four square meters of open space for every resident.

3. Fat City – vibrant intercultural and intellectual interaction – a concentrated network of selfgoverning communities. Corrupt and convoluted Bureaucracy has been superseded significant local democracy and participation.. With low unemployment, concern for the elderly and disadvantaged and substantial decision making at the community level, Fat City is a megacity on a human scale.

Understanding Urban Futures: between science and science fiction. Prof Simon Marvin. Foresight. Vol. 02, No. 06, Dec 2000, 559630.

(Prof Simon Marvin is Codirector of the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures, UK.)

Over the last five years, governments thinktanks and public alike have refocused their minds on the future development of British cities. Why are such diverse social organisations producing visions of urban futures? What kinds of techniques and tools are they using, and what are their implications? What types of city do they envision? And most significantly, what are the resonances and dissonances between the development paths they propose?

The new challenge for urban policy in the UK as outlined in the 1999 Final Report of the Urban Task Force – “Towards an Urban Renaissance”, is to develop an integrated policy framework that can shape; urban futures that are:


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“Not just fit to live in, but thriving centres of human activity … based on the joint principles of design excellence, economic strength, environmental responsibility, good governance and social well being.”

Focusing on the metropolitan region of Greater Manchester, this paper tries to build an understanding of the conceptual and methodological challenges involved in urban futures research. We select five different organisations that have each attempted to develop a viewpoint, position or vision of the future development of Greater Manchester region. Each has been selected to try to represent a variety of organisations, futures thinking processes and visions of urban futures.

CITY VISION

Recommend new approaches to regeneration practitioners and government

Lower urban metabolism through audit, setting targets and the development of new sustainable lifestyles

Practitioners take new learning and transform themselves into network leaders

Key Decision makers engage in personal and professional debate about future

Emotional experience of future City – combines echoes of present and future

CITY METAPHOR

Demyth ologised City

Integrated, sustainable City

BetterLed City

Longerrange City

Cyber fantasist’s City

In summary, the paths outlined by the five visions are extremely complex when placed alongside one another. They represent quite different ways of thinking about the future development of the city and combine singular, multiple and discontinuous paths alongside each other in unusual and creative patterns.

Conclusions:

• There is no correct viewpoint. All 5 visions generate fictions that might be the future of Greater Manchester.

• Some visions will have more legitimacy that others shaped by the social context within which they are generated and reproduced.

• The paper as described by the Author cannot provide any simple assessment of the impacts of the different visions of the city.

• What is lacking is an appraisal framework for comparing the social, economic, environmental, technical and spatial assumptions built into the different visions.

IMPACT

With such strong interest in shaping urban futures, there is now a need to bring together disparate techniques and expertise in a new context for generating more imaginative, creative, enlarged and socially feasible views of potential urban futures.


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Phillip Daffara, Discussion Paper No. 1 Sunshine Coast Habitat Futures, Maroochy Shire Council, April 2002.

Four future habitat scenarios are described. These were generated by interacting the drivers of change “Government Policy” in relationship with the “Urban Development Industry”. This relationship was driven by a third variable, being the level of social adoption of “Sustainability” within the culture of the region.

The Scenarios generated are:

SCENARIO A: “Amorpohous Suburbs in SEQ SuperCity”

• Weak regional government and planning policy lead to urban sprawl.

• Resident's quality of life declines.

• Social isolation increases as those who are unable to drive

• Access to facilities and town centres is inequitable.

SCENARIO B: “Diverse Sunshine Coast Towns”

• Triple Bottom line by half of organizations

• Sustainable development

• Social interaction promoted

• Social capital grows

• Diverse local economy

SCENARIO C: “Sunshine Coast Archologies”

• Urban form is transformed from sprawl to architectural ecology.

• Triple bottom line as dominant form of accounting

• Voluntarism is high, social capital is vibrant.

• Communities live in walkable mixed use towns

SCENARIO D: “The Sunshine Coast BioCity”

• Regional governance and planning policy is transformed by the sustainability/glocal movement. It is replaced by community self action and governance, enabled by technology.

• The city becomes a living entity cohabiting in a symbiotic relationship with its citizens.


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• Biocity is walkable, carfree and connected to other Biocities by rapid maglev trains, airships and other forms of transports.

• Bio city is unrecognisable to a citizen living in the first decade of the 21 st century.

During the consultation process 167 survey submissions were received, of which 102 were conducted in visioning workshops with MSC staff. The preferred habitat scenario for 2100, is a hightech sustainable habitat. Being so far removed from an individual’s circle of influence or concern, the 2100 vision suggests more clearly the aspirations of the sample group. The results are:

Community Sample – 62% preference for Scenario D

MSC Leaders Group – 70% preference for Scenario D

Strategic Planning Staff – 57% preference for Scenario D

The qualities of the preferred 2100 habitat vision in order of priority were:

For the Environment: Healthy, “Green” and Beautiful

For the Community: Interactive, Wise and Vibrant

For Business: Sustainable, Innovative and Prosperous

Implications for the Maroochy Shire Council in realising this vision are:

1. Strategic Policies and Opportunities affecting the Environment:

• A Biodiversity Strategy for the region that gave clear objectives to community groups about needed recovery programmes.

• A Quality of Life Strategy based on sustainability indicators that was generated through community visioning and driven by community action teams.

• A zeroemissions building code that mandated “green architecture”.

• Reconstruction of built environments into walkable, higher density urban forms, with their CBDs being car free. This reconstruction was integrated with transport investment into priority busways, the bike network and pedestrianisation of public streets.

• The Maroochy Plan was amended to recognise the Council’s Greenhouse Policy targets of: “Maroochy Shire Council aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 1998 levels by 2010.” And “For Maroochy Shire Council’s own operations, our goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1994 levels by 2010.”

• A resettlement programme to relocate 20% of the Shire’s population, living over 16.1% of urban land in Maroochy at risk of tidal inundation caused by rising sea levels. This affected group of people formed the founding community of BioCity.


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2. Strategic Policies and Opportunities affecting Business:

• Transformation towards a zeroemission economy.

• Regional Sustainable Economy Summit organised by the Sunshine Coast Regional Development Corporation.

• The Maroochy Economic Development Strategy’s Vision is amended to focus on “sustainable economic development” as opposed to “sustainable economic growth”.

• Maroochy Water Services diversified and provided bundled services in renewable resources. Energy generation via water turbines installed into the gravity feed supply pipes from Baroon Pocket Dam; Methane Digestors from the sewerage treatment plants and wind turbines at reservoir sites supplied Energex’s “Earth’sChoice “ renewable energy program.

Specific technological developments, which converge to facilitate scenario 4, include:

• Nanotechnology;

• Biotechnology;

• Artificial Intelligence; and

• Renewable Energy.

IMPACT

Local Government Authorities need to engage their citizens more often and to a higher level of participation through visioning workshops about their preferred futures, prior to developing policy.

NONWESTERN VISIONS OF THE CITY

After Modernity: contemporary nonwestern cities and architecture. Ayyub Malik. Futures Journal. Volume 33, No 10, December 2001, Pergamon, 873882.

“Nonwestern cities have gone through an extraordinary period of growth and expansion during the last half century.

The dominant idea, which has shaped the nonwestern city, has been based on the rejection of inherited patterns, and knowledge of climate and materials in pursuit of an irrelevant urban modernity.

The contemporary nonwestern city is not one; but three segregated cities:

• The inherited city – dilapidated; unkempt and disowned but still a repository of knowledge.


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• The modern city – is built for the government, the decisionmakers and the well off to project an image of progress and affluence but without the technology and economy or resources to sustain it. – A meaningless construct of costly images irrelevant to the life and need of many.

• The vast slum city – urban poor and rural migrants, without help skills or resources.

The contemporary nonwestern city remains based on social, spatial and economic injustice.

Malik argues that “there cannot be just one form of universal modernity, just once approach to cities, architecture, and the built environment, only one way of progress and development. People must strive to make their cities – Democratic, Productive, Educational, Cultural, Sustainable and Inclusive. “More that ever; citizens need literacy and education to understand that the quality of their city and environment is intricately linked with the quality of their life, health and welfare”.

Malik calls for Professionals (e.g. Architects and Urban Planners) to work out more socially relevant roles for themselves – thinkers, participants and persuaders in the affairs of cities in order to articulate a more relevant urban vision for the future which benefits society as whole.

IMPACT

Contemporary Cities need to be democratic, productive, innovative and sustainable as well as cultural, creative and tolerant. To have meaning and relevance they also need social purpose and ideals and the ability to use technology, skills, and resources to work towards these ends.


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THEME NINE: VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

END OF SPRAWL VISION

New Visions for Metropolitan America. Anthony Downs (Senior Fellow, Brookings Economic Studies Program). Washington: The Brookings Institution & Cambridge MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, June 1994/256p/$22.95. Abstracted by Michael Marien, Future Survey. October 1994, 451.

For half a century the US has had a dominant vision of how its metro areas ought to grow, described here as "unlimited lowdensity sprawl." Most metro areas have successfully realized this vision, but with resulting problems of excessive travel, lack of affordable housing, lack of consensus on financing (often resulting in gross underfunding of facilities and services), problems in siting locally undesirable land uses, and a failure to compel people who generate significant social costs to pay for these costs.

As a result of these difficulties, hundreds of suburban governments have adopted "growth management" policies to limit local growth, which aggravates regional problems by perpetuating concentration of poor households in city centers.

Three sets of alternatives are discussed:

• Inner City Decline: present policies are not likely to stop deterioration; alternative strategies include various forms of assistance, area development, human capital development, household mobility, and worker mobility. Elements from all five strategies would be needed to significantly improve innercity life.

• Metro Growth: the opposite of unlimited lowdensity sprawl is the "bounded high density vision" or communitarian approach (emphasizing communityfocused action by everyone and considering consequences for society). Between these extremes lie two other plans: the limitedspread/mixeddensity model and the new communities and green belts vision.

• Alternatives to Metro Area Government: Full metro government is not feasible; alternatives include

§ Voluntary cooperation among local governments,

§ state agencies carrying out regional policies,

§ publicprivate coordination,

§ specialized regional agencies, and

§ greater coordination of local governments.

To change visions, OECD nations need to "much more emphasis on social solidarity and less on individualistic values."


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GARDEN CITY AS A PREFERRED FUTURE

Garden Cities 21: Creating a Livable Urban Environment. John Ormsbee Simonds (EPD of Pittsburgh). NY: McGrawHill, Jan 1994/231p/$42.00. Abstracted from Michael Marien, Future Survey, October 94, 452.

Inspired by Sir Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898; MIT Press, 1965), which found the industrial city to be unlivable, a leading US urban planner describes the livable city of tomorrow as one with a long range preservation, conservation, and development plan.

Such cities will intensify the activity centers, preserve the integrity of the surrounding landscape, and engage in coordinated regional planning.

Guidelines include:

• strengthening the neighborhoods;

• incorporating the thinking of community leaders;

• preserving the best existing features;

• creating trafficfree activity centers of various types;

• using multimode rapid transit, preventing and eliminating all forms of pollution;

• planning integrated systems;

• creating an open space framework;

• planning the city and metro region together; and

• providing for flexibility so as to encourage creative individual expression.

In the years ahead, the garden city envisioned by Ebenezer Howard may yet be realized, but in a different form. Within an overall parklike setting, there will be community gardens, hydroponic farms, orchards, vineyards, and solardomed conservatories. City centers will be "hanging gardens," the main trafficways will be lineal parks, and local streets will be sheathed with canopies of foliage. As our cities are made to leaf and bloom again, gardening will be a favorite avocation and nature appreciation and outdoor recreation will become ever more a part of city living.

BRISBANE'S VISION OF THE FUTURE

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/index.shtml Living in Brisbane 2010 the Vision

In 2010, Brisbane will be a prosperous subtropical city, enjoyed by residents, admired by visitors, and respected nationally and internationally for its achievements.

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/index.shtml


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The city will be built on:

• strong and inclusive communities;

• active local democracy and responsive government;

• diversity in culture, lifestyle, work and environment;

• a creative and innovative spirit and an openness to new ideas;

• a confident and positive approach to new technologies;

• a commitment to a clean, green environment; and

• accessibility of travel and services.

Brisbane will be:

• A city of inclusive communities.

• A smart city.

• A prosperous city.

• A creative city.

• A clean and green city.

• An accessible city.

• A regional and world city.

BELFAST'S VISION OF THE FUTURE

BELFAST 2025 THE CORE VISION http://www.belfastvision.com/home.htm

The Belfast City Vision paints a picture of what Belfast could be like in 25 years time. It has been developed after one of the most detailed consultation exercises undertaken in the city. From focus groups to conferences to questionnaires, which were sent to every household, a Vision for Belfast has been crafted by the people of Belfast. The Vision covers all aspects of life in this city. It is far reaching and challenging to all of us who want to see this city reach its undoubted potential. It is the catalyst for greater co ordination, helping to ensure that all in Belfast are pulling in the same direction.

For the past thirty years, Belfast has felt the deep pain of two processes that have tested the hope of its people. The first it shares with all industrial cities, namely the loss of its traditional jobs as factory and mill closed their gates against the chill winds of new global competition. The second has been more home grown. It has gripped the city in dreadful animosity traced from longstanding quarrels over identity and nationality, and left us badly damaged. Belfast has been hurt, but its spirit has survived. For years, we have

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/inclusive_communities/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/smart_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/prosperous_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/creative_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/clean_green_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/accessible_city/index.shtml

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/council_at_work/planning/brisbane_2010/7_themes_of_livability/regional_world_city/index.shtml

http://www.belfastvision.com/home.htm


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become used to managing this crisis. Its very familiarity and our ability to cope have stopped us expecting more of our city and of ourselves.

Yes, we have paid a terrible price for our conflict in human terms and in terms of lost opportunity. Yet, given that we have been able to make progress even in our darkest days, now that peace is at hand, we can really make a difference. Moving into the next millennium, four main challenges face us.

First, we need a radical renewal that taps into the confidence slowly emerging with the chance to resolve our conflict through persuasion. It is time for a new start. Such a spirit can give momentum to a real transformation of Belfast. For instance, a place that has become reliant on special funding to support its weak jobs base needs to find a new economic engine that can drive its future prosperity. Nothing short of finding a distinctive position in the new world trading order will do

Second, we need to take responsibility. Lamenting our legacy, we have become used to pinning blame elsewhere. But, no one owes us a living or is obliged to referee our dispute. The moment has come to take responsibility for our own actions, for each other and for future generations. In this, each citizen has a unique contribution to make.

Third, we need to place greater value on risk, encouraging fresh thinking and new approaches in all aspects of city life. We need to support people taking the chance on new businesses, products and markets and those taking risks in forging new relationships across our divides.

Finally, we need to rediscover the importance of relationships, how we relate to each other, how we show mutual respect and how we cooperate for common benefit. In short, we want a mutual city one that encourages exchange amongst all sections and areas. We want to move from a habit of dependency to one of interdependency: for example, connecting all religions and cultures to each other ; the employed to the unemployed; Downtown and Waterfront to the neighbourhoods and the young to the elderly.

In similar vein, we will want to see Belfast City better connected to its wider hinterland, and all of Greater Belfast relating well to the rest of the region and to the wider world. Making connections will also be important for public policy. For instance, we will need to see different stages of education linked in pathways of lifelong learning. In all of our efforts, we will seek to tie the future to the past in creative ways that thread us into the best of our traditions.

The mutual city idea does not deny real contests of interest. But, it suggests that such conflicts should not prevent common action and support, which tie the fortunes of all people and parts of the city together as much as possible. We can develop a city in a way that does not see one area succeed at the expense of another. We can see a Belfast that promotes consensus without promoting conformity. And in seeking common cause in creating a vision, we can help heal the division.

Crafting a vision of what kind of city we want Belfast to become may seem odd in a place well known for looking back. Yet, it is fair to remind ourselves that this has been a city of pride as well as of prejudice. Just 100 years ago, Belfast was at the heart of industrial life in these islands. But the creativity and nobility of what we made for the rest of the world, were diminished by the way we treated each other back home. We, who


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could build ships to sail with grace across the waves, were ourselves sinking beneath a rising tide of political conflict. We, who could weave silk and linen to adorn top tables in global capitals, were ourselves twisting tighter the knot of sectarianism in our own back streets. We, who could welcome the world with warmth and humour, could often only greet "the other sort" with cool suspicion.

However, in drawing up this Vision, the voice of a wide cross section of people was heard and heeded. There was an evident desire on the part of many to resolve the stresses and strains of our traditional conflict and to devote energies to create a new city of common belonging. The purpose of the Vision is to chart the path towards this destination. But an effective Vision for Belfast has to be rooted in values and in these consultations the following core values came through:

• equity – fairness of treatment of both people and places across the city;

• education – knowledge and learning as the means to make the most of ourselves and our city;

• economy – a competitive economy that allows the city to earn its living and provide all with the opportunity for a decent livelihood;

• efficiency – the best use of resources, opportunities and strengths;

• empowerment – new forms of decisionmaking that enable all voices to be included, and partnerships that allow for effective networking across agencies and sectors;

• environment – an awareness of, and respect for, the surrounding natural environment and a keenness for aesthetic design and cleanliness in the built environment; and

• excellence – development across the city in all fields to be underpinned by quality and by tapping people's talents to their best potential.

Such values remind us that an effective city needs not only good infrastructure of roads, rail, airport and telecommunications, a fine supply of building stock, the right skills and ingenuity and appropriate sources of investment. But, it also needs respect for its environment and a vibrant network of civic organisations. Our Vision for Belfast is to have all these features, each of excellent quality and each working in harmony with the others.

Features include:

• A united city.

• A city of livable communities

• A city of culture and sport

• A healthy city

• A learning city

• A prosperous city


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IMPACT

The Belfast vision is an excellent model for long range and inclusive futures activities. Is it portable to Australia?

A NEW VISION: The SpiritualEcological City

Urban Imagination. Sohail Inayatullah. Edges. Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991.

The writer argues that in American history, the construction of the city has gone through various phases. These include, the City Beautiful (designed around large government buildings), the City Efficient (roads, rates and rubbish) and the City Radical (focused on the social and human consequences of economic development, of growth). In Asia, the city has moved from being local and village based (strong community) to an apt metaphor of economic development.

"Just as in modernity the village must be transformed into the city (but parts of it miniaturized either in the museum or in the fables of writers), so third world nations must be transformed into modern nations (and their exotic culture miniaturized for display)."

Beyond the city radical and the modern city is the following alternative. This is the spiritualecological city. In terms of recent exemplary designs, there is Ananda Nagar, the abode of Endless Bliss. This city is designed by the late P.R. Sarkar on ancient sacred site wherein individuals gained enlightenment. Sarkar takes the ancient Tantric worldview and constructs city spaces to reflect the values of spirituality, global/local community, economic democracy, and multiculturalism. Ananda Nagar is an ecological city intended to regenerate the rural economy. As other intended communities it is meant to be self sufficient (through and interlinking of education and soft energy economic wealth creation projects). It also has sanctuaries for animals and rare plants. Instead of a huge dams there are shallow ponds which restore the environment, thus anticipating the global water crisis. Streets are named after scientists and philosophers: Einstein, Gandhi, Tagore, Shakespeare to mention a few. This is an example of a city that is culture: it represents global spiritual culture

Central to this rethinking of the city, this new vision, is the resituation of land from individual and state ownership to cooperative means.

IMPACT

What are other examples of alternative niche cites in the Asiapacific region? Should parts of Brisbane be reconstituted with an alternative design – i.e. the spiritualecological city?


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THEME TEN: PLANNING TOOLS AND METHODS

USING FUTURES METHODS

Cities in the 21 st Century: The Forces of Change. Roger Kemp. Futures Research Quarterly. 2131.

Kemp makes numerous valuable points. The first is that traditional planning practices of assuming the future will continue like the present is a mistake. Responding to change after the fact increases the costs to the city. External circumstances and public attitudes are changing so rapidly that the practices of the past are quickly becoming obsolete.

He cites the following changes likely to impact local government:

• Aging of society.

• Small households requiring more highdensity residential apartments.

• More women in the workplace with increased emphasis on issues such as equal opportunity, comparable worth, family leave policies.

• Increased minorities and demands for special services – equity issues, bilingual issues, cultural diversity programs.

• Because of increased women as head of households, "community issues such as provisions for affordable health care, more afterschool childcare centers, community policing programs, and specialized programs for young people, such as teen centers, will be high on the" local city agenda.

• A great emphasis, as values change, from essential hard services (police, fire, public works programs) to soft services (recreation, museums, libraries and cultural programs).

"Greater urbanization, coupled with a renewed appreciation of our natural environment, will result in new planning models that provide for the multijurisdictional stewardship of those important natural amenities.

"A new planning discipline will emerge called "horizonline management" whereby communities and their public planners will take responsibility for managing scenic areas and corridors for such natural amenities as ridgetops, mountains, plateaus, as well as manmade urban skylines in denselypopulated metropolitan areas.

"Existing public officials, both elected and appointed, will feel the increasing political influence of new special interest groups – seniors, women, immigrants and minorities. When service reductions must be made in the future, it will be difficult to "cut" in the services provided to these new constituent groups.


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"Gentrification will continue as younger single people, childless couples and welltodo empty nesters, as well as active retirees, continue to move from the suburbs to inner city metropolitan areas."

Finally, he argues, that the "goal of today's local government is citizen/consumer satisfaction at a reasonable cost. Advanced citizen feedback instruments, process improvement techniques, more sophisticated planning practices, and the use of modern technologies will help achieve this goal."

IMPACT

The demands on the future city are likely to continue changing, quite dramatically, every city needs future oriented planning to ensure that it meets these changing needs.

COMMUNICATION AND LEARNING

Vision and Creativity – Challenge for City Regions. Peter Ache. Futures. Vol. 32, No. 5, June 2000, 435449.

From reading the policy documents of the various public bodies responsible for spatial planning (or town and country or regional planning), such as the EC documents Europe 2000 or Europe 2000+, the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), or the German European Metropolitan Areas in Germany, it becomes clear that metropolitan areas or city regions are at the spatial forefront of development perspectives. Here, as is well known, the most pressing features of contemporary societies can be seen at the surface, but here too, these negative developments are paired with the hopes and glories of coming societies. In other words, European Metropoles become the engines of change. As the title indicates, given the complex framework shaping spatial development on the one side, and the complex actor structures and expectations on the other, a strategic approach based on vision and creativity is needed in order to turn our city regions into agents of change. The core elements to achieve this are: communication; learning; creative projects; and new governance models. Creative action in city regions is considered to be another precondition for flexible response in a global environment. A creative city region hosts creative actors. These include, not only the obvious actors such as artists, but also those who are capable of negotiating borders and of abandoning secure lines and inherited truths. Creative actors are able to cooperate with others, are open to the experiences of different cultures, and understand the `enemy' at the far end of the table. Creative action involves being open, communicative, informed and willing to develop a vision … a creative city region is an environment where everybody is invited to develop creative potentials in an experimental situation.


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This article suggest elements of a strategy for actors in city regions to enable them to cope with the coming challenges, not least of an increasingly global system. The strategic framework suggested is not at all comprehensive, as for instance normative aspects like sustainability are left aside. Instead, the suggested elements are based mainly on procedural aspects: communication, learning, creativity and governance. Communication, codecisionmaking and coevolution of principles guiding city regional development have to be guaranteed by the public sphere. Besides the core elements of communication, innovation, learning and cooperation, it is important to constitute a strong regional vision which is proactively pursued. The vision provides a strong intellectual stimulus, which can be identified by the wider public and a multitude of actors and helps to create coherence between the different strategic choices, not least those outside core planning activities. The article concludes with the statement: we need a vision: information is nothing in itself, it needs to be formed and structured according to respective needs.

THE IMAGE OF THE CITY

The evaluative image of the city. Jack L. Nasar. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications, 1998.

This book describes how to assess, plan, and design the appearance of cities to please inhabitants. It presents a series of studies on evaluative images and discusses methodologies, findings, and applications to design and planning at various stages. This book examines city appearance, whether appearance matters, and what we can do to make our cities look better. The ambience of cities arise from social and cultural factors. The apparent “politeness” of the British, the “rudeness” of the New Yorker, or changes in atmosphere from immigration in cities such as London, Sydney, or Miami, reflect sociocultural influences on the ambience. Through regulations, design review, and individual development decisions, we can shape the visual form of our communities for better or worse. We do so to improve the community’s meaning and appearance for the many who experience it. Chapter I, “The Evaluative Image of the Environment” builds a composite model for understanding the image of a given environment along the dimensions of identity, structure and likeability. According to Wolf, the mere “imageability” of a city, that is, its clear landmarks, paths, edges, districts, and notes, is not enough to evaluate a city’s image. What is needed is a model that incorporates more subjective notions of “feeling” and “meaning”. Concluding the book, Wolf notes that “Studying the evaluative image has policy implications. By tapping public opinion and meanings, such study should give accurate predictions of future public reactions. It can serve in a variety of public and private actions, such as information dissemination, design review, incentives, public and private partnerships, zoning, codes, and enforcement. As part of a comprehensive plan or urban design, information about the evaluative image can help make changes in visual form more relevant to that public. Armed with information about public preferences and meanings, what affects them, and how they change and develop, city designers can guide the image of the city toward becoming more likeable, meaningful, and livable” (p. 138).


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IMPLICATIONS

Who is responsible for the processes of urban design? The importance of empirical research into community desires and their successful integration into urban design. The underresearched importance of images and images of the future in urban design and their potential for creating preferred city futures. The importance of ethnic minorities on the ambience and renegotiation of “meaning” associated with dynamic city life.

PLANNING FOR DESIRED FUTURES

Planning for a New Century: The Regional Agenda. Jonathon Barnett, editor. Washington DC: Island Press, 2001. Excerpted from Island Press Home Page.

Planning for a New Century brings together leading thinkers in the fields of planning, urban design, education, welfare, and housing to examine those issues and to consider the ways in which public policies have helped createand can help solvemany of the problems facing our communities. Key issues examined include:

• the relation of existing growth management policies to social equity, as well as how regional growth management measures can make new development more sustainable;

• how an obscure technical procedure in highway design becomes a de facto regional plan;

• ways in which local governments can promote environmental preservation and better designed communities by rewriting local zoning and subdivision ordinances;

• why alleviating housing shortages and slum conditions has resulted in a lack of affordable housing, and how that problem can be solved; and

• how business improvement districts can make downtowns cleaner, safer, and more welcoming to workers and visitors.

According to Virginia Fairweather in The Gazette Home Page, “There is a pendulum swing in society, efficient but cruel. You can’t let things get too bad or social instability will result,” says Jonathan Barnett, Practice Professor of City and Regional Planning and editor of Planning for a New Century, a provocative new handbook on urban sprawl and its consequences, published by Island Press earlier this year. Social inequity is one byproduct of sprawl, as inner cities are depleted of people and resources, and needless duplication of services elsewhere is another. “It’s wasteful to start over,” says Barnett. Many aspects of the book fall into the futureshock category. To mention the most familiar example, federal laws and policies have long encouraged home ownership, but federal funds were more available for white, middleclass citizens. The result was a public policy that exacerbated racial and economic inequities. Federal programs for highway construction and pollution control had similarly unforeseen


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consequences. In both cases, wellmeant legislation encouraged sprawl, by making it possible to develop previously inaccessible areas, abetting the depletion of core cities.

IMPLICATIONS

It is increasingly imperative to wisely apply foresight in order to forecast possible long term consequences of apparently sound planning policy.

COMPLEXITY AND PLANNING

Cities and Complexity: Making Intergovernmental Decisions. Karen Stromme Christensen; Sage Publications, London and Beverly Hills, 1999, 177 pages, $51 (hardback), $29.95 (paperback). Abstract from Futures, Volume 33, Issue 10, December 2001, 898901, online.

Cities and Complexity attempts to tackle one of the most significant challenges facing futures of societies: uncertainty. In an attempt to answer efficiently and effectively to the multitude of needs that the different actors and activities require, governments multiply departments and laws trying to transmit certainty to the public. The net complexity created, however, tends to favour uncertainty and consequently a weak accountability on the part of governmental systems. Having its roots in seminal works such as Forester's "Planning in the Face of Power" [1] and Innes "Planning Through Consensus building" [2], this book addresses the importance of complexity and uncertainty in governmental systems and, by doing so, enriches the area of decision making in the planning process.

Christensen's "Cities and Complexity" is divided in nine chapters, which can be grouped in three parts: In the first chapters Christensen emphasizes the difficulty that planners and managers have in understanding government systems. The most common answer to this difficulty and to the need of certainty in their actions is that `they tend to assume certainty of means and ends and that agencies they are working through act with certainty as well' (p.7). Nevertheless, problems of coordination, conflict, confusion, and duplication tend to promote inefficient, disappointing, and confusing outcomes. The second part of the book deepens the study of intergovernmental systems by understanding how the different dimensions of government systems are structured and how sector dynamics explored one of those dimensions (the vertical dimension `the pickets linking federal state and levels of functional federalism'). And how sectors are now monopolizing both the horizontal area interest dimension and the time dimensions (`how the relations change over time'). The third part of the book addresses the `delusions of certainty' that arise from the impossibility of guaranteeing certainty by the intergovernmental systems. To solve this problem Christensen proposes a contingency solution that varies according to the needed outcome or ends (GOALS) and to the known means and processes available (TECHNOLOGY).

Two issues make this book of high value. The first issue results from addressing the Horizontal and Time dimensions to understand governmental systems instead of simply


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reporting the commonly applied vertical dimension. As Christensen states, "When variable decisions rules are considered in conjunction with the multiple time frames, the functional chains of agencies and area governmental complexity no longer seems puzzling" (p. 62). By exploring the Horizontal, Vertical and Time variables in three dimensional sketches, the author succeeds in making a very important link that is frequently neglected: the consequences of governmental decisions in the landscape.

The second issue addresses the importance of both means and ends (Technology and Goals) as the key elements to build a framework of variable forms of policy making, this framework is composed of four different strategies that vary in function. This framework flows through the main chapters and mainly states that:

• If Technology and Goal are known and agreed, then the emphasis is in Programming.

• If the Goal in not agreed in a known Technology, then Bargaining should be the strategy used.

• If Technology is unknown and the Goal agreed, then Experimentation is the answer.

• If the Goal and Technology are not agreed, then Social Learning should be explored.

IMPLICATIONS

The function of the planner and of the government agent also changes accordingly to the contingent technology and goal. Planners should be an administrative, regulator in the first case; an advocate and bargainer in the second case; and inventor, or innovator in the third case; and a problem finder or social learner in the fourth case (p. 132). This book puts in perspective some issues of complexity and uncertainty important to consider, and can be a helpful reference in solving some of its problems.

PLANNING IN ASIA

Planning for a Better Urban Living Environment in Asia. Anthony GarOn Yeh and Mee Kam Ng. Ashgate, 2000.

Asia has developed very rapidly in the last quarter of the century and will be a main focus of the world in the 21 st century. This book is a consolidated effort by prominent scholars in Asian planning schools to explore urban development and planning practices in Asia. The book reflects on and examines some of the past and current challenges, and considers future prospects of urban and regional planning, environment, housing, redevelopment and conservation, and planning education in Asia. Hidehiko Sazanami’s “Challenges and Future Prospects of Planning for a Better Living Environment in the Large Cities in Asia” looks at avenues for ameliorating the extremes of poverty and wealth that coexist in many Asian cities the ways for removing the paradoxes from large urban areas whilst minimising their negative impacts. In this essay, Sazanami focuses on the development of


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a new type of urban society conceptualised from a social perspective; the roles of city administration; the importance of integrating the vitality of private groups; the role of local communities; the specific problems between inner city area and outlying area discourses; and a threepoint solution matrix for solving the housing problem. He concludes by emphasizing that there should be a shift from the tendency of previous large city planning projects to “implement standardized rules and regulations in the name of efficiency” to a future development paradigm which respects and prioritises each region’s unique traditions, religions and cultures (p. 22). In the final chapter “Whither Asian Planning Education?”, Wu reviews the challenges facing Asian planning educators and raises questions about the type of planning education that might be equal to the tasks ahead. He argues that the economic context and issues confronting Asian planers are unique and it is therefore important for Asian educators to develop planning programmes appropriate to the current conditions of Asia (p. 4).

IMPLICATIONS

Some of the most innovative thinking within cityfuture discourses may be derived from nonWestern sources. The role of education is an important aspect in insuring against catastrophe in city futures.

USING VISUAL TECHNOLOGY TO CREATE PREFERRED FUTURES

Where would YOU want to live? Sarah van Gelder. http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/vangelder_where.htm Yes, Summer 1999.

In city planning circles, it’s considered a truism that citizens want to live in lowdensity communities, with housing separated from areas with stores or offices. However when citizens are asked what they want, this often turns out not to be the case – particularly when they have an opportunity to see what kinds of development lowdensity sprawl implies – and what a highdensity urban village can be like.

A “Visual Preference Survey” is one way to find out. Citizens view images of the strip malls, wide streets, and parking lots that accompany lowdensity, caroriented development alongside the urban villagestyle neighborhoods that are made possible by higher density, pedestrianoriented development. Then they are asked which they prefer. People who have used these surveys report that the appeal of lowdensity development is drastically reduced when people see what it actually will mean to their community – and see that there are alternatives.

http://www.futurenet.org/10citiesofexuberance/vangelder_where.htm


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RETHINKING CITY DESIGN

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. Alex Marshall. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Do cities work anymore? How did they get to be such sprawling conglomerations of lookalike subdivisions, megafreeways, and "big box" superstores surrounded by acres of parking lots? And why, most of all, don't they feel like real communities? Marshall argues that urban life has broken down because of our basic ignorance of the real forces that shape citiestransportation systems, industry and business, and political decision making. He explores how these forces have built four very different urban environments the decentralized sprawl of California's Silicon Valley, the crowded streets of New York City's Jackson Heights neighborhood, the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon, and the stageset facades of Disney's planned community, Celebration, Florida. To build better cities, Marshall asserts, we must understand and intelligently direct the forces that shape them. Without prescribing any one solution, he defines the key issues facing all concerned citizens who are trying to control urban sprawl and build real communities. His timely book will be important reading for a wide public and professional audience.

Cities as conscious design: Cities don't "just happen". It wasn't the simply the car or modern technology that shaped how we live today. Rather, it was the integration of the three forces of Transportation, Economics and Politics. The car is only as good as the roads that get built through government funding and a city's growth is shaped by the politics of zoning boards. The history of the last 50 years has shown that we have chosen a centrifugal direction for these forces. From general neglect of mass transportation to the emergence of restrictive covenants, we've chosen a path that has lead us to the creation of communities that serve to segment and isolate rather than bring together. While Marshall's remedies, especially his penchant for generally leftwing approaches to social policy, may sometimes miss the mark, his book offers an excellent framework from which to approach the task of remaking our cities into much more livable places.

According to Thomas Allman (February 24, 2002, Sparta, New Jersey USA) “Alex Marshall has written an entertaining description of his frustration with the current choices of many Americans to live in low density housing relying upon the freeway and arterial road systems. He describes his interaction with selected citizens of Portland, the Silicon Valley, Jackson Heights and Celebration and attempts from this "base" to extract the ultimate truths that underlie what, to him, is a thoroughly unsatisfactory way of life. In many ways, his frustration is amusing, predictable, and entirely understandable: Americans do not agree, in general, that there is something inherently wrong with a singlefamily home in a nice location. It can be argued although almost never is that the genius of the postindustrial economic world is the flexibility of the highway system, which allows one and two job families to maintain their residential base, while tapping into changing economic opportunities. Marshall argues that tolerating the present situation he admits that politicians support it is the result of the "confusion" of those of us who do not see things his way. Indeed, he expresses surprise that people he interviews in Celebration, a "New Urbanist" development that, curiously, he spends much of the


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book criticizing, like where they live and how it works. Only in a very few places in the book does he acknowledge the importance of the ebb and flow of the economy; at no point does the massive shifts in types and locations of jobs come into play. From his point of view, each city should build (without bothering to explain where the funds come from) fixed transportation systems which would allow the elimination of the freeways, thus putting "pressure" on the downtowns, thus forcing higher density”.

IMPLICATIONS

Functionalist paradigms of city planning, design and construction in the guise of ubiquitous infrastructures such as transportation limit the livability of cities. Accordingly, without superior infrastructure design, city life in the future will inevitably deteriorate from the overburden of inherent design disfunctionality.

SCENARIOS FOR PARTICIPATORY CITY PLANNING

Participatory scenarios for sustainable development. Abdul Khakee. “Foresight, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1999, 229240.

In order to implement the sustainable development principles of Agenda 21 some municipalities in Sweden have developed scenarios for sustainable local societies. These scenarios differ from the two previous generations of scenarios in the sense that they require the participation of citizens in their preparation and implementation. This article discusses the premises of the three generations of scenarios: expert, hybrids and participatory. It describes the efforts to prepare a participatory scenario by the municipal government of Orebro (Sweden) in order to provide guidelines for a sustainable society. The article also discusses a method for preparing such a scenario.


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