Artists of various urban futures are fond of envisioning the easy movement of people and goods as a visually exciting urban benefit. We see crowded, yet free-flowing shoulder-to-shoulder sidewalks, sweeping multi-layered elevations serving every possible land use linked to a landscape capable of moving everything from the fruits of a 24/7/365 vertical farm to thousands of colleges students from class to internships across regions.

The visions such as the image (above) presented on the Foster Foundation’s website have begun to meet the technology needed to implement an extraordinary integration of movement with architecture. Three broad questions must be answered to establish a foundation for this vital parts of urban design.

1. Where would it be best to attempt this expand and integrate free-flowing movement?
2. What are the political mechanisms for linking the movement of people and goods to the architecture of places?
3. How does movement infrastructure merge with the architecture of buildings and the layout of cities?

The first question on where this vision might be implemented were examined by the Foster foundation and others using three city typologies – Mexico City with 16,000 residents per square mile as a high-rise, high-density city core, London with 7,000 residents per square mile as a medium-rise, high-density city and the region surrounding the 47 square mile City of San Francisco involving 7 million people in nine counties and 101 municipalities representing the spreading typology of a low-rise, low-density metropolis.  Surrounding counties such as Sonoma have about 4,500 residents per square mile while Marin has a resident population density of around 200 people.

Most observers know from experience that the low cost of land and lower population densities occur from the center of their nearest large city outwards in a pattern of uses best described as the fragments of leapfrog development. They also knew they live in one of those fragments, and protecting its value is important. The link below reveals an image depicting evacuation zones based on extreme weather threats in a dense urban setting. However, the fragments of safe locations remain unclear.

Hurricane Evacuation Zones and Evacuation Centers 

The urban world is clearly observable as uncontainable. The image above can stretch to every coast south. Like most things that grow and behave this way, they begin and end, grow and decay. Nothing shows how wasteful urban development is like big storms and fires.

Natural systems that react to storms and fires leave nothing behind that does not have a use in the renewal of the larger system. The detritus of urban decay is not an abnormality or malfunction without use or function; however, corporations such as Waste Management (WM) do not fill critical observers with confidence. The best yet sad statistical example is in WM’s 2106 Sustainability Report that suggests a 36% waste recovery rate (see: Video below).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWquu80yngc]

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” R. Buckminster Fuller

On the other hand, if the city is a container with firm geography, bounded like a water bottle or one of WM’s containers, it defines its users. Accordingly, it will develop to assimilate severe challenges, but not without a preset of physical parameters. Whether water, waste, or something else, if not organized for use in a container of some kind, some remain unknown. Of necessity, the city must become renewable as a whole with reusable components.

One of the people working on getting from the unknown to the known is Michael Storper, author of Keys to the City. He is an economic geographer contributing to our understanding of urban life. He separates “growth” from “economic development” using quality of life and standard of living measures such as real per capita income (nationally), distribution of revenue (locally), and social structures as they attach to income levels nationally and locally.

Storper’s data-rich keys are from highly urbanized places in the United States and Great Britain. The information reveals combinations of urban structures that describe the impact of innovation, agglomeration, or clustering that produce stable urban economies that also offer amenities (e.g., schools, tolerant neighbors, recreation, mobility) to produce choices. Some come with hard economic data for analysis about the softer measures of preference. An obvious top preference is affordable housing in urban areas. In NYC, inclusionary housing loans and square foot zoning bonus rules produce housing for low- and moderate-income households for occupation in the same building and market alongside high-income families.

Two families of three, one earning $63,000 and another $280,000 (2017), will have rent they can afford in the apartments of a multi-family building in a city and neighborhood where both households’ skills are interconnected (See ELLA and Inclusionary Zoning). Using a thirty percent of household income as a measure of affordability, one rent would be around $1,500/month, and the other would be $7,700/month. Arguments examining the drawbacks and benefits of this arrangement are ubiquitous in the urban sociological and economic literature. No matter the depth of each argument, the designers of the containers, define the contents.

Innovations such as inclusionary zoning and similar programs push standard market forces toward choice with civility in a workable urban proximity. Stroper’s observations regarding this kind of urban development identify regional land use patterns as “territorially unequal” exhibiting two types of inequality. The first is that urbanization is itself a form of extreme unevenness: it packs people, firms, information, and wealth into small territories.” It also concentrates poverty, many types of physical deterioration, and social inequality.

Both empirical and statistical evidence of social fragmentation and economic displacement recurs with routine persistence. In the case where low- and moderate-income households live successfully “next door” to higher income households who help assure stable economic settings is a product of policy. The housing market is a “teacher”, but in the experience of a lightly contained city such as New York, it takes far too long to recognize and separate the right lessons from the wrong.

Stroper’s second type of unevenness in urban development is statistically observable over thirty to forty years. Individual metropolitan regions throughout the world undergo considerable turbulence in their fates, rising and falling in the income ranks, and gaining or loosing population at different rates. None of this is bad. Ever since the invention of capital, this behavior is the world’s most successful development process. Trial and error, up and down, back and forth, here or there is how the world works. Stopping the human part if it is stupid and besides, it is not doable. Turning the earth into a machine is well underway. The application of conservation of energy rules, on the other hand, says there is no way to isolate the energy of a machine system. While theoretically possible, conserving energy within a machine is not possible. In short, it stops.

Declarations develop an emotional capacity for change on behalf of family and community, a town or city, a state and nation, province and commonwealth. The following declarations describe qualities of life known to the people and organizations of the dense urban environment. Each one strengthens the purpose of ‘the city’ for more effective technology, continuous innovation, informed public policy, and global urban leadership.

Density:

1. Produces High Levels of Collaboration
2. Sustains Micro-Change
3. Establishes the Essential Boundary
4. Defines Human Abiotic Interdependence
5. Embodies Intelligence
6. Advances Diversity
7. Assures Well-Being, Viability, and Resilience

Dense Urban Places and Collaboration

Governments tackle the complexity of urbanization on the drifting structures of accountability. Harnessing the interests of people who take actions that assure a recurring measure of certainty and security, love, and family require environments that support collaboration—measures of accountability attempt to determine the need to renew leadership. The implementation builds contracts between the structures of governance and the collective power of community action. Collaboration is how and why places matter. The benefits of collaboration are expanding rapidly.

The development and preservation of a neighborhood is an ancient practice. The physical conditions required are well-developed. The social contracts guiding implementation are renewable. We know how to advance combinations of physical and social processes and sustain lasting human relationships. Yet, there remains a far-reaching list of massive urban failures built on this hubris. What is missing? It is the belief in the power of small change and, equally important, the ability to capture the knowledge of all of them all at once. This is described best as the fierce urgency of now.  Nevertheless, The Report believes we have reasons for renewed hope.

Dense Urban Places Sustain Micro-Change

Micro change is a substance people must know and feel to achieve goals. Setting objectives creates the instruments of action. In dense urban places, goals and objectives are immediate, occur in continuous succession, and produce substantial results. The achievements of multiple micro-change makers reduce the pressures inherent to adaptation. In this sense, they have strategic control. This new reality of connective governance will grow.

Imagine a neighborhood filled with demolished building sites and abandoned places. Then witness the arrival of small groups planting gardens, attempting to occupy and rebuild abandoned housing, and demanding accountability for the cause. The authoritative role of government in this context includes developing legitimacy for these actions. As a direct means of assuring public safety includes the preservation of rights. Preservation efforts describe many New York City neighborhoods from 1975 to the early 1990s. Since then, many global factors have brought assets to NYC, but the most important and creative are community reactions to the failure of this investment. A vast range of micro-change makers exhibits the vitality of diversity through moms, dads, and kids, students of many professions, artists, and visionaries of all kinds and cultures imaginable.  This new reality of connective communities and cultures will grow.

Urban Density Establishes Firm Boundaries

Even though the strategies for adapting to change are mainly personal, the more considerable organizational demands for enabling conditions to remain. The progression from individual to group may occur in a vast expansion of urban places or the isolation of just one. Still, the opportunity for goodness is only evident with the assurance of survival for both. The complexity of individuals and organizations is a good thing, but the goodness acquired dissipates due to a lack of an yrbab boundary.  There needs to be a firm urban boundary.

Imagine how creative a city would have become if it had a firm and fixed boundary within which the goal is to encourage unlimited growth. What remains of the wilderness outside of this boundary and from which humanity ascended to its present condition would stand?  Humanity must know and learn that many more lessons of natural diversity are on offer. Each of them will be essential and a prerequisite. The wild/urban duality requires full development to survive with dignity.

Abiotic and Interdependent

Life emerges in environments that make intelligence possible. Change is upon new life instantly and upon its place among many others in a vast array. Whether it is the rise of the industrial revolution’s black moth or the loss of Bengal tigers in the shreds of the wild, urbanization is the chauffeur in the express lane of change. Human awareness of this includes the emergence of a global knowing that the city is the truth about being human, yet we stand in its sunlight with only a vague notion of it. Nevertheless, the city links ideas and turns them into action.  It injects a bright optimism into the shadows cast by doubters that prefer to stay alone in the wilderness of our past.

Recognition of actions in the common good occurs instantly, and is most frequent in dense urban environments. Imagine holding this data among a group of people with great power and knowledge. Suddenly, you recognize one of the decisions by the members of this group will announce to another group – natural selection discards you. You are not selected. The horror of this is evolutionarily unknowable but, it would destroy everything.

Dense urban systems collect the experience of the whole with great rapidity. It can sense justice and injustice instantly. The new collective nature of it leads to a pathway of action that adds balance to the human development landscape. Please prefer this to the acquisition of power alone.

Urban Density Creates Intelligence

Platforms that link everyone to everyone else on every imaginable question embrace the joy of problem-solving as a natural extension of human emotional experience and curiosity. The arduous and combative nature of hard science, on the other hand, can suck the oxygen out of a room and, in that exact moment, reveal the importance of helplessness. When it comes to environmental intelligence, common sense rules provide balance by adding the reflections of ordinary observers. Social networks support immediate innovations that do not have the patience to await the proof of science. Platform technologies support small changes in quick succession. They build consensus for action, and because of this, control discards the “big stick” of efficacy in favor of simply knowing how to make goodness recur.

Imagine the way science introduces complex questions about genetically modified organisms (GMO) or greenhouse gases (GHG). The demand from the commonplace grows loud with uncertainty regarding the injection of these things into their lives. At this point, govern the strict rules of science with rules of common sense. In this realm, the placeless structure of social networks will select physical places with the resource allocations needed to implement a vital social action, resolve an urgent economic problem or define routine political questions. The cycle of knowledge from experience to reflection is whole. This is a new form of intelligence.  It is prompt due to the connected activity of people and organizations in dense urban places.

Urban Density Advances Diversity

Our ability to adapt to our place in the world and to meet our needs depends on the structures of leadership built into our society. The expertise born of this legacy facilitates the acquisition of skills and presents them without compromise to all observers as thresholds onto pathways. The policies on how or why any of them would open as a choice to everyone have changed to favor diversity without the dissolution of differences. This idea is on a near equal footing with the legacy of privilege.  It will bond them in a powerful new way.

Imagine ways in which the history of leadership that formed the legacies of society will change to become acts of inclusion. The services required that enable accountability are those derived from the roots of adaptation. Continuous and unrelenting investment in social capital formation and community-based organization is a combination capable of changing the traditional practices of urban preservation and development. It will build powerful sets of helping relationships that will bring reciprocity to the urgency of thousands of teaching and learning situations that require immediate and practical action.

Density Supports Well-Being, Viability, and Resilience

We build to control but only control what we can make recur. The urban habitat is destructive of complex natural systems. Unlike the human habitat, natural systems operate on sunlight, recycle everything, reward cooperation, and rely on diversity. The human pathways to this end remain ineffective, but there is hope because the challenge to secure human well-being has never been more significant.

Imagine the drive for urban resilience as the prerequisite for sustainability. The dense urban environment fully isolates natural system habitats. A new urban world can form in ways that are far more protective and respectful of the wilderness.  We will build the means to leave the wild.  By making this so, doing no harm will recur.

Summary in Fifty Words

Dense urban environments offer high levels of collaboration that support quality microchanges within physically firm boundaries. yet flexible economic regions. Fueled by diversity and interdependence, this creates a unique urban intelligence in the abiotic and human world of urban life, and there is one prime rule. First, do no harm.

NOTE:
Please forgive these explorations if you have stumbled upon them. These platforms force clarification of weak ideas.

cross-link to NYC Plan 2030

Unrestrained Outside & Unlimited Insides.

How does density save the wilderness, support sustainable agriculture, and do not harm purpose?  If the problem is defined within the global colonization and destruction narrative, then the promotion of investment in every technical solution required to sustain centuries of powerful economic growth is driven by population, but not the quality of life. Density offers quality in every aspect.

The arrival of a world food production and distribution market system provides the most insight into globalization. Like the known environmental impacts of the global energy market, industrial agriculture is also open to similar disruption levels assigned to human error or lack of restraint. The dangers linked to one-crop production failures are well known. On a balance sheet, the cost vaporizes easily by mitigating threats with cheap poisons and GMO technology, and crop insurance.

Two True Observers 

Helena Norberg-Hodge (link is to video) examines the status of profit vs. growth in agriculture. The path sustained thru 10,000 years of human development has depended on the role of water and air to “sweep away” the detritus of human effort and endeavor. With urbanization, a new path is required as one place’s smoke is in the wind of another.

The arguments for change on this subject are plentiful. Still, they spend just twenty minutes with Helena (video via TEDx) as she sums up the chief complaints and neatly outlines the work required to advance the human capacity for re-adaptation and diversity, beginning with food. It needs to be close and thus local. It needs to be part of life, not a store shelf experience with store shelves.

Martha Noble’s presentation (link is to video) at the National Conference to End Factory Farming in October 2011 presents the devil in the details of an impending catastrophe that underlines the Norberg-Hodge argument. Simply put, the third-largest fund and single largest program of the Farm Bill is crop insurance acquired by the largest farms.² Put directly, ‘the people’ will pay for failures and add starvation to the ledger as the people’s assigned risk served.

Ms. Noble’s general observation of the USDA came in a closing remark paraphrased as follows: In 1995, when visiting the USDA for the first time with some questions about the agency, she was proudly handed a pamphlet that explained how Iowa farmers could now receive food stamps. The national policy governing the finest farmland in America subsidizes people’s access to fruit and vegetables while assuring cheap feed grain for cows and pigs.

When an action in response to a loss (such as a majority of sustainable family farms) turns into a reaction to an unknown, the change caused is well known. It begins with denial, often followed by anger. After that, a process of bargaining begins to stimulate an assessment of potential losses that include the possibility of total forfeiture. This condition is the known psychological state of an individual facing a crisis. Without a doubt, this state is shared by many groups of people who fully understand the metrics of devouring world resources at exponential and incommensurable rates.³ Finally, there is the group hell-bent on serving this ability with industrial technologies.

Coming to know that the earth has a “limited carrying capacity” and becoming able to do something about it locally is the prime existential question of human history. William Vogt put it this way.

“Until this understanding becomes an intrinsic part of our thinking and wields a powerful influence on our formation of national and international policies, we are scarcely likely to see in what direction our destiny lies.”

William Vogt on “carring capacity” (15 May 1902 – 11 July 1968)

It is as if we are asked to choose between two roles. The first is Donald Worster, who documents a careful celebration of Nature as a vital behavior. The second is that of Edward Abbey, who demands that our responsibility includes scraping the scum off the top of Nature’s brews, starting with people that do irreparable damage.

Given the continuous growth model and a market system designed to serve every need, the threat of a global “overshoot” is trumped far too easily by the governance question. When every need that can be satisfied with capital excludes public reforms and protections, the growth process begins to fail at local markets that eventually ripple nationally—the warning T this perspective holds.

The dangerous impacts are proven. A conciliatory approach that keeps the spread of urbanism within a limited area can gain strength as a mitigating activity. The trade-off offers what people want. A tightly designed suburb with quiet natural areas with a “walkable downtown surrounded by small farms capable of meeting 80% of its food needs.

Within this environment, the unknown upper limit of the earth’s population becomes a matter of selection within a human decision-making framework that serves each life to the fullest. The vital aspect of this potential is how it offers a way to overcome the mistaken sense of natural selection, not because we see it as inhuman. Still, the process involved involves thousands of years. The more generational and corporate side of this coin is how starvation can grow to be a massive business.

Retaining the urban potential for unlimited capital growth is grounded in housing and the design for urban living. This formation of an “unlimited inside” also gives way for an “unlimited outside.” Like the vast diversity of the wild from which humans rose, the potential for an equivalent natural urban diversity not only becomes possible it can be guaranteed. The balance and trade process within dense urban communities becomes the primary focus of the human experience, food included.

I would argue for a millennial process that would, in one millennium. Allow for the “unlimited outside” to become a dramatically untouched wilderness. The challenge is to keep within the urban framework all of the energy resources required while expelling little or nothing into the wild. A vision such as this and all attending “ifs, and’s and buts” need the comparison to the existing conditions briefly described as follows:

The demographic dominance of cities coupled with rapid lateral expansion has led to the present “mega-disorder” status of urbanization. Vast cohorts of social inequality embody the leapfrog fragmentation of personified settlements. Recent increases in natural and human settlement disruption and destruction produce higher transnational and regional migration rates. The lack of formal structures that can accept public and private sectors in problem-solving roles on this issue is critical.  At present, there is nothing to enable urban development planning that mitigates health insecurities or reduces crime by means other than incarceration. The most serious of these mega-disorders is the narrowing of pathways for a growing portion of the global population to experience freedom from fear (fill in the blank) policies.

Cities appear on the global agenda for the first important time at the 1976 Habitat I in Vancouver, Canada. An effective urban place agenda has yet to form in the United States as it remains stuck in the spread city quagmire, seduced by cheap land and money, and hopelessly addicted to oil. The urban agenda can develop from these initiatives but remain an unlikely source that would force the city to look in on itself.³

The editors of an excellent book on Food and the Mid-Level Farm subject make an advantageous point of the importance of limiting urbanization. As farm sizes increase, the main economic strength source for the small and mid-sized farms is direct market operations. The growth of farmer’s markets in major urban centers retains a level of honesty and accountability that the immense corporate farm, production, and distribution systems cannot provide. Also, the land held must be nearby and small. Mid-sized farmers can be paid for “back-loading” urban products and a wide range of conservation services and practices that assure ecological diversity, clean water tables, forestry, and land management. Leadership on the principles and practices of sustainability began with local farming. Not sustaining the value of this fact presents a grave threat to the quality of all urban life.

1. See “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin, Science, December 13, 1968  Website: http://www.garretthardinsociety.org.
2. Despite the industry’s spin, concentrated animal feeding operations are not the only way to raise livestock and poultry. Thousands of farmers and ranchers integrate crop production, pastures, or forages with livestock and poultry to balance nutrients within their operations and minimize off-farm pollution through conservation practices and land management. Yet these sustainable producers, who must compete with factory farms for market share, receive comparatively little or no public funding for their sound management practices.’ Martha Noble, Chief Policy Associate for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition  Website, is here.
3. As defined by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyeraben (1962)

Human cognitive mapping abilities are well documented. The addition of GPS devices to this research yield maps of everything that moves in the urban world among the stuff that doesn’t move. Adding urban spatial knowledge from multiple sources to private or individual navigations demands the anticipation of synchronicities that will lead to the design of higher quality urban densities.

The members of 21st c. communities gain a unique spatial knowledge of the earth. They were a long-term minority until recently, but today share an enormous responsibility. Why? New, high-quality urban densities will connect to various larger urban systems. Urban dwellers carry sophisticated cognitive mapping abilities and recognize the importance of connecting to larger urban systems using multiple mobility services.

Learning the patterns of our solar system, or knowing the feel of heightened winds or the sight of darkening clouds, allows us to grasp ideas about a possible weather future. Of course, the human brain makes sense of the world with increased sophistication. Still, in evolutionary terms, space/time pattern recognition and the creation of new patterns combine as perceptive elements that yield unending knowledge.

With prediction comes a sense of hope and security, comfort, and ultimately, the idea that we cannot only design worlds where everything works together, but the inclusion of unexpected, surprising events also offers a promise of imminent insight. This joyful, frightening novelty of human space knowledge leads to human changes’ main issues. Following is a rock-solid, case in point example:

Williamsburg’s new apartment towers developed in the late 90s along the East River. The towers provide enough density to support a waterborne transit across the East River. However, the “L” Train offers transit for thousands of commuters accesses to a vast network of urban places through a tunnel below the river to a considerable transit hub at Union Square. In Williamsburg, the Bedford Avenue Station trip is 10 minutes, and from the Greenpoint Station, seven minutes. Thousands of people can arrive at these destinations per hour with these headways. Over 200,000 use it daily, and it has the potential to double that volume.

As the tunnel reaches its 100^th year, the call for an 18 month shut down to prevent the possibility of catastrophic failure brought chaos and eventual capitulation to that possibility.  The neighborhood’s housing rents and prices dropped, some businesses moved to more stable locations during months of public hearings, and MTA stimulated anxiety.

The public mandate is to run the subway system based on about $6.2 billion commuter fares.  It costs 15 billion to run NYC’s 24/7/365 transit system in fat round numbers. The gap comprises a complex arrangement of dedicated taxes drawn from a 12 county metro-region fund and relatively small combinations of gas, mortgage recording, and payroll mobility taxes, along with a portion of the fees paid in tolls taxi fares, and vehicle registrations. A growing list of revenue opportunities is constantly explored. The details expose the recognition of a far broader responsibility for this system’s health among all people moving through the region to access its many advantages.

When Columbia and Cornell’s engineering departments developed an engineering alternative to an 18-month repair shutdown, two issues were shown. Aside from revealing a wealth of urban university brainpower, the first reaction was a sigh of relief with trepidation followed by vast criticism of the MTA’s inept rollout of the issue for public review.  There are many reasons for significant capital development planning, as if agencies were in a “running from the bulls” contest.  In 2018, the MTA:

1. …operates at a deficit larger than manly nations — $32 billion projected to climb indefinitely. 
2. …has a century-old system, with a “fix when broken” $350 million track/signal repair plan and a long term need for $6 billion in major repairs.
3. …its strategy to upgrade all 468 stations only has 51 left, but line failures continue to threaten passenger’s sense of well-being. (Twitter search #fucktheMTA for proof)
4. …has many masters with controls over a revenue stream embedded in a quagmire of bureaucratic decision making.

Finally, there are many more reasons for community development and transit planners to dissect system improvements. Still, the central reason for this chaos rests squarely on the lack of vision about what America is today at the Federal level. The United States is a metropolitan nation. It is not well-defined by the 50 states. Its power comprises over 380 multi-state regions that represent most of its economic capacity.

The United States has developed complex urban systems that must be looked at in the same way scientists examine the heavens, discover the earth. For example, science continues to measure to study the dynamics of the earth’s atmosphere to predict its weather. The dense urban regions of the planet deserve a similar level of knowledge, but this time it is about human dynamics. I have questions that need answers:

1. How do we acquire specific kinds of spatial knowledge as individuals in communities and use these abilities to make creative, but undamaging spaces?

The spatial knowledge expressed by an athlete’s skills is a good example.  If these abilities are specialized in a community of athletes, a team is created. In this context, high levels of spatial control will occur in a prescribed space such as a “field of play” with a boundary of some kind and rules for interaction.

1. What happens when urban designers, planners, and architects face the task of rebuilding and restoring a place for a community?

The skills acquired and deployed in connecting design professionals to this ‘field of play” require many specialized abilities and a wide range of teams. So, indeed, something more than laying out the dimensions of the field of play is needed.

To begin a brief exploration of these two questions, an idea expressed by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in “The Prelude — Book Seventh” is helpful.  In this long poem, he reflects on his residence in London and midway comes to the following extraordinary observation of urban life.

How often in the overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd and said
Unto myself, ‘The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;

Just over a century after William Wordsworth wrote of London, Arthur C. Clark’s first novel described human potential and the city as inseparable in The City and the Stars (1956).  After a billion years, the earth had two cities, one of Nature (Lys) and technology (Diaspar). At about the same time, J.G. Ballard’s Billennium (1962) saw “…ninety-five percent of the population trapped in vast urban conurbations. The countryside, and such, no longer existed. Every square foot of ground sprouted a crop of one type or another. The one-time fields and meadows of the world were in effect, factory floors.”

In the center of the century bracketed by Wordsworth and Clark, we find Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Their popularity rests on an American ideal wherein the preeminence of the individual spirit may require a collective vision. Yet, in trying to accomplish this, the individual is weakened, even destroyed. We are reminded by many at the end of this century to remember that the earth cannot “know” of such desolation, but if it did, it could smell regeneration in the moist breath of decay as its source of renewal.

The city is a historical exaggeration made contemporary. The old image is a complex of high buildings surrounded by a broad white apron of single-family, tree-filled towns. The smell of carelessness spills out of day-to-day business affairs, and workers grow more downtrodden and ever more desperate in their daily travels. The city, defined by vast lunatic growth, managed by torrents of savagery, disguises a flimsy gentility, the criminalities of wealth, and the wastefulness of a cancer budding from a few wild cells. It is not the cancer cell’s fault. It is the nature of the beast.

A more contemporary view of the urban world is to see stop, take stock of itself and end its spillage of waste and poisons into land, sea, and air. Once encapsulated, teams of influential individuals will build, restore and develop the city. They will not be part of the massive social collective much feared in the past, but they will share a common goal, to create a way for the wild to be forever wild, one that glides over still mountains and appears in dreams.

The idea of creating a Lys, Diaspar, or something else, cannot be accomplished by an organization or groups of them. First, a network is better at defining the complex layers of urban life. Second, a network can discover and establish the values essential to successful change. Third, networks improve access to primary resources, essentially people with information, ideas, advice, and connections. Fourth, networks influence decision-makers on policy questions in time with sophisticated combinations of analysis and advocacy. Finally, networks are a lasting, self-renewing driver of their theory of change.

The network I am a part of seeks a more extensive system focused on one issue and one word. The core of it is the catastrophe of urbanization as it stands today, and the one word forward is “density.”

Being in the Network on Density

Networks have multiple scopes of work and thinking that produce new “linked scopes” with considerable ease. The overall rapidity of these actions creates the capacity for evaluations that advance the goals of dimension leaders. The linked-scope form of structure yields a direct measure of energy. Each connection represents a flow of information that had an enabling property through the exhibit of a real-world example as the desired effect in the moment or the creation of a specific component.

Standing alone, objects such as the tunnel from Brooklyn to Manhattan for the “L-Train” become digital objects of the urban core.  They can be added to as “tags and categories” of a network as objects. Each tag becomes part of an exponential encouragement for similar levels of change. The connections from one to many align to form pathways built on community adaptations that respect cultural differences and sensitivities. 

Whether a change is in a language or a material thing, a law or a professional practice, networks respond to social change agents capable of shaping active social systems. A booklet from a nonprofit network group included in a presentation entitled Net Gains is available here: www.in4c.net

Have a look if you want to have your team (or just you) become part of a network on the question of urbanization and Density, leave a reply to suggest a role.

From 1800 to 2000, planning, engineering, and architecture, served to create a vast expansion of the urban world. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that this work’s consequences turned elusively unpleasant.

Rex L. Curry

In 2010, over eighty-five percent of Americans and half the world lived in the midst of the urban world, yet it remains a vague notion. Despite the super-usefulness of dense urban living, the word “city” stays threatening. From low-density suburbs to the towers of Manhattan’s Eastside, the city has to work, it is all we have, and they don’t work very well.

All settlements have finite political boundaries that yield the average number of people (or workforce) per square mile, kilometer, hectare, or acre per year or decade by day and night.  Density is a ratio of a building’s size to the lot area.  It can include a percentage of total floor area expressed as green space, parking lot, setback, even balcony.  Determining the potential of density in these places starts with mass measures. The test will be if the services essential to well-being. The integration of self-awareness with community awareness in this way demands the urban world to stand before Nature and an essential, untouchable Wilderness, bow and ask forgiveness.

Medically, the term “critical” means ‘short term.’  Its frequent use in the 21st century is telling on many fronts. The epidemiological characteristics of urban settlements present a series of disasters.  I see novelty and opportunity here because only a third of the earth’s landscape is urbanized, and each part of it is instructive of an adaptation to restraint.  The densest regions are near a natural resource and an ocean.  They range from heartbreaking failures to soaring enclosures of fully actualized human potential. This duality is now squarely before the change-makers.

Without a stable boundary, the densities of metro areas such as New York or Los Angeles remain abstract.  The articles tagged “density” look for ways to make that boundary. Draw a line around “the city” and stop it in its tracks. Everything inside that line will become super urban with unlimited potential. All found outside will become less and less so.  A win/win for all is implied.