Over millennia humankind has adapted to population growth, new technologies, and expanding trade and travel, by building and regenerating cities, which have accelerated civilisation. The 1980s marked a pivotal moment in global urbanization, driven by two interconnected trends.
In developed countries, a re-urbanisation process began following several decades of deindustrialisation where many cities had lost population, hollowed out, and declined. Then, fuelled by the growth of globally trading knowledge, information, creative, and service economies, coupled with internationally mobile and talent, the city began to exert a fresh gravitational pull. Global connections, connective infrastructures, cosmopolitan character, learned and cultural organisations, artistic vibrancy, and rich metropolitan life, led to cities being reconceived as nodes for growth, and a new quality of life offer.
At roughly the same time, inspired by the success of the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies, many developing nations started to pursue the twin paths of industrialisation with urbanisation. They shifted rapidly towards manufacturing, attracting international corporates, connecting to globalising value chains, building the infrastructures, and fostering the business climates, to support first, the transition to manufacturing, and then subsequently to services, innovation, and experience.
At the same time, other nations in the global south experienced an acceleration in rural to urban population migration driven by poverty, conflicts, agricultural failures, natural disasters, and other changes. This began the growth of urban populations independent of industrialisation, travel, or trade.
Since 1980, this ‘co-urbanisation’ wave has accelerated and unleashed a 100-year cycle that will take us to both peak human population and peak urbanisation. By 2080 the percentage of human in cities will have doubled from 40% to 80%, the number of people living in cities quadrupled from 2.3 billion to 9.3 billion. We are on a great human anthropological trek. We are an urbanising species, building a planet of cities.
Concentration, The Magic of Cities
Cities are sharing platforms. They create the possibility of the large scale collaboration of people who do not know. Concentration is the super-power of cities. It leads to common spaces, and to large-scale co-benefits, in shelter and health, food production and nutrition, energy supply and sustainability, buildings and place creation, services, and amenities. Concentration also enables and encourages network effects. It enables us to be more productive and more frugal simultaneously. It can help change behaviours, reinvent what is not working, or explore alternative ways of living. The power of concentration gives us the tools to adapt, reinvent, and make different things happen.
But concentration also has downsides. It can intensify problems such as: poverty, segregation, inequality, inflated costs, intensified carbon usage, and heat. It can also routinise violence and conflict.
Progress only results from combining concentration with intentional leadership, deep democracy, capable institutions, and skilful participation. Good urbanisation is about making concentration work, forcing us to reinforce ethical principles, reform governance systems, and bend our economic processes to larger purposes.
Rapid urbanisation should not be feared, but be embraced, shaped, and managed. Huge potential advantages come from cities in terms of innovation that drives productivity, feeds creativity, and improves quality of life. In good urbanisation, core urban systems (energy, utilities, waste, water, transport, city logistics, land use and property) aided by accelerating technologies are continuously being pushed to improve.
People concentration is the physical form is density. Density can increase connections and interactions, thus accelerating our inventiveness and ambition. While cities host the activities that most emit carbon (industry, transport, buildings) and house the assets and amenities that are the most obvious victims of rising temperatures and sea levels, cities can and must lead in reversing climate change. They have the resources, dynamism, and inventiveness required to enable the large-scale behaviour changes that can be achieved through the fusion power of innovation with concentration.
The post pandemic city and the mandate for a new social contract
The COVID19 pandemic shifted our perspective and allowed us to be agile in ways we did not previously imagine. It accelerated key behaviour trends, and abruptly halted others. Yet it was also a catalyst of social and political change. The crisis revealed the challenges of deeply unequal life chances, and uncovered reserves of social capital, which underpins urban agility.
The pandemic:
- Closed borders and paused human movement.
- Revealed the risks in global supply chains.
- Accelerated digitisation.
- Revealed massive health inequalities.
- Underlined the link between human and planetary health.
- Revised relationships between citizens and governments.
City leaders promoted flexibility in the ways our cities function by redesigning streets and public spaces, and by shifting and easing regulations. Businesses innovated in how they helped people stay productive, and how to bring them back together again. Neighbourhoods provided mutual support and rapidly created new social networks. Place leaders responsible for commercial districts, parks and green space, or open land, created new offers, codes, and activation formats to encourage people to find shared places again.
The enhanced agility illustrated how we could more deeply reform our cities, and how a new cycle of urban innovation could evolve. Combined with the fresh recognition that our cities have been harbouring inequality and maintaining carbon intensity, it created a revised mandate to lead and manage our cities differently. It demonstrated to us that the post pandemic city requires a new social contract; a guiding agenda to shape the priorities of cities and future urban innovation.
This social contract is the agreement that underpins the collective endeavours and the accepted governance in a free society. It is needed to meet common needs, and to protect the wellbeing of citizens while preserving the civil liberties, the sanctity of human life, freedom from subjugation, the desirability of opportunity for all, the right to a fair trial, and respect for privacy. It now also includes increasing responsibilities towards nature and the environment.
Urban Transition: A New Model of Change
The model of urban change we need to promote is one of innovation. We seek a revolution in urban innovation. This model of change involves taking multiple bold experiments at the local level, with engaged citizens and local partners, to deliberately reinvent our cities from the inside out.
Innovation involves discovery, experimentation, testing, prototyping, and scaling. It uses methods and approaches that are proven to accelerate innovation in ways that share risks, control costs, and optimise co-benefits. These trusted tools increase the innovation appetite across multiple communities, districts, sectors and domains by demystifying the innovation pathway. The tools of urban innovation are living laboratories, testbeds, demonstrators, accelerators, tactical urbanism, crowd sourcing, citizen panels, and many more.
It prioritises agile approaches, real time learning exchanges, and requires continuous monitoring and adjustment, with rapid feedback loops. This can only work with the core tools of trust, social capital, and critical thinking, combined with an appetite to problem solve. This is a ‘bottom-up’ pathway resourced by urban innovation tools.
This way of making change is not one that is shaped by national policies, extra taxes and regulations, fiscal reforms, new institutions, incentives for business to invest, or other well-tried tangible methods.
This model reaches its full impact when innovations are scaled and happen in many locations across a city, and where many people and organisations feel they have ownership of the process. Just like the original invention of port cities, municipal governments, market squares, sewers, underground railways, or tall buildings, enabled by elevators, effective experiments will be rapidly scaled to many cities.
In this sense, this change model is real-time, dynamic, viral, multi-scalar, and potentially exponential.
This is the imperative that represents the calling of our time.