Monday, March 19, 2012

The Age of the Generalist

Over the last few weeks I have been struck by how stuck professionals are in their expertise... The most confronting of late has been the medical profession with whom my wife and I are working towards the birth of our first child; negotiating our way between the mid-wife-led natural birth community and the conventional medical fraternity of obstetricians, medical aids and hospitals. Both camps seem to lack the flexibility of thought to adapt and allow us to walk a path between them, drawing from each side as it suits our particular need and preferences.

This same inflexibility of thought is something I have witnessed in the engineering profession and it appears to be of epidemic proportions in our 'specialist' areas of knowledge. Our modern approach to most things has been focused on increasing levels of specialisation to the point where there are few real mavericks/thinkers/jokers/game-changers left on the implementation side of life. By the time a professional can call themselves that (read engineer, lawyer, doctor etc) they will have studied and/or been a candidate-whatever for at least 7 and as much as 10 or 12 years... No wonder they feel the need to hold that hard-won ground so fiercely...

And in this stagnant marsh of specialist turf-war thinking, the shining lights are the people who can tell the whole story, bringing in the relevant areas of detail as required, but all the time keeping a broad narrative which reflects real life in all its complexity. It is these yarn-spinners who are the real hidden gems, who keep our disabled institutions limping along with promises of a new story.

In the sustainable design business we spend a lot of time talking about integrated design, yet our approach is still heavily focused on specialists each doing their bit (while at least talking to each other) we have not yet leveraged the power of true generalists and story tellers in our approach to design. In other words, we are getting to grips with multi-disciplinary approaches, but havent yet got to the trans-disciplinary approach of those disciplines which pursue an understanding of societies, communities and eco-systems and can put design in context. And context, my friends, is everything.

Which is why I'm looking forward to a new age; the age of the generalist... I want people who have enough understanding of the details to keep the specialists honest; but as a priority are able to provide context to design. We should look in the fields of anthropology, ethics, peace studies, ecology and the arts for those thinkers with the breadth of understanding to ask not just what is possible, but also what is right, appropriate and fitting. People who can describe our preferred futures in broad terms and help navigate the path to get there.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Missing Pieces of the Urban Puzzle

The start of 2012 in Cape Town has seen a huge focus on urban and design issues; Design Indaba, Future Cape Town, the Cape Town Partnership, Modila Trust, Portside, 22 on Bree, Convention Centre Phase II and the City of Cape Town tenders for urban renewal nodes in Kapteinsklip and Athlone Power Station have all raised the urban profile significantly (and politically).

As might be expected, urban design issues have played their role in this discourse - density, mobility, urban renewal etc; but from my perspective, there are some significant pieces of the puzzle missing in planning for future cities.

On the face of it, the new urbanists seem to have it all sorted out: go to war on urban sprawl, shopping malls and car-based transport... Densify, invest in functional public transport and cycle ways, commit to pedestrianised urban malls and build good public space.

The urban design community seem to be well across this in terms of the design interventions and priorities for new urban spaces. Development corridors, mixed use ratios, thresholds at which public transport becomes viable and amenities for urban living are all well covered and we see them coming out in some of the world's leading cities. Architects have even started talking about context at the urban scale, which is a sure indication, of changing attitudes...

But we have absolutely no clue of how to quantify in design terms, and therefore design for, two key elements of urban spaces:

1. Our infrastructure requirements are only considered in terms of peak demand - we have no culture of quantifying the resource consumption and waste stream implications of urban design decisions; and

2. Our understanding of critical mass and nature of green space required for effective ecosystem health, biodiversity and ecosystem services is woefully inadequate.

What this means is that in terms of the key environmental factors of sustainability, our urban designers are effectively flying blind. When faced with some of the excellent work on resilience coming out of Sweden like the Nine Planetary Boundaries concept, we don't have the design tools for quantifying our cities' performance in resource or ecological terms.

And so we revert back to the building scale, and limit our focus on sustainability to demand mitigation at the building level. And this is the place many of our leading urbanists are stuck.

One of the benefits of urban-scale ecology and resource intensity models are that they provide a tool for facilitating integrated urban design, much like the detailed building simulation tools of thermal and daylight modelling did for architects and building engineers. This then opens the door for the design of integrated, decentralised urban infrastructure, which in turn unlocks the potential for nested systems to optimise the use of waste streams. And therein lies one of the secrets to getting our cities functional at a resources level as well as at an interactive level.

Even those of us with a passion for cities must acknowledge that we don't have a clear picture of what our cities should look like in a severely resource-constrained world. Energy, food security, supply chain and water issues are typically put into the 'too hard' box because they rely on such far flung, complex systems for their integrity. Our only response seems to be 'reduce demand for resources', yet with no evidence for this actually happening.

The first step to building smart cities must be providing urban designers with the critical performance models that allow design to be directed by resource limitations as well as social outcomes. Once we understand city morphology in resource and ecological terms as well as urban terms, we will be a big step closer to the sustainable cities of our imagination.