The City: Past, Present and Future

Transcription

1 Report: The City: Past, Present and Future MND Auditorium, Singapore 14 September 2015 Contents 2 Video Link 2 Post Event Summary Report 8 Highlights from Q&As 10 About the Speakers 11 About the CLC Lecture Series

2 Click here to view the full lecture video The City: Past, Present and Future MND Auditorium, Singapore 14 September 2015 Speaker: Professor Luis Bettencourt Professor Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute delivered a CLC Lecture on his research into how we can anticipate the future of cities by examining the interaction of people and systems in cities today. He explained his work, where his team studies past and present cities around the planet. By understanding cities through a systems approach, such as technological, social and economic systems, the research he undertakes aims to discover how different cities operate and the kinds of similarities they share. He began by showing a space camera s video capturing snapshots of Earth, where we see vividly how most nations are urbanised, and how rural places are also becoming urban. By 2025, the largest city in the world, predicated on population trends, will be Tokyo with around million people. The largest cities are also expected to far surpass current figures, some with populations of around 50 million, while population growth in developed regions will become more stable. Large cities cannot create their own energy and food. Thus, Professor Bettencourt suggested that cities of the future would be characterised by a lot more exchanges of goods and people. They will be more dynamic, somewhat unstable, as well as characterised by having more Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 2

3 opportunities, he said. Theme of Complex Systems When urbanisation happens, one cannot just look at systems in one dimension, he said, such as the physical city, the economic city, and the social city. One has to understand how these factors come together to form a city. For instance, even though rich societies are always urban, the opposite is not always true. Presenting a chart on GDP per capita vs urban population, he showed that while urbanisation is the trend for cities, they are not necessarily wealthy. When we look at cities, we look at them as places for technological opportunities, which are clean, healthy and smart, he said. One extreme example is Masdar city in the UAE, with everything from use of solar panels to strict water recycling and transportation infrastructure planned to the most minute detail. At the other end of the spectrum is Lagos, Nigeria, which has little engineering, haphazard planning or no planning at all, vehicular constraints and obstacles to human development. Both extreme planning and absent planning are in a sense, not ideal, he said. Modelling and Data [Real cities, present] situations in which several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly connected ways. Jane Jacobs Cities are therefore complex adaptive systems. Professor Bettencourt listed a number of aspects that show up this complex system: Heterogeneity: Diversity of people and organisations Interconnectivity: Everything is connected in networks Scaling: Cities of different sizes have different problems Circular-causality: Cause and effect are mixed Development: Cities change in open-ended ways Next, showing a chart on productivity and city size across time (between US metropolitan areas from 1969 to 2009), he illustrated that population size has an impact on income earned. People earn a little more in bigger cities; a doubling of city size translates to approximately 20 30% increase in salaries. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 3

4 Intensification of Cities How does a city interact with its people, space and infrastructure? Professor Bettencourt said that one could abstract these networks and put them back into the city. Imagine tracking a single city dweller and the experiences the person goes through each day, e.g., transactions, encounters, etc. In larger cities, this happens in a more accelerated way, e.g., more interactions more quickly. The densification of cities in space translates to social and economic intensification. When we calculate these interactions, in larger cities, land areas grow slower while land values grow much faster meaning cities need to grow vertically to provide more land. Via illustrative cellphone network charts, we also see that in larger cities, people tend to have more interactions with more people. Intensification of cities also leads to proliferation of uses of space, as exemplified by dense cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. This also introduces greater diversity, which sometimes makes space harder to manage. The Future of Cities Professor Bettencourt suggested that cities of the future could be more equitable, greener and faster. As to what choices have to be made and what technology needs to be used, there are already some examples globally. For instance, Germany has built smaller solar cities that harness more solar power than they require and this has allowed them to manage pollution differently. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 4

5 To Professor Bettencourt, the most important transportation innovation in the decade actually lies in the smartphone. Fine-grained coordinates allow people to transport things as well as commute more efficiently today. Using smartphones for travel has made the uses of knowledge management more critical and apparent. At the other extreme, there is also the probability of residences being further divided according to income. Increasingly, as transport and services become more efficient, the faces of the poor and the rich can be very different, and even more unequal. Today, we already see that New York City has the same income disparity as Zimbabwe. It will be interesting to consider the impacts of unequal distribution of services to different neighbourhoods Will this lead to higher costs, better standards of living, and more time to do other things? Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 5

6 Highlights from Q&A Moderator Jan Vasbinder moderating the Question & Answer session The Q&A session was moderated by Jan Wouter Vasbinder, Director of Para Limes at the Nanyang Technology University, Singapore. The following are some highlights from the session: As cities become more successful, how do we deal with path dependency? In the scenario of city-states vs cities, how do national borders influence the development of a city? All complex systems are history-dependent. Professor Bettencourt said that what we have now are key ingredients to what we will have in the future. In this sense, we cannot escape path dependency. He gave the example of subway: while it can be expensive to rebuild, the key is to have leeway to build something else along the way. Singapore is good at this, with investments in infrastructure over a sufficiently long time, which usually a sound investment. Infrastructure, over a long time, always pays for itself, he said. On the other hand, local governments in the US, for instance, have a very challenging time balancing the books year on year, when instead they really need to address long-term challenges. On city-states and borders, the main crux is the free movement of people, or to have a selective environment where people may come and go as they please. Singapore is a bit different in this respect, he said; it is a hub in a region with a lot of capital and human capital growth sitting on a pretty spot [with] a good immigration policy. He raised the counter example in the EU, where one could target immigration policy at a certain type of people, creating an underclass, e.g., Turkey. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 6

7 Is there a tipping point to the growth of cities? For instance, Mexico Valley grew as a lot of people came in, where they built their own mansions and drainage systems. Is there a possibility of investing too much in such organisation? Professor Bettencourt remarked that this has indeed happened and continues to happen in many cities, but this does not usually have catastrophic ends or failures. Often it is the lack of water, or violence that destroys a city, but even then most cities are often resilient enough to pull through, as in the case of Latin American in past decades. For example, New Orleans has bounced back after Hurricane Katrina and people are returning to the city. Therefore, while there could be tipping points, they are in fact rare in practice, because people and organisations are almost always adapting to changes. For old societies like the Mayan civilisation, not very much was known about them, their local hinterland and their trade routes. Among these factors could be the reason why they were more susceptible to local disasters and government failures. Today, cities are much more resilient to local problems due to delocalisation of many resources. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 7

8 About the Speakers Speaker: Professor Luis BETTENCOURT Professor of Complex Systems Santa Fe Institute Luis was trained as a theoretical physicist, and has worked extensively on cities and urbanization. His research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predicative ways, informed by the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. His research interests also include the modelling of innovation and sustainability in developing human societies, the dynamics of infectious diseases and aspects of general information processing in complex systems. He has authored over 100 scientific papers and several edited books, and also regularly reviews papers for leading journals in Interdisciplinary Science, Physics, Urban Studies, Neuroscience, Epidemiology, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Moderator: Jan Wouter VASBINDER Director, Para Limes Nanyang Technological University Jan started his professional career as a researcher in a nuclear laboratory, and has worked in the nuclear industry in Israel and the Netherlands. He has held the appointment of Attaché for Science and Technology in Washington and Ottawa, and has also headed an organization responsible for developing large and long-term co-operative industry university research programmes in the Netherlands. In 2011, he became Director of NTU s Complexity Programme, which aimed to develop a Complexity Insitute at NTU. The Complexity Institute was spun-off in 2014, with the Complexity Programmme being renamed Para Limes. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 8

9 About the CLC Lecture Series The Centre for Liveable Cities was set up in 2008 by the Ministry of National Development and the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, based on a strategic blueprint developed by Singapore s Inter-Ministerial Committee on Sustainable Development. Guided by its mission to distil, create and share knowledge on liveable and sustainable cities, the Centre s work spans three main areas - Research, Capability Development, and Knowledge Platforms. The CLC Lecture Series is a platform for urban experts to share their knowledge with other practitioners Centre for Liveable Cities All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Centre for Liveable Cities. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series: The City: Past, Present and Future 9