Future Outlook on Urban Competitiveness

Future Outlookon

UrbanCompetitiveness

Challenging+

Complex+

Creative+

Courageous=

Competitive

Dr. Wendy L. SchultzDirector, Infinite Futures

Principal, SAMI ConsultingAdvisory Board, Shaping Tomorrow

Fellow, World Futures Studies FederationFellow, Royal Society for the Arts

Five Key Activitiesof Integrated Foresight

Identifypatterns ofchange:trends inchosenvariables,changes incycles, andemergingissues ofchange.

Examineprimary,secondary,tertiaryimpacts;inequities inimpacts;differentialaccess, etc.

Identify,analyze, andbuildalternativeimages ofthe future,or’scenarios.’

Identify,analyze,andarticulateimages ofpreferredfutures, or’visions.’

Identifystakeholders,resources;clarify goals;designstrategies;organizeaction; createchange.

Identify &Monitor Change

CritiqueChange

Imaginethe Possible

Envisionthe Preferred

Plan &Implement

Integrated Foresight

Why explore possible futures?

Because change happenz...

The original presentation featured an embedded video of the Zurich “Change happenz” ad, which may be found on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ktjF2bXIo&feature=related.

This was to underscore the notion that plans rest on assumptions and mental models, and change renders our assumptions and mental models no longer fit for purpose, or transforms them entirely - as acknowledged by a major global corporation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ktjF2bXIo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ktjF2bXIo&feature=related

...and fortune favours the prepared mind.

Beneficiaries.

Noh Seung-yul, age 18.2010 Malaysian Open Golf Champion

He’ll be 58 in 2050.

There are no future facts...

...and no such thing as ‘business as usual.’

Watersheds.

“3 Horizons” and Horizon Scanning

CURRENT TRENDS & DRIVERS

STATUS QUO, MOMENTUM, INERTIA

EMERGING ISSUES OF CHANGE

1st horizon

2nd horizon

3rd horizon

Time

Dominanceof paradigm / worldview

Pockets offuture found

In present

“present” “future”

Fading paradigms & technologies

Transition paradigms & technologies

Invent, Develop, Deploy

Research,Demonstrate,

Disrupt

Envision, Explore, Embody

Sharpe, Hodgson, Curry

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What are you assuming?

Working assumptions,eg:

1. Agricultural land only contributes 2.8% to South Korea’s GDP;

2. Patterns of housing and standards of living remain essentially the same or improve;

3. Globalization and its advantages continue;4. Human values hardwired into us as social

primates; and5. Most significant market actions are human.

2050 possibilitiessuggested by scanning:

1. In 2050, agricultural land contributes SIGNIFICANTLY more to the South Korean economy;

2. In 2050, houses / housing developments take up CONSIDERABLY more space;

3. By 2050, the era of cheap-transport-derived globalization advantages is long gone;

4. In 2050, we are not your grandfather’s primates;5. In 2050, the internet will be smarter than we are: by

2018, the internet will have a million times as many nodes as the human brain, and it will have senses, courtesy of the cameras and microphones and compasses and accelerometers built into our cell-phones, not to mention the internet of things...

Images and Designs

Future Cities:

The End of the World as We Know It

Origin Global Warming Global CoolingLife /

DemographyCulture /Society

Discovery /Innovation

GradualChanges

Desertification; slow sea-level rise; aquifer intrusion; agricultural

decline.

End of interglacial, transition to glaciation.

Slow decline in fertility worldwide followed by global population decline.

Decreasing stability and security locally

and internationally as people compete for scarce resources.

Accelerating change; nano-bio-info-cogno convergence; ability

to manipulate “nature” / ourselves.

AbruptChanges

Increased sea melt, partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf: sea level

rises 1 metre.

New “little ice age,” generated by, eg,

increased volcanic dust and/or shifts in

Gulf Stream.

Famine: starvation; depressed immune systems; resistant

infectious agents and zoogenesis.

Mass civil unrest and border / regional

conflicts; failed states explode.

Singularity: radical innovation feedback blows away human /

machine /natural boundaries.

Wild Card / Discontinuities

Asteroid strike superheats Earth’s

atmosphere.

Super-volcano or Nuclear Winter

Global plague: population collapse.

Warlord deploys bio-WMD against

neighbouring territory.

Discovery of Grand Unifying Theory /

“Theory of Everything”

Ice

Flood

Fire

Plague Transform

Fade

Blowup

Meltdown Sustain

Transform: mutable cities.

TransformIn the late 21st C, the convergence of innovations in information technology, bio-engineering, nanotechnology, and the cognitive sciences created a self-reinforcing acceleration of transformative change. These innovations were underpinned by the paradigm shifts emerging from complexity and chaos theory, and in turn catalysed a state of accelerating and near-continuous transformations in worldview.

The results? a completely and continuously mutable reality -- people can bioengineer themselves and “nature”; the human - machine interface is completely porous, with biochips and DNA processors extending “pervasive computing” into the human body; smart machines co-design and re-design themselves and, in concert with their post-human partners, co-design and re-design the worlds around them. Assembly and re-assembly at the atomic level are almost literally child’s play.

The late 21st century is also post-consumerist, post-literate, and post-Earth:

by the end of the 21st century the boundaries between producers and consumers had been all but erased with pervasive home fabrication capability; literacy had evolved into mediacy, and the new global pidgin owed as much to Mandarin and movies, and Hindi and high-impact role-playing games, as to English and the Latin languages.the best and brightest have evolved as ‘homo stellae’, leaving the cradle of Earth, or ‘homo oceanus’, adapted to life on and under the seas. [continued next slide]

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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create

superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will

be ended.Vernor Vinge,

On the Singularitypresented at the VISION-21 Symposium

sponsored by NASA Lewis Research center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30-31 March 1993

(http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html).

drawn from Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005; Jim Dator, “Ubiquitous, Dream, Transformational, and Other Futures,” 2006.

“...technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.” (Kurzweil)

http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html


Transform

By 2100, humans, and their technologies, and the environments of both, have all three merged into the same thing. Humans, as humans, lost their monopoly on intelligence, while new forms of artificial life and artificial intelligence emerged, eventually perhaps to supercede humanity, while the once "natural" environments of Earth became exercises in managed evolution that were (and are still) continuously envisioned, designed, created and transformed first by humans and then in conjunction with our post-human successors (paraphrased from Dator). From homo sapiens sapiens to homo sapiens silica and homo sapiens stellae and oceanus, and bio-silica sapiens.

Lives are long, experience a currency, education continuous, production and governance open-source and blurred between the local and global, and children few. The population has declined and scattered, and old installations attract the idle curiosity of nanotech-enabled amateur archaeologists of all ages. The ‘ancient world’ artifacts of pre-singularity humanity are seen as interesting curios of species childhood.

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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create

superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will

be ended.Vernor Vinge,

On the Singularitypresented at the VISION-21 Symposium

sponsored by NASA Lewis Research center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30-31 March 1993

(http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html).

“...technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.” (Kurzweil)

drawn from Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005; Jim Dator, “Ubiquitous, Dream, Transformational, and Other Futures,” 2006.



We change ourselves.

New territories, layered identities.

• The Emotiv headset (pictured right) is the first commercially available user interface allowing people to control computers with their brainwaves.

• Implantable chips connecting microprocessors to the human nervous system have been prototyped and tested, both by Prof. Kevin Warwick at Reading, and also via the Braingate chip, used as a therapeutic implant for a paralyzed patient. Intel forecasts that chips in brains will control computers by 2020.

• This will be accelerated by the recent announcement of the BCI (brain computer interface) X-Prize, organized by the Singularity University and the X-Prize Foundation.

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Wiring Up Our Brains

graphics from WIRED’s “Found: Artifacts of the Future” feature.

Our belongings evolve: AI.

Transforming transit and transport?


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A “SensorNet of Things”

• Connections will multiply and create an entirely new dynamic network of networks – an Internet of Things.

• There will be an increasing convergence of technologies whereby a number of disparate goods and services may be coupled with IT in the same way in which mobile phones, for example are currently capable of taking video footage and photographs and permitting access to the Web.

• New ICTs enable 'ubiquitous computing' or 'ambient intelligence' to play an increasing role in our lives through the use of embedded devices which can continuously collect and process information. The devices sense movement and monitor how individuals interact with objects such as vehicles and domestic appliances, making it possible to 'customise' the use of technology in the home, the workplace, and elsewhere.

• By 2036 'it is likely that the majority of the global population will find it difficult to ‘turn the outside world off ’. ICT is likely to be so pervasive that people are permanently connected to a network or two-way data stream with inherent challenges to civil liberties; being disconnected could be considered suspicious.

• Our “things” will be increasingly embedded with sensors allowing them to monitor their own operations, need for supplies, the ambient environment, and to connect with other appliances and devices -- and us -- through the Internet.

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3D ‘fabbers’: printing anything.

“Such devices could change how we acquire common products. Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.”- Prof. Hod Lipson, Cornell

• Fab@Home distributes “open-hardware” plans and DIY instructions for building simple, low-cost home “fabbers.” Fabbers are 3D printers or prototypers. They replicate objects from plans supplied by a computer, and can use a variety of materials, from metal to plastic to sugar or chocolate. It is possible not only to print 3D objects, but to print objects with moving parts. Commercial fabbers are also available, and prices are dropping rapidly.

• Researchers at the University of California have designed optical decoding software that is good enough to create a working copy of a key by analysing a photograph of the key. Once the key type and code is identified, the software can drive a key-cutting tool, creating duplicates of the original. 5

• The world is increasingly being recorded to high-quality digital databases; cell phone cameras are increasingly high definition.

Fade: aging cities.

Fade

Fade Away: aging cities

Detroit: about 90,000 abandoned and vacant buildings; about 30% of the city's housing is vacant.

Flint: the original home of General Motors, which once employed 79,000 local people but now only around 8,000; unemployment is approaching 20%; the total population has almost halved.

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drawn from Patrick McIlheran, “The ruins of Detroit,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, June 15, 2010: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/93934929.html; BBC2, “Requiem for Detroit,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rkm3y; and Tom Leonard, “US cities may have to be bull-dozed to survive,” Telegraph.co.uk, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html.

Fade

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/93934929.html




http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rkm3y




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html








Pruning cities.

50 cities have been identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Strategy: buy back vacant/abandoned sites, demolish, convert to meadow, park, urban farms, art installations.

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drawn from Patrick McIlheran, “The ruins of Detroit,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, June 15, 2010: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/93934929.html; BBC2, “Requiem for Detroit,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rkm3y; and Tom Leonard, “US cities may have to be bull-dozed to survive,” Telegraph.co.uk, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html.

Fade

















Recycling suburbs: re-thinking middle class sprawl.

excerpted from RE-BURBIA design contest organized by Inhabitat and Dwell, http://www.re-burbia.com/.

Fade

http://www.re-burbia.com/




Urban crypto-forests: Nature moves back.

drawn from BLDGBLOG, “Crypto-forestry and the return of the repressed,” http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/crypto-forestry-and-return-of-repressed.html; photo: from personal library: plants reclaim building in the Indian quarter of Singapore.

Fade

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/crypto-forestry-and-return-of-repressed.html






Sustain: parsimonious cities.

Sustain


We change where we live.

Sustain

1st horizon

2nd horizon

3rd horizon



In present

Transforming Food


hydroponics and aeroponics

commercial intensified agriculture vs. organic artisanal agriculture

cloned-tissue meat production vs. tourist ‘art’ cattle


Time


“Cornucopia” food printer

Sustain

Transforming Food• Aeroponics: NASA

developed, now small-scale products and large-scale research / design centers

• Constraints: costs of infrastructure

• Paradigm shift: from earth to Spaceship Earth

• In-vitro meat: PETA has offered a $1 mn “X-Prize” for science team that develops commercially viable process

• Constraints: social attitudes re: natural foods - snobbery / luxury backlash

• Paradigm shift: from natural to biodesigned

• “Cornucopia” food printer - MIT student design: extrudes favourite ingredients and then heats or cools as appropriate.

1st horizon

2nd horizon

3rd horizon



In present

Blurring the Urban and Rural



urban agriculture & vertical agriculture;vertical ecologies;

and ‘pooktre’

urban-rural agricultural divide

natural systems agriculture:melding ecology and agronomy

Time


Sustain

Blurring the Urban and Rural• Vertical Farm research centre attracting both professionals and students of design

•Constraints: costs of new installations - finding investors; regulations; retrofitting costs

• Land Institute: creating prairie-like perennial agriculture

• Constraints: in development• Paradigm shift: biomimicry

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A “PowerNet of Things”

Power generation capability built into everything:

small gadgets: solar rechargershouses / residences: solar, wind, and piezo-electricclothing and floors: piezo-electric (pressure) rechargersinfrastructure: desalination plants are also power plantsroadways: piezo-electric and solar generation

Power stored, recycled, sold on:Extra energy can be ‘stored’ as hydrogen via chemical process similar to photosynthesisCloses loop to create viable hydrogen / fuel cell economy

Sustain

Biomimicry: designing from nature

Zimbabwe office complex air conditioning

modeled on air flow within termite

mound.

Self-cleaning fabrics and glass modeled on surface structure

of a lotus leaf.

What would your city look like if planned by these rules?

Scientists, engineers and designers increasingly innovate by studying nature’s efficiencies, following these rules of thumb:

– Nature runs on sunlight;– Nature uses only the energy it needs;– Nature fits form to function;– Nature recycles everything;– Nature rewards cooperation;– Nature banks on diversity;– Nature demands local expertise;– Nature curbs excess from within;– Nature taps the power of limits.

Sustain

Economic models change.

• The New Economics Foundation recently argued that in the long term we ‘need to re-link our money system and currencies to local and regional economies, so that if the national (or even international) currency collapses, others will continue to enable people to conduct economic exchange’. Bernard Lietaer cites the example of the Swiss WIR B2B model, which has been proven to act as a ‘significant counter-cyclical stabilizing factor’.

• In the UK, 30,000 ‘Lewes Pounds’ have been issued since the local currency was launched in Lewes, East Sussex, in September 2008; in Detroit ‘Detroit Cheers’ have been used in an attempt to reinvigorate downtown areas.

• Digital currencies also generate economic growth: Second Life’s Linden dollars have fueled an economy robust enough to create real-world millionaires

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Growth of New Currencies

‘For now, the amounts [of local currency] in circulation are minuscule. Most are a gesture of defiance against globalisation by encouraging local commerce rather than a rigorous economic experiment. But there may be more converts if monetary policy eventually runs out of road.’– The Economist

1st horizon

2nd horizon

3rd horizon

Time



In present


Crowdsourced: Credit, Investment, Philanthropy



Grameen Bank microcredit;

Zopa person-to-person lending; ‘crowd-funding’, eg, “Diaspora”

captains of industry, dragons’ dens, angel

investorsEveryone’s a vendor:

Square

• Constraints: momentum/inertia of current investment systems and traditional approaches

• Paradigm shift: from top-down to networked/dispersed

Sources: Foresight/GOS (2009) Sigma Scan (270); DFT (2008) Public experiences of car sharing

Participation in car sharingby age, UK

• The general shift from commerce dominated by products to a service-based economy is starting to affect the possession and use of goods. It is increasingly common for tangible or intangible goods to be accessed for a short period of time on a licensed basis, as if they were an externally-held service.

• Examples: Zipcar, USA and London; Windcar, Japan. About two thirds of Zipcar's members are under 35 and based on survey data, the company says that more than 40 percent of Zipcar users either sell their car or decide not to buy one.

• Such leasing arrangements could expand until nearly all fixed assets could in principle be leased to business and consumers rather than be owned by them.

• Leasing and short-term access models have grown for entertainment (e.g. iTunes, Spotify, Lovefilm). ‘Lease, don’t own’ models may expand to other areas of life, and more companies may become involved in financing leases.

‘Lease, don’t own’: Community Ownership

Will your city be competitive?

Emerging patterns of leverage:

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Printing Everything

Printing electronicsPrinting 3D objectsPrinting foodPrinting organic tissue

Nets of EverythingInternet of thingsSensornet of thingsPowernet of things

Blur

From economies of scale... to economies of gridEach home a micro-state / economy. Parsimony: sustainability as elegant design

Just one more thing...

Just one more thing... Surprises.

How do we create competitive cities for the future?

The future will be framed by how we answer five fundamental questions:

DEFINE: What new concepts, ideas, and paradigms will emerge to help us make sense of the world?

RELATE: How will we live together on planet Earth?

CONNECT: What arts and technologies will we use to connect people, places, and things?

CREATE: As human beings what will we be inspired to create?

CONSUME: How will we use the earth’s resources?

Michele Bowman and Kaipo Lum

Challenging+

Complex+

Creative+

Courageous=

CompetitiveObserve. Explore ahead.Challenge assumptions.

Thank you.

Dr. Wendy L. SchultzInfinite Futures:

foresight research and trainingOxford, England

http:// www.infinitefutures.com

http://www.infinitefuture.com

http://www.infinitefuture.com

Future Outlook on Urban Competitiveness

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