NSIGHTS INTO THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES · 2018. 6. 18. · 6th International Conference on...

6th International Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) – Future in the Making Brussels, 4-5 June 2018

SESSION EVOLUTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF CITIES, REGIONS AND COMMUNITIES

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INSIGHTS INTO THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

Denis Loveridge1 and Cristiano Cagnin2 1- Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR), [email protected]

2- Center for Strategic Studies and Management (CGEE), [email protected]

Abstract

The paper has two objectives: i) to discuss the nature of a sustainable city and how and why some cities grow, thus identifying strategic questions worth probing; and ii) to propose the use of due diligence, adapted from the business world, for FTA with discussion supporting ‘cities’ transition to sustainability.

The evolution of cities (i) follows complex dynamic situations (typically an Ackoffian ‘mess’ in the living world), (ii) is virtually boundaryless, resembling the Panarchy ecological metaphor, in which a city grows through exploitation (growth of resources), conservation (of resources), release (of resources) and reorganisation (for the next cycle as resources deplete) and (iii) is limited by the existence vs. extinction duo describable through regarding the Earth as a living system (the GAIA hypothesis).

The likelihood that a city may follow sustainable pathways or otherwise, creates many choices relating to each possible pathway. Choices create conflicts: e.g. in development (social equity vs. ecological preservation), property (economic growth vs. equity, or capital vs. labour), and resources (economic growth vs. ecological presentation), or combinations of these.

Appreciating why some cities become sustainable (while others do not), and the inherent conflicts is difficult even for people deeply involved (Barker & Peters, 1993). FTA should highlight existing assumptions and probe new questions, becoming investigative rather than analytical. In business and finance this requirement, often a legal one, is encapsulated in due diligence. FTA needs, therefore, to embrace these principles with the disappearance of disciplinary boundaries.

The paper will set out how due diligence can be used in FTA: this is illustrated by how and why some cities grow becoming sustainable while other fail. Due diligence applied to FTA raises policy, strategy and tactical questioning of assumptions about how the evolution of cities is perceived, individually or collectively. Some of the conundrums policy makers face appreciating the cascading landscape as a city evolves helping them embrace novelty and shifts in thinking regarding the way the world appears and functions.

Due diligence appreciates, systemically, intuitively and numerically, situations through the taxonomy of ignorance (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns; their behavioural counterparts and linguistic ambiguity) relating to cascades of situations, enabling ameliorating policies. FTA is then is not reductionist problem solving but is concerned with the dynamism of life itself as a cascade of situations where problem solving is but a small and double edged procedure. Situations are systemic and need to be thought of in the way outlined above.

The ways in which a city functions, why some thrive while others disappear, how in particular contexts the same actions may lead to success while in others to failure is the purpose of the forensic nature of due diligence. Appreciation (Vickers, 1963) of the dynamic and cyclic ways in which cities evolve is the purpose of due diligence embracing the many and diverse ways that the existence vs. extinction duo shape the evolution of cities old and new. The obvious and outlandish ways in which cities grow, die or simply malinger are embraced rather than constrained by learning and thinking within limiting boundaries, excluding what lies within the boundarylessness of the existence vs. extinction duo.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]



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Keywords: due diligence and FTA, sustainable city and living system, transition and evolution, dynamic situations

and boundaryless

Introduction

The purpose of the paper is to comment on the role FTA may play in the evolution of cities both old and new. It is timely because there is a growing interest in how cities evolve, particularly with the growing influence of ideas that have a long history relating to sustainability of human settlements noting that some endure while others do not. Underpinning the discussion is the acknowledgements that cities are complex entities that cannot be thought of as other than complex systems that cannot be appreciated through ‘silo’ based thinking and even less so by the ‘pistols at dawn’ basis of challenges. Cities pass through phases of vibrancy and morbidity, sometimes simultaneously otherwise in starkly separate ways through which they may either continue to exist or become extinct. For those reasons the paper is in three parts. Part 1 makes some general comments about the metaphor of the sustainable city. Part 2 dwells on the metaphors of the existence vs. extinction duo; situations and appreciation. Part 3 introduces thinking about cities as complex situations. Part 4 makes some observations relating due diligence to governance, ignorance all within the realm of the Gaia hypothesis. Lastly, Part 5 discusses practicalities with FTA in mind.

Part 1

1. What is a sustainable city?

Is a city in continual transition towards more sustainable, fair, prosper and inclusive urban environment, ultimately assuring a sense of belonging and solidarity-based quality of life for all (WBGU, 2016) as well as safeguarding the natural life-support systems; all of which embedded into a collective long-term integrated or systemic vision able to provide orientation for societal change. Such transition towards sustainability requires fundamental changes in land-use, energy and transport systems, in the management of materials and materials flows, in urban settlement policies, and in the structural-spatial design of cities (WBGU, 2016), to name but a few.

Ultimately, transformation in cities will not be able to follow a universal pathway because of their diversity and complex interplay of historical, cultural, socio-economic and ecological contexts (WBGU, 2016). Nevertheless, a clear vision for reimagining the city and its relationship to its surrounding countryside can be found in replicating the operating system of the natural world.

In essence, natural systems operate on the free energy of the sun, which interacts with the geochemistry of the earth to sustain productive, regenerative biological systems. Human systems, including cities, which operate by the same laws can approach the effectiveness of living systems. These laws can be distilled into three key principles: equate waste with food; maximize use of solar income; and celebrate diversity (McDonough, 2017).

Waste should become resources in a circular fashion – take, make, retake, remake, restore –, thus designing incoming materials for “next use” instead of “end of life”. Diversity is found in all healthy ecosystems, in which each organism has a unique response to its surroundings that works in concert with other organisms to sustain the system (Webber 2017).



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In the same way, cities depend on a diversity of buildings, residences, businesses and other non-residential uses, as well as people of diverse ages using areas at different times of the day. This creates community vitality since the intermingling of city uses and users is key to economic and urban development. Furthermore, high concentration of people is vital for city life, economic growth and prosperity. Therefore, higher densities, instead of overcrowding, yield a critical mass of people that is capable of supporting more vibrant communities. In this context, higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and multifunctional mixed uses are key aspects that support cities to function as a thriving living organism (Jacobs, 1961).

Approaching the city as an ecosystem means that over time buildings, streets and neighbourhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. Hence, the elements of a city, such as sidewalks, parks, neighbourhoods, government, economy, among others, function together synergistically, emulating natural ecosystems (Jacobs, 1961 & 1984).

In a nutshell, a sustainable city is basically an ecological system that evolves in many dimensions as depicted in the STEEPV acronym1: these lead to a number of metaphors that reflect the influences on how city regions evolve.

2. Why are some cities long lived & others not?

The life and death of cities has been the subject of books: all that is attempted here is to illustrations of some causes of the life and death of cities and to that extent is unsatisfactory but sufficient for present purposes.

Existence vs. extinction, life and death, applies to cities just as it does to any species of life: a city is a living entity. Some cities grow and remain in vital existence for millennia while others become extinct for multiple reasons. Acknowledging the continuity of the conflict between existence and extinction needs to be a touchstone to appreciating why some cities exist and grow over millennia and others succumb to multiple forces that lead to their extinction. In many cases basic resources either promote existence or in their absence lead to extinction. One of the most obvious features of the existence vs. extinction duo is the geographical location of the city. The Earth’s surface is fractured as shown in Fig. 1.

1 Social, technological, ecological, economic, political and value systems.



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Fig. 1 The fractured Earth’s tectonic plates and their boundaries

Whilst the existence of tectonic plates became known only relatively recently, their dynamics is now recognized to have considerable influence on the evolution of human settlements and, more recently, cities promoting the existence of some and the extinction of others. Mostly extinction occurs through earthquake and volcanic activity, and the disposition of accessible (or otherwise) natural resources. For present purposes it is only necessary to draw attention to the existence vs. extinction duo and the need to appreciate its role in the evolution of cities. As examples, eleven of the world’s largest cities are officially classified as being short of potable water while others are in known zones of volcanic activity. Historically, Conquest, War, Famine, and Death or Pestilence, (in the form of pandemics), the metaphorical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, have been likely causes of the extinction (or severe decline) of cities. To these natural causes economic decline and failure to come to terms with technological changes need to be added: the latter needs to include computer aided social instabilities. In all extinction is closely related to a lack of resilience referred to later.

In contrast, Jane Jacobs (1961 & 1984) has set out in some detail what makes some cities vibrant in their structure, population and inter-relationships to form networks of dynamic cities that endure.



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Part 2

3. Existence vs. extinction duo: situations and appreciation

Existence imposes real limits that are controlled practically through extinction events. The combination of existence and extinction has the nature of a feedback loop that produces forms of stability: these only get out of control when that balance fails producing an inequality in the form of 'persistent' feed-forward, which can be either positive or negative, until stability returns but in a different way, a phenomenon called homeorrhesis.

This is in line with the evolution of the Gaia hypothesis of life on Earth (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974; Lovelock, 1991) which sets out the case for regarding the Earth as a living system whose behaviour is governed by complex feedback systems that lead to a condition of homeostasis. All life then leaves an ecological footprint on the Earth: most of them arise from predator-prey principles in various forms. Population growth and crashes are one example, while extinction events are the counterpart of the notion of existence. Paradoxically human beings wishfully set themselves apart by believing, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that they are ‘in control’ of the bounteous natural world.

Ultimately, an inequality between existence and extinction leads to major crises for living systems. Each crisis stems from the summation of a myriad of individual events. In current parlance these crises are called inappropriately 'grand challenges' though history is littered with such traumas for life on Earth, humanity in particular, that have been referred to under different names.

In this context, extinctions are major events that cause significant reductions to populations of living matter either directly or indirectly. Many have occurred in the history of the Earth. Few extinctions are immediate but mature over ecological or geological time. Direct extinctions affect a specific species while those that are indirect arise from say, severe interruptions in a food chain.

The possible extinction events arising from human activity are familiar and throughout ignorance (Roberts, 2012) plays a considerable part, combined with the modern desire for immediate gratification of wants combined with the immediacy of the alleviation of poverty. Once again the necessity of learning the language is obvious, as are the relatively short timescales by comparison with extinctions arising from natural events. Here there may seem to be a paradox, as many of the natural causes of extinctions have major 'immediate' outcomes, e.g. volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and earthquakes. Nevertheless their extinction phenomena include long term disruptions with durations lasting over centuries while their build up may also occur over geological timescales. In view of their nature it seems unlikely that any form of human intervention is possible to ameliorate the outcome of these events.

Hence, the possibility of an inequality between existence and extinctions causes concern if not an actual feeling of threat to life as it is known. Human understanding of its world uses the notion of boundaries to make comprehension easier. Boundary setting is a deeply personal, behavioural and philosophical matter. 'Shared vision' is a phrase that is often encountered but just how deep the sharing is can be problematic. Boundary setting then becomes paradoxically a necessity and a curse as argument proceeds over what should or should not be included within a particular boundary: there is also the risk of unknowingly retreating to the problem solving mind-set. Some influences, knowingly or not, that affect boundary setting are recognizable metaphorically, but in the 'real world' it is the outcomes that emerge from the mess of factors (Ackoff, 1974) involved that matter. For instance, emergent outcomes are bothersome to



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scenario writers and colleagues alike who endeavour to capture the future through a variety of scenarios (remember that a scenario is the skeleton of a play). Helpful though these may be often they attempt to develop pictures of the future after the emergence of a situation has occurred.

Daly has set out three fundamental principles relating to sustainable development:

For a renewable resource the sustainable rate of use cannot exceed the rate of renewal of

its source.

For a non‐renewable resource its sustainable rate of use cannot exceed the rate at which

a substitute renewable resource, used sustainably, can be made available.

The sustainable rate of emission of a pollutant can be no greater that the rate at which it

can be recycled, absorbed or otherwise rendered harmless in its sink (e.g. by bacteria and

other organisms, without themselves destabilizing the ecosystem concerned).

Simple though these conditions may seem application of them in the real world has deep consequences for the ways in which a city may evolve and the skills needed if we are to enable cities to thrive: a case of learning the languages, the thinking and numeracy involved.

Daly's' ideas are much deeper but the simple representation is enough to show the depth to which they influence the appreciation of systems: interventions to ameliorate them must also be systemic. Problem centred thinking, within what is thought to be well defined boundaries, is simply not appropriate.

The journey from the proposition of an inequality between existence and extinction has many twists and turns with meaning for cities and their sustainability, with some important skills needed to look at the implications for the rediscovery of 'grand challenges' however inappropriate that term may be. Very little of this is new, but as the world appreciates the need to move toward low entropy ways of living there needs to be a return to some older ways of thinking rather than a rush for more computational power: that will have its place but ought not to dominate thinking.

4. What concepts are there to aid ‘appreciation’?

It could be contended that historically the location of cities has been pseudo-random while their physical and social structure has been greatly influenced by the ‘at the time’ appreciation of ‘what was needed’. All this occurred long before Ebenezer Howard promulgated the idea of the ‘garden city’ (Howard, 1898) that has been so influential in the location and design of cities ever since. The notion of ‘what was needed’ in laying down the early ideas of a city’s foundation amounts to appreciation of the reigning situation and how that might develop. Appreciation and situations are fundamental to the foundation and growth of cites and form the basis of the exploration here of hypotheses and metaphors that underlie what passes for ‘theory’ in the planning of cities.

In the present context appreciation takes its natural meaning of a full understanding of a situation while a situation is a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs. Both terms were invoked by Vickers in his fundamental paper (Vickers, 1963) while realizing that a full understanding is an unattainable dream.



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Appreciation, or sensitive awareness, may seem to be an old fashioned idea but understanding what it involves is fundamental to anticipation or foresight. Few people understood appreciation better than Vickers. His fundamental paper leads to the conclusion that appreciation has a circular relationship with anticipation and learning, both elements of due diligence each with internal feedback loops, all of which is fundamental to the assembly of coherent ideas about the future that is fundamental to FTA.

Part 3

5. Thinking about cities as complex situations

Situations, as a set of circumstances with high information content, need appreciation that comes from being open to the reception and interpretation of dynamic and multi-dimensional context and content of varying levels of learning, thinking, numeracy and probability. Because of their dynamism, situations cascade through time implying that as situations change in context and content amelioration is evident as indicated in Fig. 2 below but solution (or challenge) oriented thinking should not be.

Fig 2 Cascade of situations

(With acknowledgements to Popper (1957), Vickers (1963 & 1973), Checkland (1981) & Loveridge (2009): reproduced from Loveridge (2009))

Situations occur in cascades, each posing a new experience requiring a further shift in appreciation to what Vickers called a new appreciative setting that involves behavioural notions



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of values and norms (Vickers 1973:175), but makes explicit use of simple aspects of brain science. Ackoff (1974), Checkland (1981) and Loveridge (1977 & 2009) all make use of metaphors that stem from Vickers original ideas of the extension of conventional feedback control into soft systems characterized here as cascades of situations.

With the passage of time from Ebenezer Howard, rule based planning systems invaded the field of city planning. However complicated the outcome, these rule based systems were and remain no more than bureaucratic attempts to capture at a specific time the current appreciation of a dynamic situation. Consequently, because regulations are static, they are always running behind the realities of the cascading situations that involve dynamic complexity. By contrast, appreciative behaviour allows responses to vary according to the extent of the perceived departure from the norm recognised by appreciation, a feature implicated in rule based systems by their inherent linguistic ambiguities. In a living system appreciation may seek action, but there is no certainty that it will occur, whereas the enforcement of regulations will invoke action in a binary ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ fashion. Consequently, appreciation requires judgements of reality and value to assess first: the state of the system (judgements of ‘fact’) and second: to value these ‘facts’ with respect to the individual and society two inseparable kinds of judgement. It needs always to bear in mind that ‘reality’, ‘facts’ and ‘value’ are often not what they seem, a cardinal point in due diligence relating to the future of any situation. The metaphor of a dynamic situation for the evolution of a city leads naturally to the notion of footprints, the mark any city makes on the Earth as a system. In turn this leads to several hypotheses that either inform or explain the evolution of cities.

The first and most important point to grasp is that footprints are real. Their presence in snow or mud say much about the past: they also point to possible directions of travel depending on imaginations of the future. The footprint of a city is real and can be mapped out on the earth’s surface. Irregularities inhibit any precision in setting boundaries: a characteristic of cities is their boundarylessness (Dempster, 2007), a hypothesis that extends into many others of a city’s properties. The hypotheses of footprints and their boundarylessness can be appreciated from Fig. 3 below which is instructed from some ideas from climate modelling as follows.



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Fig. 3 Hypothetical footprint of a city

Every city can be located on the Earth’s surface not by a point but by a hypothetical longitude and latitude grid on the Earth’s surface. The grid has to take into account the oblate spheroidal shape of the Earth so the cell shown in Fig. 3 misrepresents the cell dimensions first, by being of exaggerated size and second, by not illustrating the effect of the Earth’s shape: both misrepresentations are deliberate for simplifying the present discussion. In practice the geographic size of the city and the chosen grid dimensions determine the mapping of the grid onto the city to cover its topographical footprint.

The footprint of a city contained by the grid cell will be defined by its location on the Earth’s surface and by the locations topography. These will be augmented by its above ground atmosphere and phenomena (e.g. pollution), and geological structures on which the city stands including phenomena such as tectonic plate activity. Account must also be taken of all these phenomena that emanate from adjacent (N-S; E-W) cells: this is a further example of a city’s boundarylessness.

Whether a city is old or new (yet to be built as proposed in Saudi Arabia currently) each grid cell will have a multi-component flow of resources into and out of it some of which are listed below:

Resource flows

Human world

Manufacturing

Agriculture

Water



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Services of many kinds

Natural world

Climate/weather

Animal movements/migrations

People flows

Demographics

Dynamics of values/norms & culture

Occupations

Politics & international relations

Scientific, Technological & Engineering flows

General support for human living

Health services

Biology & genetics

Hospitals & care homes

Energy in all its forms for the support of human life

Construction & infrastructure

Buildings – purpose & design

Roads & other surface infrastructure

Sub-surface infrastructures (electricity supply, water & drains, gas)

Communication infrastructure

Broadband structures

Global communications infrastructures & their social influences

Internet of Things

AI & its influence as an underpinning technology

Ecological flows

Non-human biological burden

Domesticated

Non-domesticated

Vegetation

The representation of a city’s footprint as outlined by Fig. 3 and the (incomplete) list of flows is that of a complex dynamic situation (cascades of interconnected situations) that hints at a three dimensional finite element analysis. To think of city footprints in this way poses formidable data problems because of the multiplicity of data types and sources, including how the data were created; by whom it was collected and for what purpose(s). The components of understanding



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data outlined in the NUSAP system (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1990) poses these questions clearly and needs to be part of any due diligence. The process of inversion used in climate modelling (Edwards, 2010) gives some clues to just how complex understanding data can be and of its influence on any kind of modelling of a city’s footprint.

Two hypotheses promote some support to the metaphors about the way a city grows: these are the ecological hypothesis of Panarchy (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) and Dempster’s sympoiesis. The two connect to describe how a cyclic process (Panarchy) shows how a city’s resources may be augmented because, as real system, a city is ajar (as opposed to closed and self-organizing as suggested by autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980)). Being ajar and open to the ingress of external resources, sympoiesis blends with the Panarchy hypothesis which proceeds as illustrated below.

Fig. 4 The Panarchy cycle

(With acknowledgement to Gunderson & Holling, 2002)

The Panarchy cycle has a third dimension, Resilience, which is not shown in Fig. 4 above though it is a fundamental property of a city and of the way it evolves. The openness of the sympioetic cycle occurs in the ‘r’ phase, as shown.

The various hypotheses outlined form an amalgam through which the way in which a sustainable, because of its resilience (see Panarchy cycle) a city may pass through times of growth and decline into a different form (Homeorrhesis, Waddington, 1957). For example, the Panarchy cycle may indicate how a city may build and accumulate resources: these allow expansion. Only later is it found that some unanticipated aspect of its underlying geology, combined with its topography, causes underlying fractures that cannot easily be ameliorated, because its resources have been exhausted. The sympoietic nature of the Panarchy cycle at this later time allow the ingress of new resources. These matters have implications for the depth of due diligence and for governance modified by the hypothesis of ignorance with its latent and actual ambiguity.



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Part 4

6. Due diligence, governance and Ignorance: Implications from the Gaia hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974) proposes that the Earth is a self-organizing system within the general properties of the Solar system: within that system it is self-evidently sympioetic. The hypothesis is based on the self-organizing properties of the complex, interactive living systems (atmospheric, animate, biologic and geologic) that together create a homeostatic system in which remarkably the retained atmosphere has changed from anaerobic to aerobic of near constant composition that supports life (Lovelock, 1991). Gaia and its many sub-systems is the support system for a city’s evolution whether that be for existence or extinction.

Due diligence for the situation of an evolving city has to encompass the width and depth that pertains to the city’s location as set out in Fig.3. The necessary extension of the forensic nature of due diligence takes it into far broader fields than the process is customarily expected. The breadth required inevitably invokes the notion of ignorance (Roberts 2012) in both its technical and behavioural themes as summarized later. Throughout there will be ambiguity about what is known and what is not placing a premium on being able to reason about ignorance rather than what is presumed to be understood, a familiar situation in the engineering industry. Due diligence in the depths proposed is an essential step towards governance.

Governance is the process of decision making and by which decisions are (or not) implemented. Formal and informal actors are involved via ignorance and formal, and informal structures for implementation. Governance is based on claims for accountability; transparency; participation; and coherence all of which aim at a reorganisation of decision making structures with the objective of re-asserting social legitimacy in city planning to move beyond formal processes of government and public administration, to promote a continuous and closer interface between the state, the economy and society. Governance may not produce a precise and stable policy outcome as not all stakeholders have the resources to be involved (Loveridge and Street, 2005). Different stakeholder values and behavioural characteristics lead to different boundary judgements, usually far removed from Dempster’s boundarylessness and from Jacobs districts (Jacobs, 1961). In this way the complexities imposed in socio-cultural systems that concern the evolution of cities may:

Create greater public awareness and understanding of city planning

Improve the anticipation of likely desirable uses of anticipated future technologies

Avoid the assumption that people have infinite plasticity toward new technology

Increase trust between policy makers, business and the general public

Create policy processes amenable to current and future situations

Help to meet societal expectations of increased transparency and involvement in decision making

Throughout stakeholders are “any group of individuals who can affect or are affected by the policy decisions taken” (Freeman 1984; Saritas et al., 2007). The governance and stakeholder approach has various implications for the relationships between the society, corporate industrial activities and public governance: these are indicated in Fig. 5.



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Fig. 5 The entire metaphor

(With acknowledgements to Cagnin, Loveridge & Saritas (2009))

The shift from ‘Government’ to ‘Governance’ and to the new global ‘regulatory’ state began in the 1970’s (Lindblom, 1977) and onwards (Majone 1996 and 1999). Governance and regulatory concepts began to imply a modified description of regulation and how it works, where regulatory limits of state authority and the potential of society influence, to restrain or block public policies, are recognised. Corporations, institutions and associations also began to enhance public policy within a new framework, that emphasises the interactive and interdependent nature of the new regulatory environment illustrating the interdependencies that flow from the prime forces in cities due situations involving globalization and glocalization.

Social networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), ‘big data’ and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are relatively recent influences on the way cities evolve: Fig. 5 above illustrates many of the components that make up the complex situation created by the ‘three pillars’ of governance that have been invaded by social networks, IoT, big data and AI. The influence of these four new forces on the evolution of cities is an example of ignorance and ambiguity. Social networks, the IoT, big data and AI create an Ackoffian mess, of situations, that resemble a real Tower of Babel far removed from the growth of universal appreciation between human societies let alone of the fragility of the Earth as a Gaian system. Despite the privileges awarded to knowledge, UNK’s, unknown unknowns, the final element in the hierarchy of ignorance, are acknowledged to abound in spite of the ‘fail safe’ principle’s underlying use in the evolution of cities. The forensic use of dynamic due diligence, at the scale indicated earlier, cannot overcome UNKs but may



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promote appreciation of the situations they provoke, especially with regard to the multiple themes social networks, IoT, big data and AI interactively introduce.

Part 5

7. Practicalities: How can FTA help?

Appreciation of complex and dynamic situations lies at the heart of FTA in which the Future is logically redundant because if a science, technology or engineering is known or imaginable it is no longer in the future, only their applications lie there together with their ethical, legal and social influences (ELSI). Due diligence embraces ELSI studies that necessarily encounter various aspects of ignorance: in this frame ignorance is not the antithesis of knowledge. Ignorance penetrates ELSI very deeply both technically and behaviourally. In engineering and invention ignorance is a well appreciated matter: it lies at the root of the dilemma of a system being ‘fail-safe’ (a long established engineering and risk principle) rather than the ecological principle of a system being ‘safe when it fails’ (Holling, 1977). Roberts (2012) sets out a taxonomy of ignorance, summarized in Fig. 6 below that indicates the duality of ignorance being ‘about knowledge’ and ‘about the behavioural influences’.

Fig. 6 Summary of Roberts’ taxonomy of ignorance

In engineering ignorance breeds an appreciation of the need for caution in design procedures (fail safe principle) which, through SEEP and V pressures, over recent decades has become formalized through the ‘precautionary principle’. Stirling (2008) introduced important matters concerning science, precaution and politics relating to technological risk in particular. Stirling’s key factors were uncertainty (characterized by probability), ambiguity (presumably of information) and ignorance: these can be fitted into Robert’s taxonomy beneficially.

For policy the clash between ignorance and knowledge, and its many grey areas, creates serious dilemmas for policy makers that can be illustrated as in Fig. 7. Policy makers tend to resolve these situations by imposing agreed boundaries on them to enable the appreciation of risk; boundaries to these perceptions and their fitness for purpose, valuation and risk. How these ‘boundaries’ are conceived and drawn then becomes an important matter. If the boundary



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regards the situation as autopoieotic rather than sympoietic the outcome will be markedly different. An autopoieotic situation can be regarded as organisationally closed, effectively becoming a silo, whereas a sympoietic situation will be characteristically ajar and open to outside influences, perhaps acknowledging the nature of the ‘real’ world devoid of silo features. These notions generate conflicts in the realities of policy making creating a sense of appreciation of 'existence'.

Fig 7 Policy-makers dilemmas

(© Denis Loveridge reproduced by kind permission of Routledge)

For policy makers it is essential that FTA creates a sense of ‘handshaking’ (Boettinger, 1969) and common ground for appreciation of the situation within the taxonomy of ignorance (Fig. 6). These steps begin to create a common language for appreciation. In the real world ignorance can become mired in behavioural traits that make themselves apparent in corporate ignorance characterized in the way shown (Fig. 6). However, it is the merging of the two streams of ignorance that poses hazards for policy makers and corporate executives. For example, when ‘known unknowns’ are suppressed in order to ensure that policy outcomes are achieved: this amounts to limiting the policy makers dilemma to ‘recognizable complication’ that is ‘controllable’ to achieve ‘what is desirable’ (Figs. 6 and 7). Behaviourally this implies the adoption of a highly constrained appreciation of the dynamic situation and the absence of a common language for policy and leads to a biased and partial model.

FTA models of situations are bounded and may be qualitative, quantitative or a mixture of both. Qualitative models are unavoidable as they are the precursors to any form of later quantitative model. Qualitative models set out a linguistic appreciation and description of a situation of concern: they need to be investigative (‘due diligence’), imaginative and based on the evolution of common ground as referred to earlier. Inevitably, common ground needs to cope with the influences of ignorance rather than to focus exclusively on what is believed to be known.



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Because of their real world complexity, models of situations are bounded thus limiting appreciation of their wider world influences, imposing strong demands on how these boundaries are created and the ‘handshaking’ required in doing so.

FTA is application oriented, it is a real world activity involving threads in all of the STEEPV themes. It is plagued with all the aspects of ignorance along with ambiguity, paradox, complexity that inevitably are simplified through setting boundaries, real or imaginary, to enable appreciation of the situation. Normal accidents (Perrow, 1984) of every conceivable kind are only to be expected when the situation is far from equilibrium which those subjected to FTA studies usually are. FTA needs to step away from the time honoured addiction to methods of analysis that have not changed much in several decades. The need is to move toward the investigative ideas embodied in ‘due diligence’ with their flexibility; emphasis on the entire STEEPV set and with probing questions that evolve as appreciation of the situation and its dynamics reveal themselves. Appreciation begins and ends where probing dialogue occurs before a linguistic model, based on common ground and agreed boundaries, begins to emerge and to be formulated as a model locking out elements of the appreciation that might prove to be the keystone of the situation. Fixed checklists are not suitable for appreciation of a situation.

For FTA the borders between the themes of the STEEPV set have largely, if not entirely disappeared. FTA therefore needs to become investigative rather than analytical. In the business and investment world this requirement often is a legal one achieved through due diligence. The proposition is for FTA to embrace the principles of due diligence in a modified form to encompass the virtual disappearance of disciplinary boundaries.

Due diligence is a language based way of systemically and intuitively researching, verifying and appreciating a situation in the context of the taxonomy of ignorance. Sometimes it is based on legal requirements, often it is not, but may shape legislation later. While the term originated in the business world, where due diligence is required to validate statements about the business, the goal in FTA is to ensure that every endeavour is made to assess the influence of technology within the agreed boundaries with the definition of TA offered by Dale & Loveridge (1996).

FTA as due diligence is concerned with applications as situations. Due diligence in this context is the ‘intellectual task of articulating our problems [situations] of living’ (Maxwell, 1984) with the intention of proposing and criticising possible solutions and human actions. It is not concerned with reductionist problem solving but with the dynamism of life itself. It is this dynamism that converts the notions of the problems of living into life as the series of ‘situations’ that it really is and in which problem solving is but a small and double edged procedure. Situations are systemic and need to be thought of in the appropriate way, involving the uncertainties of fuzzy boundaries; interdependencies that convert complications into complexity; the consequent creation of emergent situations that (it is claimed) ‘cannot be anticipated.’ New skills are then required for this form of FTA (Loveridge & Cagnin (2016)):

Reasoning about ignorance, which is an unfamiliar skill

Thinking in terms of dynamic and systemic situations

Understanding numbers and the quality of data

Bridging creativity and expertise into the policy maker world through interaction and alignment

Engaging in speculation and more importantly in conjecture, which requires creativity

Knowing how to learn, how to think and numeracy in depth, thus building excellence in breadth and depth



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Due diligence principles will, therefore, guide an evolving understanding of the dynamism of the situations perceived through a process of questioning and reasoning freeing FTA from fixed methodologies, thus allowing new information and learning to take place via a sympoietic understanding of complex systems. Two essential shifts will then take place:

From... ... To

Unrevealed biases and describing extrapolations of the present in the future

Exposing anticipatory assumptions and describing discontinuities and “unknowns”

Addiction to methods and the use of checklists and analytical processes. defined algorithmically

Investigative ideas with emphasis on the entire STEEPV set with probing questions evolving as appreciation of the situation and its dynamics grows

8. Applying due diligence in FTA to bring in insights into the evolution of cities

This section describes a few insights the authors have had during the last year or so. These are the result of applying due diligence in FTA in order to better understand the nature of a sustainable city and how and why some cities grow becoming sustainable while other fail. The outcome has been the identification of a few strategic questions worth probing and which may be strategic to supporting ‘cities’ transition to sustainability.

It is important to highlight that the intention is not to provide answers to the questions posed here. Instead, the aim is to provide the necessary elements to enable one to devise spaces for dialogue with city dwellers in their diversity. It is key to understand people’s individual and collective aspirations and expectations with regards to the city they live in as well as to build contextualised models that enable a radical shift in their thinking with regards to what is possible. By exposing anticipatory assumptions, making explicit what is tacit, and by enabling one to see the city in which they live from a different and more systemic perspective, new strategic questions that derive from those highlighted below may arise. A new understanding of how the city one lives in is organised, what works and what doesn’t; which services are provided and to what extent, amongst other notions about the functions of a city are collectively developed. And by investigating these further in depth and in breadth shall enable individuals to jointly unlock ideas to be tested in practice to learn how these are able in fact to help their cities to transition to more sustainable pathways: this is where FTA has a prime role to play.

Moreover, it is important to have in mind that the end result of any attempt to investigate the questions outlined below will be different in whatever experiment devised to do so: this is due to the diversity of participants of such experiments and the complex interplay of historical, cultural, socio-economic and ecological contexts about the city under analysis as well as that which each one brings to the fore. Hence, ideas to be tested in practice will vary according to individuals that participate in such experiments and the collective knowledge generated through due diligence.

Due diligence applied to FTA raises policy, strategy and tactical questioning of assumptions about how the evolution of cities is perceived, individually or collectively. Some of the conundrums policy makers face appreciating the cascading landscape as a city evolves, helping them embrace novelty and shifts in thinking regarding the way the world appears and functions.



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In this context, it is important to highlight that real life experiments are currently under design for implementation in different Brazilian cities beginning in 2019. These are being framed around the questions that follow.

What makes a city 'sustainable'?

How do they differ from other cities?

What are their essential/intrinsic properties/characteristics?

What is the role of AI in sustainability and sustainable cities?

How do they become populated?

How do they arise and evolve? How do they grow from established footprints? What is the role of historical precedents? What enables growth and what disables it?

Why do they arise in particular geographic places? Topography? Geographic nexus of resources and production?

Who determines the need for a city and especially a sustainable one?

Which are the conundrums behind who decides? Are these economic production, consumption, distribution and innovation)? Are these social (access to and distribution or resources, services and opportunities? Are these environmental (consumption of resources and production of wastes)? Or are these a combination?

What are the conflicts associated with who decides? Are these based on property (economic growth vs. equity or capital vs. labour)? Are these based on resources (economic growth vs. ecological preservation)? Are these based on development issues (social equity vs. ecological preservation)? Or are these a combination?

Conclusions

From the very beginning the choice of location for a settlement that evolves into a city is fraught with all the biases and power politics of any human society. In their own ways this lies behind the many individual proponents of this or that location or process through which a city becomes established and how it either evolves or dies through the complex interactive events that characterize the existence vs. extinction duo. As with all living entities the life expectancy of a settlement as it transforms itself into a city, is unknowable. Much of the paper is devoted to what may (or may not) prove to be ways in which the series of city transformations may proceed and to provide some insights into those transformations. Much depends on the depth and breadth of the underlying, but not always recognized, due diligence, an activity that is mentioned repeatedly throughout the paper. Due diligence will require a deep appreciation not of problem solving and knowledge, but of ignorance and reasoning about its presence in every transition a city undergoes, a process clouded by the ambiguities of language and intentions of the people involved. The trend for ignorance and ambiguity to be blanketed through the evolution of regulations is ever present, but regulations are a framing of past appreciations of the situations in which a city has evolved and to that extent they are backward looking.

Several ways of thinking and learning are described, albeit briefly, in the text which also points to the strong need for numeracy. The ‘big data’ theme now discussed indiscriminately, and seemingly as some kind of general panacea when the abbreviation AI is attached, requires care



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for multiple reasons, but most of all relating to the quality of the data. The framework put forward by Funtowicz & Ravetz (1990) is particularly helpful in this field. There is also much to learn from the data inversion process used in developing climate models (Edwards, 2010).

Finally, the text needs to be regarded as a tool for learning and thinking about the evolution of cities together with indications of the associated numeracy. Criticism there will be at the absence of ‘procedure’, but that is exactly why due diligence is referred to as ‘forensic’. The dictum proposed by Sherlock Holmes that ‘when no other explanation fits the revealed information, however uncertain and ambiguous, but the most bizarre then that must be accepted’. As FTA moves into the era of AI and big data this is a dictum that has particular force when too much reliance may be placed on computable models of cascades of complex situations. The text does not intend, nor should it be so construed as criticism of or comment on the work of the many contributors since (and in antiquity) Ebenezer Howard described the concept of the ‘garden city’ and to the transformations of settlements into modern cities.

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