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8/10/2019 Bruce Mau Citt

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17WINTER 2010 / 2011

M E G A L O P O L I S

T O I M A G I N E T H E F U T U R EW E M U S T R E T H I N K

T H E M E A N I N G O F A C I T Y

B R U C E M A U

Urbanity, Revised

Do you have any idea how muchyour buildings weigh?

Buckminster Fuller

We have no art,we do everythingas well as we can.

Marshall McLuhan,quoting the people of Bali.

RWe are in

the midst of a globalreimagining. Practi-

cally everything we do is in ux.The cities we live inour greatest culturalworks at the biggest scale, and the high-est synthesizers of all of our technological,scientic and artistic accomplishmentsare being fundamentally reinvented.However, the old urban paradigms stilldominate our collective imagination


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18 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL


cars, buses, streets, parks, suburbs and cen-tral business districts. Traditional formsreach further back to city walls, city gatesand city halls, and still inform the concep-tual models of governance, the behaviorof mayors and civic ofcials and even thedenition of the citizen. Unconsciously,these concepts tie us to our past in thewalled cities of Mesopotamia. They bindus to the boulevards of Hausmann, andthe postwar suburbs of Levittown. Whenwe think about the future of cities we stillthink with these outmoded mental mod-els. Even though we know these culturalforms are being profoundly rethought, inthe absence of new norms and forms, wemaintain the old. While we may be in theprocess of reinventing the car and ques-tioning the suburb, reimagining the parkand redesigning the street, radically em-powering the citizen and connecting theworld into a single global urban systemall processes that continue to rock andreshape our citiesthere is still no newconsensus on the future of any one of thesenew forms that can be shared and broadlyunderstood. In the absence of a new pat-tern that we can understand and embrace,we cling to what we know.

At a recent meeting in the MiddleEast, leading architectural urban designrms from around the world presentedtheir work. Each spoke the new languageof the sustainable future with impressivetechnical knowledge and beautiful ren-derings. But in the end, the developmentmodels presented had an almost bizarresameness. It was as if there was an algo-rithm of relationships that produced a car-pet pattern of walkable neighborhoods

and dense, transit-friendly developmentthat could be laid down no matter wherein the world they were building. Althoughthey were embracing the technological ca-pacities, they were using them to re-buildParisin a bizarrely modern, recondi-tioned worldeverywhere.

However, massive change is upon us,and it opens onto an extraordinary vista ofopportunitiesand challenges. Contrasturban inertia with the clock speed of tech-nological change where we are doublingour capacity every 12 months, inventingnew products, systems and language. Para-doxically, in this time of great change andpotential abundance, we must reinforcestability in order to allow citizensindi-vidually and collectivelyto support andengage new and fresh possibilities.

The other great paradox of this momentof massive change is that the greatest chal-lenges we face are problems of success, notfailure. If we had failed more, we wouldnot have nearly as many problems. Had wefailed more frequently, there would not benearly seven billion of us. If Malthus wasright, there would be fewer than a billioncitizens on the planet, and we could behavelike frat boys and never concern ourselveswith our impact on the global ecology. Butwith a growing population expected to topmore than 10 billion by mid-century, whatwe do adds up. And the impact of our suc-cess generates new, demanding and evenlife-threatening challenges.

MASSIVE CHANGE

Under these conditions, the urban potentialof the global revolution of possibility thatwe call Massive Change is twofold:

Bruce Mau is a designer, the creative director of the Institute without Boundaries

and author of Massive Change (Phaidon: 2004).


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19WINTER 2010 / 2011

U R B A N I T Y R E V I S E D

First, create wealthembrace theextraordinary new capacities of the 21stcentury so that we can fully experienceour collective potential for a brilliantlycreative, abundant and equitable future.

Second, get to perpetuitydesign abeautiful way of living that is equal partsecology and economy; a way of being onthe planet that is thrivingvoluptuous,thrilling and plausible in the long term.Perpetuity suggests a way of being thatdoesnt destroy the ecology we depend on,steal from our children, or leave them withour toxic legacy.

Cities will be a big part of accom-plishing both of these ambitions. We aremaking great progress in this direction,but we still have a long way to go. Thereare profound inequities that lock a hugepopulation of the world out of the devel-opment potential that exists. And we arestill a million miles from perpetuity inany comprehensive sense. To get there, wewill need new ideas that enable the valuesof Massive Change and inspire people tomake the changes that are necessary.

I have spent 25 years thinking aboutthe city, occasionally working on the objectof my affection. I have been fortunate to beinvited to imagine urban visions for large-scale developments; create new models forthe design of resource communities in thefar north; develop a 1,000 year plan for thefuture of Makkah, the spiritual center ofIslam; and lead a vision for a new post-oilsustainable city in the Middle East.

O ver the last two and half decadesthere has been a revolution in theglobal urban reality as more andmore of us moved to the city, nally sur-passing more than half of the world popu-

lation. We have also seen a revolution inour capacity to design at the scale of theurban systems. We have witnessed:

The development of global informa-tion technology and the Interneta sys-tem of connection that changes every-thing. That system has accelerated thedevelopment of new tools like geographicinformation systems and global mapping.

The building of the physical equiva-lent of the Internet in the global system oflogistics that enables just-in-time manu-facturing and connects our economies andecologies into a single network.

The creation of the science and prac-tice of complexity and the developmentof new dynamic analytical tools with thecapacity for understanding and visualizingurban systems.

The invention of new concepts forunderstanding our place in the network oflife, like the Biomimicry movement andthe cradle-to-cradle approach to design andmanufacturing.

The development of new metrics for

environmental development like the Lead-ership in Energy and Environmental De-sign [ ] program that quanties per-formance in the built environment.

The design of new concepts in energypositive buildings like Pearl River Tower byAdrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architects.

The development of new city proto-types in India, China and the Middle East,like Norman Fosters Masdar, an experi-ment in the synthesis of advanced sustain-able urban living.


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legacy of the mining industry was a 30mile dead zone around the city where nota blade of grass grew.

I proposed that instead of thinking abouta city with a park, we think about the entirecity as a parka place of beauty and natureand delightwhere 100,000 people make aliving, raise their families. This way of think-ing allows us to see ourselves in the contextof the natural world with the responsibil-ity of designing and maintaining the ecol-ogy that sustains us. In fact, this process inSudbury had been underway for some time.In her recent book, Hope for Animals andTheir World , Jane Goodall features Sudburyas an example of ecological recovery. Decadesago, a project to restore the surroundingecology began, and today the forest aroundmy home town is slowly coming back to life.Interestingly, a Park of Desolation, severalhundred acres in its most toxic condition,is being maintained, allowed to stand as amonument to its past as a toxic desert.

IMAGINE A CITY WITHOUT MUSEUMS

My friend Giorgio de Cicco, Poet Laure-ate for the City of Toronto, once wroteabout the difference between cultureand cultural events, between art and artparties. He highlighted the poverty of acity that thinks that museums, and theirfundraising dinners and blockbuster ex-hibitions, constitute culture. He set methinking about the city as a work of art.Not a container for art. Not a place thathas an art program or special events.But a place that is itself holistically con-ceived as a thing of beauty, a place wherethe beauty of food and music, the art oflove and family, the creativity of workand life, all come together.

Somehow in North America, and toa great degree all over the world, we haveallowed art to be marginalized. Imag-

The explosion of the movement that isdistributing ideas and potential throughorganizations like Habitat for Humanityand CEOs for Cities, who are working toquantify the economic dividends of thecity and galvanize action in creating thenext generation of great American cities.

And then there are the thoughts thatexercise the urban imagination, that ex-plore ideas and forms that might helpshape our cities.

IMAGINE A CITY WITHOUT PARKS

The idea of the park is a concept thathas come to the end of its useful life.The park is an island of intelligence in asea of stupidity. The outmoded idea of apark cannot help but reinforce a funda-mental problem that has inicted untolddamagethe separation of humans andthe natural world. In the city, the parkfunctions as an alibi, a moment of good-ness in a eld of bad. We use the park as alicense, a small green permission slip thatallows us to trash or pave everything else.We need to invert the diagram. We needa general condition of intelligence. For theforeseeable future we may need to toler-ate islands of stupidityplaces where wehave yet to invent a solution to a particu-lar problembut the general conditionought to be one of intelligent sustainableabundance. With exceptions.

A couple of years ago I was invitedto think about applying design to thecity where I grew up. Sudbury is a toughmining town in Northern Ontario. Thecity has an extraordinarily beautiful con-textthe northern Canadian forest of thePrecambrian Shield, the artistic subject ofthe most famous group of Canadian his-torical painters. In fact, Sudbury has 330lakes inside the city limits. However, the


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21WINTER 2010 / 2011

U R B A N I T Y R E V I S E D

our cities for cars. Even places in the worldwhere the people are dead set against theAmerican values of liberal democracy, theyembrace trafc. Trafc is the lingua franca ofthe 20th century.

Now imagine a car that is silent andclean and sexy and thrilling. It takes its en-ergy from the sun. Or it produces energyand powers your home. Or it is poweredby compressed air. This car doesnt need tostay outsideyoucan park this car inyour workplace orbedroom. This isthe 21st century car.There is a wave ofinnovation happen-ing that hasnt beenseen since the carwas rst invented.If you visit the FordMuseum in Detroit you will see the experi-ments that happened around the turn of thelast century as we attempted to combine thewheel and the motor. Thousands of innova-tors, in hundreds of companies, invented ev-ery conceivable formatthree wheels, twowheels, four wheels, electric, steam, internalcombustionwhich eventually settled intowhat we know as the car. That car evolvedincrementally for nearly 100 years. Now weare reinventing the car at a higher order.We want the beauty and freedom and thrillof the carwithout the environmental im-pact. The new car will also transform cit-iesin surprising and yet unknown ways.With the car dened in this new way, weopen the suburb for a renaissance. Suddenly,the environmental equation is recast.

We must apply the same level of in-novation to mass transit. After more thana century of change, the bus is still abus. We are still using trains for transit,a model from the 19th century. We use

ine if Venice had had a 1 percent for artprogram during the Renaissance. I cantimagine many people visiting Venice for1 percent. Venice is art. Everything aboutit is intended to be the best we can be.Every sound. Every color. Every taste. Every-thing you touch or see or hear is created foryouto delight and demonstrate our bril-liance. Everything is an afrmation of thehuman spirit. Art is the material the place ismade of. We need a 99 percent for art ap-proach. We need an approach that imaginesthe entire city as an art work. Everything canbe beautiful. Its not a matter of money. Artdoesnt cost more. It just is more.

In the end, this is fundamentally acompetitive issue. In a world of mobilecapital and talent, money goes to beauty. Ifyou want talent in your cityand moneyand innovation travel togetheryou needto create beauty. You need to demonstratethat culture is the core of your being. Imwith Claes Oldenberg on this one. In 1961,he wrote in his deliriously beautiful mani-festo, I am for an art that does somethingother than sit on its ass in a museum.

IMAGINE A CITY WITHOUT TRAFFIC

The old car is toxic and stupid. The old caris dead. The most amazing thing about the20th century design of the car is how effec-tively we were able to disguise its reality. Ifyou were sitting in a room with an enginerunning you couldnt hear yourself think youwould be dead in no time. An internal com-bustion engine is a continuous toxic explo-sion. Think of a freeway as a poisonous riverof re. That is the 20th century reality of thecar. But we disguised that. We designed away for you to sip your Starbucks and listento Vivaldi sitting on top of this continuousexplosion. And more than any other design,this design of the car reshaped our cities andchanged the world. Everywhere, we designed

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HERESIES

Stuart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalogue fame,identies four environmental heresieschal-lenging the environmental movement torethink its negative posture of protest, andarguing that the city is key to unlocking oursustainable future. On the other hand, RemKoolhaas published the Harvard Project onthe City, an effort that fully abandons thechallenge of utopia for the luxury and com-forts of cynicism. If the burning of Buck-minster Fullers Geodesic Pavillion for Expo67 stands as an iconic image of the end of autopian era, perhaps we can instrumentalizethe burning of Koolhaass Chinese Televisionbuildingcaught on YouTube videoasthe bookend of the period of anti-utopiancynicism, and begin to herald the signs of anew era of urban imagination.

We should end this contemplation of theurban imagination with a paradoxa noteon mental health and the political strategyof the city. The citizen can only embrace in-novation from a place of condence and sta-bility. In order for the citizen to experiencethe potential of 21st century innovation andchange, our political leaders must reinforcestability and security. The very notion ofchange may seem exciting to people like me,but it is terrifying to most. The paradoxicalpolitical project of the open and democraticcity is to reinforce norms of conduct that en-hance community and health in order to al-low citizens the opening and opportunity tocontemplate change.

In fact, the real objective of 21st cen-tury political urban leadership must beto establish Massive Change as a healthydemocratic norm.

the same glass box bus shelter in Chicagothat we use in Los Angeles, with the sameoutmoded advertising economic model.All of these represent opportunities thatare ripe for reinvention.

(RE)IMAGINE LUXURY

If we are ever to get to perpetuity, we mustprofoundly change the nature of the de-bate about sustainability. So long as wedene sustainability in the negativeassaving and sacrice, using less and givingthings upwe will never inspire the par-ticipation that we need to succeed.

For fty years the environmentalmovement has dened the argument thisway, and the outcome has been absolutedisaster. Over those ve decades we haveseen a tenfold increase in global energyuse. Not once in half a century has the to-tal number of cars in the world declined.Not once. The world will not embrace adenition of our future as less than ourpast. We will not sacrice. We are builtto seek pleasure, wealth, beauty and de-light. We must dene sustainability inthese terms. We must develop sustain-able luxury. Sustainability must be morebeautiful, more thrilling, more luxuriousthan anything we have ever experienced.

Once we get to this approach, we willall love it and want it. Only sustainableluxury has the potential to inspire therevolution that we urgently need. Onlythis approach will inspire people whodont dene themselves as environmen-talists or pioneers or extremistswhichhappens to be the vast population look-ing for a better life. l

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