Communities and Cities

Our generation faces a massive challenge - and opportunity - to fundamentally redesign our industrial-age system of mining food - towards a resilient, sustainable mode of farming food - all without losing our capacity to produce and distribute food on a massive scale. The author of this article argues that we need to embark of a series of large scale agricultural and infrastructural experiments in how we feed cities.

Server is one such proposed experiment - based on an almost absurdly simple proposition: could a motorway be self-sufficient? That is, could we unhook it from oil, and tie it into the surrounding agricultural economy, a belt of farmland whose major crop is .. mobility.

The project takes a 7-mile section of the M1 motorway in the midlands, and investigates its redesign as a self-sufficient farming belt, producing no overall waste and consuming no major external resources.Based on existing processes, prices and capacities, it attempts to choreograph a sort of agricultural ecosystem, in which the waste of one process is seen as the feedstock for the next.

You can read more about the Server project here: http://www.bemakeshift.com/catalogue/38/server.html

Samule Palmisano, the chair and chief executive of IBM, writes about the change agents of the 21st century and how the most important locus for innovation will be in the cities. Technology that can make our cities much smarter is already excisting. However, if we are really going to drive meaningful change, we need to get smarter about how we work together and the cities of the future will have to be far more collaborative than they currently are.

You can read the article here: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/01/15/the-future-of-the-city.print.html

There has been increased emphasis on intentional innovation, on conscious efforts to develop a more systematic approach to innovation. Rather than wait idly by for social innovations to appear, practitioners and organizations around the world are working to understand and establish methodologies, frameworks, and processes that stimulate social innovation and aim to increase the chances of its success. This is an important development.

Yet, there is an intrinsic character to innovation that resists the linearity imposed by many traditional frameworks. And, while it is important to pursue these more structured methods, it is equally as important to pursue approaches that embrace the unique, magical quality of emergent innovation.

Much of the existing literature acknowledges the need to set the conditions for social innovation, but rarely does it discuss what those conditions should be. The Centre for Social Innovation's on-the-ground experience with a diverse range of civil society groups provides them with unique insight into how to create the conditions for social innovation emergence.

This paper uses the Centre for Social Innovation as a case study to demonstrate how the conditions that facilitate social innovation emergence can be deliberately created. It provides insight into the field and offer transferable ideas that can be used to accelerate social innovation in other environments.

The article, Urban Legends, is dismantling some of the common urban legends of today and promotes a new approach to city development and innovation. It argues that it is not clear whether the extreme centralization and concentration advocated by the new urban utopians is inevitable -- and it's not at all clear that it's desirable.

What if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

You can read more about Joel Kotkin's arguments in his article: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/urban_legends

This article argues that the 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. Further, this new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones.

You can read the article here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/beyond_city_limits

In 2010, five of the world's 10 most global cities are in Asia and the Pacific: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and Seoul. Three -- New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles -- are American cities. Only two, London and Paris, are European. And there's no question which way the momentum is headed: Just as more people will continue to migrate from farms to cities, more global clout will move from West to East.

We are at a global inflection point. Half the world's population is now urban -- and half the world's most global cities are Asian. The 2010 Global Cities Index, a collaboration between Foreign Policy, management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, reveals a snapshot of this pivotal moment.

You can read the FP special report on the The Global Cities Index 2010 here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/11/the_global_cities_index...