Stockholm Speculative Futures Meetup — The Battle for the Infrastructure of Everyday Life
“Our cities are paused in front of several different alternative futures.” — Dan Hill
For the second event of our Speculative Futures Stockholm chapter, we gathered a diverse and critical crowd to discuss a way forward to develop our cities, facing today’s emerging and recurring challenges. In addition, we tackled the thorny question of the special place that technology holds in transforming the city.
With a sold out event and a very curious community, the future development of our cities seems to be on everyone's lips.
Dan Hill, Director of Strategic Design for the Swedish Innovation Vinnova, made us the pleasure to present and share his vision of a process which could lay ground to a common and desirable tomorrow for our cities.
Check out more about Dan Hill at https://medium.com/@cityofsound
If you haven’t been able to participate in this event, find the recording of the talk below :
The Battle for the infrastructure of everyday life
Dan explains that to rethink serenely our approach to city-making, we need to take a step back, acknowledge today’ fallacies, and take a closer look at how our cities are shaped.
Dan referred to the current process of city-making as “a slow and unthinking drift from 20th century systems into systems shaped by 21st century Big Tech corporations”. Like the car or tram-way, technology has been a central driver in designing our cities and the interactions happening within them. Today, from advanced manufacturing to autonomous vehicles or super-green safe streets, big tech companies have positioned themselves as key players in creating the ’smart city’, designing all of its layers.
“Technology is the answer. But what was the question” — Cedric Price, 1966
According to Dan, the resulting consequences of such approach to city-making is ; firstly, a city unadapted to 21st century challenges, and secondly, a city against the concept of ‘city as common good’.
Through his examples, he pointed at the divergence of interests between city makers and inhabitants ; leading to cities, which he described as “unprepared, ill-advised and increasingly subjugated by individualising technologies applied at urban scale”. Moreover, dominated by corporations’ interests and a single vision of a city’s future.
“We don’t make cities to make technology, buildings, infrastructure. We make cities for culture, community, commerce, conviviality…” — Dan Hill
Fortunately, Dan shared some crucial actions to approach those challenges.
Question the futures of cities
Following the “business as usual” approach has impeded us from questioning the nature of society we are creating and the reasons that lead to design our cities that way. Today, we must ask ourselves, what sort of city do we want to build?
Dan believes that a different city model is possible. A model we could engage with consciously and deliberately aiming for civic and public outcomes.
Facilitate the collaboration between the private and public actors
Dan also proposed that in order to recreate this link, it is crucial to adopt a participatory approach to transform our cities. Sharing the know-how and a multiplicity of opinions helps to negotiate the public and private interests and allows a different form of city-making. In this process, speculative scenarios are the vessels of diverse imaginaries. It gives a richer and pluralistic view on the specific context investigated, to provoke and question the established relations between people, things and the environment.
According to Dan, city-making is also about harnessing and turning the divergence of interests into collaborations through the acknowledgement of common benefits. For example, the Oslo city bikes service shares openly their data with the city so they can better understand the demands in terms of mobility and plan accordingly the local public transportation. Beside of sharing their data, the company has put effort in creating a relationship, a sense of belonging and ownership of the infrastructure by the public, resulting in lower cost of maintenance per bike. Hence, identifying shared drivers and outcomes projects a way forward and brings back a balance between the stakeholders.
Contextualise technologies applications
To prevent unintended consequences on the deployment of new technological systems into the city, we need to contextualise their usage to better match each city’s challenges such as mobility, energy, traffic, housing. Dan illustrated this risk with the example of Uber and Lyft in San Francisco where the city has registered an increase of 40% in traffic since the launch of the service; opposite from the initial promise of reducing traffic.
In the future, consciously contextualising the technologies’ usages in and for the city will allow us to entirely rethink how cities collect and use data.
Strategic city-making
As discussed earlier, framing an approach to design potential futures for our cities needs pluralistic visions to converge. In addition to that, it requires a new systemic and strategic methodology because of our current approach, which Dan described as outdated processes.
“We are taking 21st century challenges, evaluating them with 20th century ideas, and responding with 19th century tools.” — Madeleine Albright
He shared a strategic methodology and milestones to design a way forward including our greatest challenges in the equation. Through the example of a street project In Melbourne, we looked at how to develop healthy streets, encouraging greener mobility, increasing economic value or even reducing pollution, etc… :
Step 1 : Define the digital backbone
Step 2 : Unlock the spaces
Step 3 : Test other mobility options
Step 4 : Re-green the city
Step 5 : Enable shared surfaces
Step 6 : Design flexible active programs
Transform the design approach
For that to happen, Dan suggested that designers must change their approach to problem-solving and be more engaged in designing cities.
First and foremost, we need to change the way we look at issues and drivers shaping our cities. By adopting what Dan called ‘soft eyes’, it forces us to see the holistic picture of the problems and the context we are designing in.
Secondly, we need to adopt different ‘lenses’. Yesterday, streets were designed around the usage of the car. Tomorrow, the new streets can adopt unexpected shapes depending on the one we select. For instance, reducing the number of parking lots may merely create more pedestrian space but it could also aim to recreate economic attraction or reduce the impact of heat by planting trees instead.
Looking at the city with a different eye is also about understanding what constitutes its space and what can be identified as ‘slow layers’ and ‘fast layers’. According to Dan, thinking with different temporalities offers new grounds for testing flexible solutions, meanwhile adapting the spaces to the rapid growth of the city and its evolving challenges. For this to happen, design must become adaptative.
To conclude he believes that the last strategic step happens when designers, policy-makers, urban planners, etc... converge to rewrite building policies. The final goal is to modify an obsolete code that governs the making of the city in order to lay a foundation for new policies and solutions.
The audience answered to Dan
Following up on his rich intervention, Dan Hill asked the audience some questions. It addressed the needed transformation of the design practice and policy making to tackle 21st century challenges. As well as what unique opportunity the Swedish and Nordic context have to give us to handle our futures.
Picking up on Dan’s ideas, many members in the audience shared the will to create an engagement from the public in designing solutions with government and private actors. Moreover, the sustainability challenge is identified as a genuine gathering driver for re-thinking the city as a pervasive space between natural and artificial environments, leading to other long term benefits. Most importantly, the critical view towards today’s processes invites us to look more closely at the way we engage with our city and modify it, whether it’s intentional or not.
Here are some of the contributions collected by the Speculative Futures Chapter team in closure of the event.
“We need more system-thinking”
“More iterative design rather than abrupt changes.”
“By using participatory approaches, involving marginalised communities and fostering care and a sense of ownership.”
“Make it clearer to the politicians & the public of the typically unforeseen benefits of the new urban planning ideas. For example, benefits in health, community interaction/cooperation, reduced crime from making streets more liveable.”
“ Scandinavian countries have the strongest welfare-systems, but build them on the expense of nature & our environment there are rich ecosystems and we need to envision to do what ever we do at first with less and less pollution & in the long run in tune with nature.”
“The ability to embrace change that is made and chosen rather than accepting change that is forced upon us.”
What is next for Speculative Futures Stockholm
The Speculative Futures Stockholm is working on an exciting plan of activities for 2020, make sure you keep following our events on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Stockholm-Speculative-Futures-Chapter. The Stockholm Chapter is composed by Daniel Petersson, Fernanda Torre, Trieuvy Luu, Marie Louise Søndergaard, Paul Lequay, Lorenzo Davoli, Martina Eriksson, Johan Grönskog, Kimberley Beauprez, Johan Hammarlund, Tove Blomgren, Gaelle Le Gélard, Viraj Joshi, Victoria Cleverby. A big thank you to all of them! We are just getting started, so please reach out to us if you are interested in joining us!
Last but not least, thank you again to all the great people who participated in our second event. Thank you also to our host Antler and our speaker Dan Hill.
