The future is urban:
Ambiguity can help us navigate.
If you were born in 1900, you had a 1 in 8 chance of living in a city. Today, 1 out of 2 people live in cities. Two-thirds of the world will call cities home within the next thirty years.
So what type of home do we envision for humanity?
How do we prepare the next generation to design and build cities?
We have two paths: business as usual, which has led to cities being increasingly unaffordable, hot, and crowded. Or we can build human-centered cities with high quality, well-designed places for all communities.
How we urbanize is about articulating our future in spatial terms.
These are massive and complex problems that cannot be solved by one discipline alone. This requires urban planners, engineers, and designers to put their heads together. Human-centered design, as a method of problem-solving, brings everyone together.
Urban Studies started as a field within sociology to explain the impacts of industrialization and mass migration into cities. Urban planning came later when cities adopted the first zoning ordinances and needed to train practitioners to administer these laws.
Both fields sought to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Urban Studies offered methods to identify, explain, and categorize what we saw in cities. Urban planners assessed problems and rationalized solutions to improve the quality of life in cities.
This approach require experts who know best; they worked hard to suppress ambiguity and speak with certainty about the best path forward.
Today, cities are more complex than ever — its impacts are borderless and global — and they face new technological possibilities and threats of climate change. The unknown is a fact; we can no longer assume with certainty what we do not know. At a minimum, we have to be comfortable with ambiguity; at best, we leverage ambiguity to guide our actions especially when the path forward is murky.
Our methods of training those who design and build cities need to adapt.
To design a curriculum around this, we offer students a set of tools. Learning how to get information, make sense of it, and understand possible paths forward is key. By interviewing, students identify and map the needs of stakeholders. They synthesize learnings to reframe the opportunity as design challenges. The goal is not to learn how to prescribe checklists of solutions, but to gain confidence in assessing the unknown and to exercise creativity in seeing the problem with fresh eyes.
Cities are adopting these methods as well. Urban planning agencies use human-centered methods of data collection to understand people’s experience in public spaces. Prototyping and pilot projects allow communities to test, collect data, and gather feedback on potential capital improvements before investing large sums of money to pour the concrete.
Making cities better is admittedly a different design challenge from designing products and services. More research, experimentation, and collaboration is needed. When facing ambiguity, one thing is certain: putting people front and center is a step forward in an urban future yet to be written.
Deland Chan teaches Civic Dreams, Human Spaces at the d.school and is a Co-Founder of the Human Cities Initiative (www.humancities.org).
