Megatrends, Powerbrokers, and the Advent of the Microchip City
Co-Authored by Stephen Hardy and Nick Bowden. This piece was originally posted on Stephen’s Medium.
Cities are fabulously complex. They are engines of economic growth and crucibles for innovation. They flex and bend in the winds of economic uncertainty and they represent both an enormous drain on natural resources and the single most efficient human system. But for all the dynamism that cities have seen over the last 250 years, the built form of our cities has remained comparatively static. In the modern era, we would argue that we have seen only two megatrends that have truly impacted the shape of our cities: urbanization brought about by industrialization, and the rise of the automobile-centric community. In the wake of these megatrends, the very essence of what a city is evolves. That evolution was shaped equally by the technology of the time and the political might of the elite power brokers. Cities were reconstructed by newfound abilities to bend steel and the age-old political machinations of backroom deals.
Today we sit on the threshold of the next megatrend: the microchip city.
Cities look almost identical to the way they did in 1959 when the microchip debuted. That however, will change dramatically in the coming years and the results on the city will be truly transformative. Cities will be reconstructed again as technology is interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives empowering new forms of transportation, smarter governance, exponential efficiency gains, and further disruptions of the labor market; cities will be reconstituted once again. We aren’t talking automated streetlights and “smarter” infrastructure, this will completely remake our cities — a new operating system, and potentially one that is more human centered than either of the past transformations. But much more on this in the coming posts. For now lets pull a few lessons from the first two megatrends.
Industrialization built the modern city. Factory jobs drew millions of agrarian workers from the farm to the city in an unprecedented migration that is still happening around the world today. In New York City alone, population increased 35x over a 100 year period from 1830 to 1930 (200,000 to 7,000,000). During that same time period, global population only grew by 2x. Today urbanization has become a defacto indicator of a country’s economic development and now more than half the world lives in cities. In the U.S. that number is 80%.
In the early days of urbanization cities were overrun by the populous. The infrastructure of the day simply could not hold the influx. Widespread disease, pollution, and effluent were the norm. To combat this scourge, city planning and civil engineering grew as professions. Sewers, zoning, and transportation routes were designed and overlaid onto the city. These interventions enforced a degree of order with a net positive impact on human health and commerce. However, prosperity was still reserved for the few and the reshaping of the city was done in a way that further isolated and disenfranchised the powerless.
If Industrialization built the modern city, the private automobile remade it in its own image. In the 1920s and 30s private automobile ownership skyrocketed, bringing with it new freedoms and ushering in automobile-centric design. Roads, bridges, parking, garages, and the interstate highway system exploded the city. The bulldozer hollowed out many of the densest parts of town to make way for infrastructure needs. The rise of the single-family home suburb, the mall, and the drive-through created entirely new types of city growth. The automobile has unquestionably disrupted the city.
Though it varies by the community, the automobile now consumes between 30 and 50% of the American cityscape.
“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city” (Lewis Mumford 1981, prominent urbanist and writer).
Mumford isn’t speaking just of the car, but of the parking and roadways required to support its use. And again, major decisions about who would benefit from the public investments that encouraged this transformation moved ahead according to the plans and policies of a select few and often at the detriment of the actual citizen in the impacted areas.
The classic example of this is now the origin story of modern urban planning. Robert Moses the “master builder” of New York was a power broker of the first order. His preference for massive expressways and extensive roadway infrastructure typify a national trend to bulldoze poorer neighborhoods to make way for the automobile’s expansion. In the wake of this top-down pressure, several grass-roots campaigns emerged arguing for the vibrancy of their neighborhoods and the importance of granular and organic communities that shouldn’t be hammered into a regular order. Jane Jacobs emerged as the patron saint of this movement. Her public fight with Robert Moses over the Lower Manhattan Expressway saved SoHo from being destroyed and emboldened a generation of urbanists who began to give voice to the idea of city building with, instead of in spite of, the public.
I share this story to hint at the importance of the impending dialogue about the advent of the Microchip city. If we look ahead even just a decade or two, it’s not hard to see scenarios where the privately owned automobile is a relic, where roadways and parking will be obsolete, and the city will need to be remade again. The dramatic shifts in the labor market and in our cities will bring about new opportunity, new threats, and new policies in our communities. It is our collective responsibility to bring forward the lessons of the past two great megatrends: to proactively plan and to truly listen to and empower the citizenry. The transformative power of autonomous vehicles, the great potential of the blockchain, the ability for citizens to utilize and act as sensors, and the potential of scaled citizen engagement each come with mind-blowing opportunities. We will talk more about each of these in the coming weeks. If you are interested in the history of cities and want to really get into the weeds and theory, I recommend Peter Hall’s: “Cities of Tomorrow” and Kenneth Jackson’s: “Crabgrass Frontier”
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About the Authors: Stephen Hardy serves as mySidewalk’s Chief Product Officer. Nick Bowden is mySidewalk’s CEO and founder. Both come from an urban planning background with a sincere passion for data-driven development.
