Creating cities that are liveable, lovable and viable
To reach our mission we have a decade to re-think, re-design and re-create inclusive and carbon neutral cities together.
On a drawing board, a city map resembles the blueprint of a a machine. It is the sum of its parts, each with a useful function and well-defined process to perform that task. They are at once separated and connected to the other parts though flows of its output, be it on a conveyor belt or a road or through a cable. To make city or the machine work the way you want, you need to understand all individual processes and how they relate to each other because as soon as you change something, the entire system might be affected.
A majority of people already live in cites, and many more of us will in the future. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from activities performed in cities or to support cities, and thus the war on climate change is a battle fought in cities, neighbourhood by neighbourhood
At Viable Cities, our mission is to make cities climate neutral by 2030. It’s a bit of a daunting task but our plan involves bringing together around 60 stakeholders in various areas of research, industry, government, local authorities and civil society to empower everyone involved with open-source knowledge, tools and playbooks to involve everyone living and working in cities to make that happen, through open-source knowledge, tools and playbooks among other things.
Of course, the ways cities operate today mean they are nowhere near being carbon neutral, and especially not if you include the impact on the climate from all of us living in cities.
The structures of the modern city weren’t built to last, and so they weren’t created for sustainable lifestyles. Buildings and infrastructure are not built to last an eternity, but to stand a generation and then to be replaced by something else, even something better. And so a city is never finished but is in a state of never ending flux, a constant beta-version of its future self.
The city as a platform
Continuing with the programming analogy: even if the cities of today are not programmed to support and encourage carbon neutral lifestyles, they can be transformed if we can identify the deep code problems and address them. Viewed this way, the greenhouse gas emissions are a bug arising from the use of fossil fuels to create energy and that is a bug we can fix. Unfortunately, many of the problems we face are complex, even outright wicked!
If the city is a platform, the users are those living in it, and those users are us. In order to reach our goals, not only do we have to fix the deep code problems, we also have to use a variety of techniques, tricks and tools to make it as easy as possible for anyone living in that city to behave in a way that doesn’t hurt the climate.
By using a process called “systems acupuncture” we aim to identify opportunities for truly transformative change turning scientific achievements and collective knowledge about business models and new opportunities into action.
Nudging people in the right directions is important here, as it is to involve everyone in understanding why change is needed, how it will affect us, engaging everyone in defining needs and finding solutions that work, and making the necessary changes.
At Viable Cities, we’ve also decided to use storytelling as a tool for transforming cities. You have to be able to tell stories and describe what the experience of the future could look like and what it would feel like, as an invitation to involvement. Stories can nudge people in the right direction and engage us in a way pure facts cannot. Still, the stories we tell and the emotions they convey cannot be removed from scientific facts, but the stories cannot rely only on scientific facts either.
That is why Viable Cities has appointed a Chief Storyteller — the first of its kind — to explore ways in which storytelling can be used effectively to create engagement and involvement to enable climate neutral cities and lifestyles. Stories are an important tool for transformative change.
A city can only be understood from within
The analogy of the city as a machine has been used to describe and plan cities since early on. One of the most complete and widely imposed practical handbook of how to create a city emerges from the colonisation of the Americas by Spain, and is part of the Laws of the Indies proclaimed in 1573. These laws govern site selection, street and block layout, orientation, central plaza, public buildings, walls, common lands, the distribution of lots, and even the style of buildings. No one should be surprised that the colonial style of planning cities was a top-down-approach.
The American land expansion, both religious and commercial, to the west is examined in the light of “grids of expediency,” as is the nineteenth-century expansion of the Manhattan grid as a system that “is the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.”
It made sense to have one district for meat-packing and one for where most banks were situated and a fish market by the harbour and a neighbourhood for all the Italian immigrants and another for all the Germans and everyone seemed to self-segregate anyway. And schools were placed at an equal distance from each other, as were libraries and prisons and hospitals and fire stations. The aim is to create and maintain a machine running smoothly by administrating a densely populated area and where people are viewed as cogs, as rational as possible.
The only problem with this approach is, of course, that people aren’t cogs at all. Trying to understanding a city from a macro level will inevitable make its inhabitants invisible. As you ascend high enough needed to take in the entire city in one view, the individual populating the streets disappear from sight. As popular as the meta perspective might be, it doesn’t help you to understand the city because you are distancing yourself from something you that cannot be distanced from.
A city cannot be understood from afar or from above, but needs to be experienced from within. You might be annoyed by the fact that you are stuck in traffic but you are at the same time that traffic. Which brings us to another analogy to understand a city, that of a living organism.
This analogy arose from the growth of biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and rests on a number of assumptions about the nature of organisms, of collections of biological cells. It does not change merely by adding parts but through reorganisation as it reaches limits or thresholds. The whole organism is homeostatic, self-repairing and regulating toward a dynamic balance. Cycles of life and death are normal to organisms as is rhythmic passage from one state to another. From this flows the notion of the form of the organic city. It is a separate spatial and social unit made up internally of highly connected places and people. A healthy community is heterogeneous and diverse.
Love is local
None of these concepts does however do a very good job of describing what it feels like to experience a particular city or why one might love one town but loath another, even though they might have roughly the same composition on a map.
That love arises from something much more fluid, the emotional and physical relations you have to a place. What makes it so attractive to go local, to buy produce from a farm not far from the neighbourhood square, or frequenting the local pizzeria rather than a Pizza Hut on the same block is because it relates to something we are physically connected to. Going local is a desire to comprehend a limited part of the world, a part that is small enough for you to be relatable.
But the experience is very different from one person to another, based on background, gender, experiences and mood. When someone is breaking up with you, you no longer taste the food in a restaurant. And the sunset is never as beautiful as when you just realised you love the person sitting next to you.
When the air doesn’t feel clean, the water is dirty or waste collection isn’t happening, citizens naturally turn to their city administrations. The distance between those who govern cities and those who live in cities are much less than to those in parliament. That puts pressure on city officials to act quickly and decisively and it favours concrete solutions before abstract declarations.
Towards a liveable, lovable and viable city
To be carbon neutral, a city may need smart energy grids to enable local production of renewable energy, a steady supply of locally produced food or effective public transportation. To be a lovable city, it needs places where you can dance, buildings of worship, markets of trade, gardens for play monuments of glory, grief and remembrance.
So how do we design and re-design better versions of our current cities? How do we make better use of the public spaces and the time spent in those spaces. What if we changed the ways we travel in the city, the ways we work, and the ways we live? What happens if we stop designing cities for the size of cars and yet again make sure the city is created in relation to a human scale? What if the elderly were to decide how cities are designed? Or the children? Or people with functional diversity? What would they say? What would city life look then?
Even though we might not know what it will look like, we can probable guess what it would feel like. That city would feel more liveable to groups that feel that are left out from planning processes today. That mean it would be more loveable to many more people, and with things we love, we also take better care of. And so that city would also be more viable.
Our approach
As you probably know, Sweden is a country built on the ideals on collectivism, providing enough social safety that individuals should be able to pursue their own dreams. As with every system, there are advantages and problems with this system. Still, it has served us well and helped us learn a few things along the way. Our approach is guided by a few principles, influenced by the Swedish way of thinking.
“Vi” as in we.
The Swedish word for we is pronounced nearly the same as in English, and it is a difficult word for the same reasons. The concept of “vi” is fluid and it depends on who says it if you are to feel included or left out. In order to create inclusive communities in sustainable cities, we use is as broadly as possible in a communal sense.
Not only do we include everybody in the room in that “we” or in “our” but also everyone not present but affected. This cannot be stressed enough, and we will try to make this point as often as possible, at the start of the conversations we’re going to have.
Able as in empowered with an ability
To re-think, re-design och re-create our cities to be climate neutral, we need to work together and learn from each other. Although Sweden historically has been something of a pioneer in the field of sustainability and although Viable Cities is fortunate enough to have gathered a diverse field of partners, we take great care not to be humble, with a top-down approach and favour fixed solutions. That is why cities can act quicker than countries.
When we tell each other that science cannot be misunderstood with regards to climate change — we have to change our current way of life — it is not a call for sacrifice but an invitation to co-create our future. Inviting people to understand the implications of climate change and what to enable constructive dialogues on how we can create better and climate neutral versions of our cities, must be done with a peer-to-peer attitude.
Recognising that every city, every organisation, every person and every experience of the city is unique, we must also acknowledge that no one is special. No one is here to help anyone special, but to help each other. Gathering data, sharing better and new practices, piloting new ideas and learning from successes and mistakes will make us all more empowered with an ability to reach our mission.
Cities as communities, not places
A smart city is city that makes it easy for people who call it their home town to live a good life. The viable cities we envision are human communities, not just collections of buildings. What technology that is in use is irrelevant, it is what it does for people that matters.
When changing our cities, we must never loose focus on the interests, motivations and needs of the citizens, and make sure new ideas are realised with the active involvement of those whose life that will be impacted by it. It’s not about changing a place, but about shaping compassionate communities.
Post-modernism thought us that what is truth depends on your perspectives and the filters that surrounds the bubble that is yours. In this era of competing narratives, we have to remember that there is no single set of scientific findings that tell us what do do, and no single story about what a future city will feel like.
No one can claim to have the overarching narrative of a city, let alone of our time. No story is completely true, no version captures everything. That’s why it’s important to have lots of stories, to ensure that everyone can make their voices heard and their stories shared to enable others to gain from a multitude of perspectives.
The future is already in beta
Luckily, we don’t start from scratch. Our program has been running for almost two years, many of our partners have been working in this field for decades and the cities that committed to be the pioneers in achieving climate neutrality have been making efforts to create a good life for their inhabitants for centuries. There are lots of knowledge and experience to draw from and a lot of things are already happening.
As a government funded research and innovation program, we want to inspire others by taking a leading role in energy and climate transitions through smart sustainable cites.
At Viable Cities, we will find, fund, co-create and/or share solutions that enable transformative change to make cities climate neutral in the next ten years. Again, it’s about creating a sense of “vi” around climate action together with everyone involved and affected, empowering people to be able to create their own future, all while considering the city as a community, not a place.
We want to find what’s already working, fund new research and innovation projects on a local and national level that have the potential to catalyse transformative change, make sure there’s always a co-creation element to it in order to get citizen involvement, and then share the learnings and solutions to the world.
We hope that everyone involved in any Viable Cities initiative have experienced our way of leaning in to the future, knowing that the future is in beta, and the way we apply a sense of playful seriousness about this challenge. We know that the complex challenges of cities make it necessary to adopt an experimental approach, where we learn continuously, and keep evolving.
There are lots of things to do to reach our mission: climate neutral cities 2030. The ways cities operate needs to be transformed, as will the way we live our lives. This will require efforts from all of us. At the same time, when striving to make our cities more liveable, lovable and viable, we must recognise that a lot of the solutions needed are already in place.
Let’s use that to give us hope and to inspire us to push further.
The future is in already in beta.
