First, a kind of question, how can we manage the inevitable diversity of culture?   The second offers the obsurdity of continuous economic prosperity.  The third is the promise of technological and scientific innovations that are likely to save us all from our “continuous prosperity”.   If that is not enough, two ideas with a “last minute tone” promote the importance of design through urban remodeling practices and a somewhat vague suggestion regarding the need to define the physical interactions of urban and rural governance with greater accuracy.  But wait, just when it seems to make sense at the last minute, it gets worse. 

The business or corporate sense of priority at these Expos is carried by a truely vapid narrative of ad copy headings such as,  “quality leads to better experiences”, “sustainability is mandatory”,  “enable healthy lifestyles”, and my favorite, “be frugal”.    Is it really likely that flavorless clichés will successfully obscure the actual challenges that lie ahead?  It is obvious that irony will not be dismissed and that getting to the truth remains very, very difficult.

In  2012, the Expo will be called “The Living Ocean and Coast” (Yeosu, Korea)  or why the nations policy of believing in the corporate interest was in our self interest, turned the Gulf of Mexico into an oil storage tank.

In 2015 we will be treated to an expo-presentation entitled, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” (Milan, Italy) that will no doubt be organized to apolgize to the twelve million people facing death through starvation in that year.

Start list of verticle city construction

1.  Rotterdam

The “Der Rotterdam” in The Netherlands by MAB Development broke ground on 14 December 2009 it will be completed in 2013 (40-50 months).  MAB is part of the global Rabo Real Estate Group with emphasis on mixed-use development and commercial real estate with offices in the Netherlands, Germany and France.

This is the largest Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) building, and the largest in this country with 160,000 square meters and €340 million for the project.

Vertical city ideas return to what purpose: urban density and diversity
Three mixed-use towers at 150 meters
Connected mix of uses are retail, commercial and proffessional offices, apartments, a hotel, conference facilities, a gym, shops, restaurants and cafés.

Port District of Wilhelminapier
Adjacent to the Erasmus Bridge
World’s Third Largest Port

Urban Worlds

Density links to “urbanism” and to national transportation and communication policy for a reason – both require destinations to function profitably.  In 2008, when just over half of the world population became officially[i] urban, people took notice.  (See maps below).  Not coincidently, this marker includes a sense of accelerating environmental urgency coupled with a demand for vast improvements in business and urban development practices on a global scale.[ii]  Authors such as Mike Davis in Planet of Slums[iii] have said “wait just a damn minute – there are two destinations here”.  The quality of a dense urban life and its density is considered a good thing in very small parts of the world.   From a global perspective the deprivation associated with urban life is clear, but even a dense, high standard of living state like New Jersey or a cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles disrupt the “old wilderness order”, and concentrate poverty, wealth, goods and services in a new order about which humans seem to know very little.  These are equally accurate indictments of urban life.  

Excluding extreme weather as a cause, significant levels of distress have yet turned critical in America.  Growing disposable income contributes to widespread auto ownership at 93%.  Tucked in garages along side private homes, personalized transports systems have built the nation.   Each continues to offer millions of people the promise of casual free movement through space serving billions individualized trips to any destination.  Personal transport has a customizable personality serving everything from wealth to need.  It probably defines the future of mass transportation and it will do so by moving this power from the pump to the plug.  Advanced, digital communication systems such as GIS guide personal transport.  Thousands of new destinations are more accessible than ever before.  They can be “visited” prior to arrival.   Only one major thing will change.

 Beginning of the 21^st century, estimates of the earth’s population growth rate is 1.3 to 1.6 percent per year.  This means a population nearing 6 billion will double in just 50 years.  The lack of dialogue on the limits of growth may heat the planet more quickly than rise of atmospheric carbon. 

 
Percent Population in Urban Areas to 2025

Complexity makes things stay the way they are until something new pops to change everything.  New things are more powerful.  Economics and politics seem incapable of persuading humans to get past the decision making process of apex predators.   This is an old thing. Perhaps the metrics for a higher level of decision making is nearing, and questions that challenge stuff.   Isn’t this the real question? 

Is there or is there not a way to make the crowd’s wisdom, the regression to the mean, or the square root rule a more viable tool for place making?, and human life inspiring means to a vital existence?

Making sense out of the world is a uniquely human trait.   In the April 2009 Scientific American, an article by Emily Anthes outlines ways that our nerve cells are affected by design factors.  Wow, our minds are sensitive to things beautiful and blue or red and dangerous; they sense open or closed spaces and when we encounter a high ceiling height we might be encouraged to think more freely.  The people working to prove these things are found at The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in the never ending search for intelligent design.  

From an evolutionary viewpoint, the introduction of the brain to architecture and the full thrust of urban design is super new.  If all of geological time were one hour, the emergence of buildings would be in the last few nanoseconds.  

Silly me, and I thought the identification of the “golden ratio” had this whole thing aesthetically settled, n’cest pas?

These markers will then define a period of consolidation built on the size and/or significance of registrations/subscriptions followed by several experiments designed to measure user renewal ratios, or implement micro-billing options for access to direct services or data on an exchange level basis.  Given a more detailed metrics of the full arc and set of business model rebounds in the IT industry, a number of joint ventures are imagined with major hard copy print and broadcast partner companies.

A complete understanding of this vast print and support media business cycle is not possible.  Theorists of the information age put the question this way: on the day when the rate of change accelerates beyond our ability to comprehend it, will it matter that we won’t know it happened?”

The World Game Report (1969) shows R. Buckminster Fuller on the cover standing before a map he designed to eliminate distortion. Forty years latter, the demand inherent in this report remains.   It called for a world reporting process that would be accessible to the ordinary person and it offered this extraordinary promise, “…all of humanity can be brought to economic success within one quarter century – thus eliminating the fundamental raison d’être of war.  The World Game employs the general system logistics for the reorganized use of the world’s resources and employs comprehensive and progressive series of waves of producing higher performance per unit of invested time, energy, and know how and each and every component function of the over all scheduling.  It imagined the use of technology that was beyond Fuller’s reach but not his vision.  The World Game made it possible for intelligent amateurs to discover the premises were valid a few weeks of research.

Global economists since Thomas Malthus or Adam Smith have defined human relations as “trade”.  More recently designers with a global view willing to draw in the ideas of designers such as Buckminster Fuller have defined human relations as a question of “scale”.  Today, fully understanding global human consumption in terms of scale and trade now rise as the central means for guiding humanity toward well-being on a continually sustainable basis. 

Collective intelligence

The most well known book on the subject of collective intelligence is  The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.  It uses many examples to illustrate the truth of his subtitle, “how the many are smarter than the few”.  But most of it comes down to a well known bit of math known as “regression to the mean” and the “square root rule”.  For some time we have understood how to prioritise, aggregate or generate new content using data.  But only recently have very large consumer generated data sets have become widely available.   A typical example is how Google’s page ranking algorithm factors in the number and quality of incoming links to list search results.  The most recent was the use of an algorithm with the assistance of the Where’s George website to predict the spread of the dangerous H1N1 virus.

The advancement in the use of consumer generated data to describe scale and trade processes allows for multiple co-creative options, the ability to share a sense of “talent” through interactions that produce value.

Nationally obedient countries are very different from those that accept regional compliance with compromise — the England/Scotland/Whales/Ireland relationship comes to mind.

Nations with a culture of compliance in aversion to violence have a centralizing power that only a handful of countries on the earth have ever managed successfully.  The United States is probably the most powerful of the developed “compliance cultures”.  Yes, America’s roots are made of miracle European economics and war, but only a few compliant cultures have managed the challenge of sustaining power for long periods without increasing the demand for submission.

The evidence of compliance is in a nation’s capacity to take collective action in the design of financial systems that distribute services sufficient to insure the well-being of a significant majority, or the acceptance of law and adjudicative procedure and above all a consistent broadly based support for philanthropic action.  These concepts of civil society are rooted in aspirations that shun the alternative of brutality and fear.

And yet, creeping into ideas that support a banking system in invisible hands or justice as a choice between two versions of the truth begins to leave the ordinary person face to face with images of anger in a far away land that are equally likely just next door.  

It is more than obvious that the residents of powerful nations are not obedient enough.  That recently lawful action deemed to be in the collective good were in fact, greedy.  Perhaps a new metaphor is required. 

The predator-evasion response in fish shoals offers an interesting parallel for the ordinary guy.  The “fishball” is an efficient means for monitoring a predator’s behavior by minimizing risk to the individual, and second it minimizes the energy required of each idividual to escape.

A deliberative predator-evasion behavior is already at hand for humans.  It is data shoaling.  Deploy data sets capable of sensing predatory financial behavior aimed at individual households, groups or neighborhoods.  Not difficult at all really, especially given recent improvements to sampling techniques.

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

 

I glimpse at people as they step out into the world.  They recognize the contradictions of the vast public realm of New York City with solace or ambivalence.  It is difficult to tell.  Dense urban life forms a vital, self-renewing architecture of home and world.  In it privacy is retained yet altered by a sicky web of institutions and businesses that lure these steps into civility, polite discourse and complacency.  This is so for all except the finest and most adored artists.