Cities have long been important areas of study in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, civil engineering, architecture and urban studies. But such studies have recently gotten a big boost for a number of reasons.
Foremost among them is the fact that our planet is becoming increasingly urbanized. In 1900, only about 13 percent of people lived in cities. We recently crossed a threshold, when for the first time ever, the world’s urban population now equals its rural population. Moreover, from now on, cities will absorb all the population growth expected over the next decades while continuing to draw some of the rural population. By 2050, cities are project to have around 70 percent of our planet’s population.
Something must clearly be done to help cities absorb all those people, and provide them the right infrastructure, jobs, places to live, public safety, education, health care and many other services, all the while being cognizant of the impact that this growing urbanization will have on the sustainability of the planet. This is about as daunting a task as anyone can imagine. But fortunately, advances in technology, science and engineering are providing us with all kinds of new knowledge, innovations and concrete tools to help us in this monumental undertaking.
Leading universities are taking up the challenge. In April, I attended a workshop on smart cities at Imperial College in London. Then last month I participated in a panel at a symposium at MIT on the related subject of complex engineering systems.
Companies are taking up the challenge as well. A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to Berlin to attend a conference on Smart Cities sponsored by IBM. A number of such events are now taking place around the world sponsored by universities, the private sector and government, as parts of major efforts to find solutions to the challenges cities face.
Personally, I am particularly intrigued by the turn some of these efforts are taking to look at cities as systems of systems. It feels absolutely right, and captures both what makes cities so exciting and challenging, as well as the right way to frame the problems so we can apply innovative technology and systems thinking to help cities work better.
A common thread of discussion in the aforementioned MIT panel was that in order to properly manage a complex system of systems, you need a set of values or objectives around which to optimize the overall system. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that for cities, something like quality of life or liveability best captures the values we want cities to attain.
The Economist Intelligence Unit conducts periodic surveys of living conditions in more than 125 cities around the world. They examine nearly 40 individual indicators grouped into five categories: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure, which they then distill into a single number, a liveability index against which they rank those cities against each other.
I wonder if perhaps it isn’t better to look at liveability less as a single number, than a multi-dimensional factor that best captures each city’s unique style and character. Is it a city that emphasizes its dynamic business and cultural environment, like New York or London; or a city built around its natural beauty like Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco? Is it a city with a particularly strong sense of history like Rome or Jerusalem; or a cutting-edge, modern city like Shanghai or Abu Dhabi? Are we struck by their sheer size, like Mumbai or Mexico City; or by their overall quality of life like Vancouver and Melbourne which got the highest rankings in the Economist survey?
But going beyond any numbers, what is it that we mean by a concept as rich and subtle as quality of life? And, as I was reflecting on this question, my thoughts kept coming back to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the famous phrase that has come to embody the US Declaration of Independence.
I did some research, and learned that quality of life was a major preoccupation for many eighteenth century thinkers in Europe and North America who were part of what has come to be called the Age of Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers, especially John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and the other framers of the Declaration of Independence, were heavily influenced by The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment thinkers were concerned with how to best apply the new scientific reasoning being developed to help understand the physical world, to human nature and society as a whole, rather than the theocracy, absolute rule and feudal thinking that had prevailed through the previous centuries. They aspired toward more freedom for common people based on self-governance, individual rights and property. Reason was seen as the primary source of legitimacy and authority.
These principles were a revolutionary departure from being ruled by religious authorities, absolute monarchs and feudal aristocrats. It was no longer enough to tell people that they had to accept their miserable lot regardless of how they felt, so they could then enjoy a happy afterlife. People should be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, - for themselves, their families and their communities, - right here on earth.
As the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and formed the new United States of America, their leaders thought hard about the key principles that should guide the new nation they were now organizing. The Founding Fathers realized that they needed to come up with a set of values that gave legitimacy to the American Revolution. At the same time, they were also conscious that they were constructing a new kind of system based on the Enlightenment ideas that they so admired.
From a systems point of view, we can look at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a kind of architecture around which to frame the overall system of governance, including its key components (the three branches of government, etc.), the rules of their interactions (balance of powers, how a bill becomes a law, and so on), and its ongoing operations (election of officers, . . . ). The new nation could then be built, evolved and continually improved or optimized around these governance principles.
As with any complex system, the key to its success are its overall purpose and values - the core objectives around which the system is to be optimized. And those values were captured in the Declaration of Independence’s simple and eloquent words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . . .”
America’s system architecture has enabled the country to become a dynamic, constitutional republic based on laws whose interpretation keeps evolving over time, as well as an increasingly free and inclusive democracy.
So here we are, over two hundred years later. We are now trying to figure out how to best apply the latest technologies, scientific thinking and common-sense reason to improve the planet, its cities, and the overall quality of life for people everywhere. As we do so, we should be inspired and guided by the earlier efforts of the Founding Fathers and Enlightenment thinkers. Perhaps our quest for Smarter Cities and a Smarter Planet will turn out to be a kind of 21st century Age of Enlightenment.
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