Megacities on the move: a action-oriented resource exploring four scenarios of urban mobility

Megacities on the move is an amazing resource for anyone working on urban issues (download pdf here). The report is based on interviews with 40+ experts on sustainable mobility. It is an action-oriented workshop guideline with an entire section on how you can host your own workshop on these issues. And two case study on Istanbul and Mumbai are provided along with 4 pretty animations and light background music that make the world of urban planning look sexier than it really is :). Here is an overview of the PDF along with a press-release. 

This is an amazing resource that I will definitely be using. Though, I think this book would’ve benefited from more engagement with historians, ethnographers, and sociologists/anthropologists specializing in urban issues. 

Sometimes design and policy solutions can be very normative. While being normative can be totally practical and is many of time part and parcel to the work of policy makers, organizers, and designers, I would’ve loved to see a section acknowleging how people respond to programs on urban sustainability. What are instances when a program failed to connect with people - not because of the ideas but because it either  failed to build community with citizens or failed to understand the everyday realities of a community? I 

In addition, some of the information provide is incredibly ahistoricized. For example, on page 45 they talk about a working metaphor of the city as a biological eco-system and treat it as if this is a recent discovery:

3.2 The city as an organism 

A recent concept popularised by William McDonough that is starting to influence urban design, particularly in new cities such as Masdar. According to this concept, cities have metabolisms analogous to those of complex organisms in terms of nutrient and waste flows, and they should therefore mimic the dynamics of ecosystems if they are to be truly sustainable. 

William McDonough did not introduce this concept. The city as an organism was actually embraced by urban sociologists and policy makers of The Chicago School in the 1920s. These social scientists ran with the city as an ecological organism metaphor, arguing that cities could only withstand so much density until the eco-system was unable to “metabolize” the eco “invasions” of new social groups. Keep in mind, this was in mid-20th century US where immigration was at its height and large cities like Chicago, were centers of urban experiments with immigrant populations. American cities in the early 20th century just like urban cities now in the early 21st century - did not know how ot respond to population influx and how to manage for sustainability and community.

There are limits and affordances to any metaphors. In the case of the Chicago School, urban sociologists took this metaphor and applied it to policy making decisions on the federal level to de-populate cities. They convinced politicians that too much density in an eco-system caused social problems and they teamed up with urban planner and architects to design low-density metropolitan areas. They produced studies that supported urban policies to suburbanize metropolitan regions. In reality, this led to a white flight, abandonment of inner city social structures, and a huge social, cultural, and economic divide between the minority populations “stuck” in the city and whites who lived in the suburbs. 

So I would’ve loved to see a stronger analytical lens throughout this PDF. But my concern does not detract from the great contributions of this living document fromForum of the Future and their partners. The document asks great questions about the future and engage in very practical problem-seeking and solving. 

Project Description from Forum of the Future:

“For the first time in history more than half the world’s population is living in towns and cities. We passed this milestone in 2008 and by 2040 two in three people are expected to live in urban environments.

Urbanisation presents us with a wealth of new opportunities and huge challenges. It has the potential to further economic development and innovation, but also threatens to exacerbate key global problems, including resource depletion, climate change, and inequality.

Megacities on the move sets out to find solutions to one of the biggest challenges – how billions of city-dwellers can access what they need without putting intolerable strains on the planet. It focuses on how to achieve sustainable urban mobility, looking at all the ways in which people will access goods, services and information and make contact with each other. It goes beyond transport to consider ICT solutions, innovative urban design and much more.

Forum for the Future, working in partnership with Vodafone, the FIA Foundation andEMBARQ, has produced a practical toolkit to help public bodies, companies and civil society organisations understand and plan for the mobility challenges of the future. It is designed to encourage action now and stimulate innovative products and services.

We have created four scenarios exploring urban mobility in the year 2040, taking into account resource shortages, climate change, demographic trends and other major factors which will shape our future, and drawing on interviews with more than 40 experts from around the world.

We chose this year because urban infrastructure is generally planned, built and used over decades. Looking at the challenges we may face in 30 years provides enough time to plan for and deliver a whole new generation of more sustainable solutions.”

ps thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting this!