brand and neurwith on cities

This one's short but sweet: from the TED Talks, a 3 minute version of Stewart Brand's talk on cities.




And if you have more time (14 minutes) here's Neurwith on Squatter Cities.

back to the future

Note: I am particularly envious of the discipline and the prolificacy of bloggers like caffeine_sparks, ExpectoRants, village idiot savant and Senor Enrique who seem to have something new and significant to say everyday (Resty seems to have 4 everyday!). I, on the other hand, struggle to keep up with just with the comments -especially when they (That's you Peter. That's also you, Fred.) deserve well written responses.

True, they often deal with very current issues, while I opt to be an opinionated bystander. (I definitely don't fence sit -but most of these issues fall outside the scope of topics for this soapbox.) Still, their ability to sit and churn out interesting blog posts leaves me (self) wanting.

It's not for lack of effort, I must have two-dozen unpublished and unfinished draft post.

Here's one that's almost a year old (updated, of course):

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If you've got an hour an twenty minutes to spare, and you're really interested in understanding why our megacity (like other megacities) grows squatter colonies, check out Robert Neurwith's June 2005 lecture at the Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Neurwith is the author of (the highly recommended) "Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World" that chronicles the two years he spent living in squatter colonies in four continents. (He also runs the squattercity blog.)

"The 21st-century Medieval City," Neurwith's SALT lecture encapsulates his experience over the two years. Here's the link to the audio via MP3, or if you prefer, Ogg-Vorbis. (You can also subscribe to the whole seminar series via iTunes.) There's also a video via Google. And the slides are available here.

If you don't have 80 minutes to spare, you can always read Stewart Brand's summary notes from the lecture.

Neurtwith's thesis: squatter colonies are the future of humanity -with three billion people, a third of humanity, living in such cities by the year 2050.

If that sounds depressing to you, consider that most cities began as "warrens of illegal settlements." -They matured, in time, into permanent, organized settlements -which is the reference to medieval cities -most of these also began as settlements around the shadow of feudal fortifications.

(You also have consider that the concept of urban land as "private property" is fairly recent (perhaps since the 1500s) in the history of cities. Land, in most cities, were property of the crown or the potentate. -And this is a can of worms, as it will lead us to a debate about the concept of property.)

Neurwith's point is that we need to embrace and understand the dynamics of these settlements if we are to solve the challenge that will face a third of humanity in the coming decades. In Neurwith's view, squatter settlements are, "a legitimate form of urban development."

Some excerpts (from Brand's notes):

"What brings them from the countryside is the hope of economic activity, and it abounds. Restaurants, beauty shops, bars, health clinics, food markets. No land is owned, but a whole low-cost real estate economy takes shape, managed without lawyers or government approval. (Hernando de Soto is wrong about land ownership being necessary for growth.) People build their house, a wall at a time when they have a bit of money, and then sell their roof space for another family to build a home there, and so on up, story after story. Devoid of legal land title there are prospering department stores and car dealerships in the older squatter towns of Istanbul. Forty percent of Istanbul, a city of 12 million, is squatter built."

Forty percent! What's the number in Metro Manila? 30% of the population, but maybe just 10% to 15% of the land area?

As to criminality, Neurwith had interesting notes on the role of criminal syndicates in the favelas of Rio:

"Rio is a famously dangerous city, for tourists and natives alike, except in the squatter neighborhoods where no police go. There security is provided by drug gangs, who have become surprisingly communitarian, building day care facilities and soccer fields along with providing safety on the “streets”— narrow stairways kinking up the steep mountainside amid overhanging upper stories looking indeed medieval. There are wires and pipes everywhere carrying stolen electricity and water. (Enlightened power companies realized the thieves are potential customers and are making it easy for them to buy into legitimate service.)"

Finally, Neurwith has this insight and proposal:

"Neuwirth pointed out that squatters “do more with less than anybody.” All that the rest of us have to do is meet them halfway for their new cities to thrive."

Image Credit: Extract from Robert Neurwith's slideshow

stewart brand

The New York Times has a feature story on one of my favorite thinkers -and one of my intellectual heroes: Stewart Brand.

Two of his books have shaped my perception and thinking about cities, civilizations, leadership and personal and generational responsibility. I wholeheartedly recommend them.

I think Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility should be required reading for anyone who is in any sort of leadership position. (Read more about the Clock project -and have your mind blown wide open.)

And How Buildings Learn should be required reading for all architecture students.

This gem from the NYT article:

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

How's that for counter-intuitive thinking? How's that for hope for our cities?

why naga matters

In this blog, i've focused pretty much on Metro Manila and its issues (with some forays into Subic). As a megacity, Metro Manila shares the same challenges as Lagos, or Sao Paolo or Mumbai. The world is rapidly urbanizing and the megacities are the poster children of the human condition.

That being said, urban agglomerations of 10M or more will account for little over 5% of the world's total urban population by 2015. Meanwhile, one out of every four (and by 2015, one out of every five) city dwellers will be living in a city with less than half a million inhabitants.

This is why Naga is important (...and San Fernando...and Bacolod...and San Miguel, etc.) -because our small cities offer a chance at better models of urbanization. A chance to get ahead of the curve and work on making livable cities rather than just struggling with the megacity hydras of moving, housing and cleaning up after (not to mention governing) 10M+ people.

The challenge is to get the small cities to seriously consider their future -and to find other models (to be un-Manilas) of growth. (See also this, and this.) The hope is in enlightened mayors such as Jesse Robredo and in enlightened city staff who are ready to tap internal and external resources to help guide the growth of their cities.

The information economy -where location takes a backseat to (cyber) connectivity -will offer hundreds of new opportunities for small cities.

P.S. If I had my druthers, I'd start a small city consultancy to offer help (particularly in strategic urban planning) for our under .5M cities back home. (As it is, I already work with small cities. Maybe in a few years...)

Image credit: Extract from Joel Chamie's ppt on Urbanization and Migration: A Global Perspective. (From an excellent conversation on urbanization between Joel Chamie and Stewart Brand at the Global Business Network. PDF copies of their powerpoint slides are available for download.)

deep and wide

There is no limit to what you can accomplish, as long as you are prepared to wait." Freeman Dyson

Maynila is at least 500 years old. By the time the Spanish got there in 1570, Maynila was already a thriving city with a population of 4,000.

As Stewart Brand puts it, "cities persist." Barring major natural cataclysms, Manila will still be here 450 years from now. The government's form, the shape of geopolitics, will be as similar and as different as Rajah Sulayman's court is from the current administration in Malacanang. The city's built fabric in 2450 will be shaped by the decisions we make now.

While it is easy to become frustrated by the current politics, long term vision and long term leadership means we must consider the future now. Ergo the title of this blog. In another hundred years, Arroyo, de Venecia, Cam, Estrada and the whole cast of characters will all be footnotes. Metro Manila will persist. In what form and in what condition depends on our current imagination of the horizon we have yet to see.

image credit: Maria Madonna Davidoff, cover art for "The West and the World"

cities as population sinks

This is an answer to Sydney, who posted this comment on one of my previous posts. I'm not reacting to Sydney's post per se (i am very thankful for his kudos) but to a sentiment he expressed that I think is shared by a lot of pinoys. Sydney said:

"There is a lot of work to do in MM. There are some improvements going on but maybe it is too little too late especially with the ever growing population."

I looked through the population stats for Metro Manila (from the 2000 census) and it looks like, although the population is still growing, it is growing at a slower rate.

This corresponds to both Phillip Longman's and Stewart Brand's findings that cities are population sinks. Fertility drops when countries urbanize -as people who move to cities have less children -the rate drops below 2.1% (the replenishment rate). Most city growth in the next 50 years will be driven by in-migration. (Which is a perfect segue to what will be my next post: on Subic as a metropolis).

the long view

"cities go through tremendous change...but they endure" -Stewart Brand

May I recommend a set of very stimulating lectures about long term thinking sponsored by the Long Now Foundation. You can download mp3 files of most of the lectures here.

You can start with any lecture, but for city-philes I would suggest Stewart Brand's lecture on Cities and Time. The lecture is 1 hour 17 minutes long, so make sure you have a long enough moment to enjoy it.

Stewart Brand is one of my all time favorite thinkers and was greatly influenced by his book Clock of the Long Now. His discussion in the lecture (and in the book) on the pace of change cycles (pictured above) makes me think that the struggles of my home country is about changing culture and governance (not governments) -an exercise that we have been struggling with over the last 200 years. The paroxysms of the present are symptoms of the change taking place and the deeper layers.